Deal or no deal?

US president Donald Trump’s pledge to end Russia’s war in Ukraine is proving somewhat trickier to fulfil than he had expected. So far two tentative deals have been agreed - sort of - by both sides but neither appears to have actually come into force. 
 
Russia’s Vladimir Putin - wily old fox that he is - is playing a cunning game, offering a semblance of agreement to proposals then adding so many conditions that any accord becomes impossible to implement. While Trump congratulates himself on reaching a deal, he appears not to notice that the Kremlin keeps kicking his ball into the long grass.
 
First there was Ukraine’s 11 March agreement to a full 30-day ceasefire if Russia also accepted the terms. Such was Putin’s obfuscation that some media outlets initially reported that he had agreed, while others said he refused, and the whole idea seems now to have dropped off the discussion agenda.
 
Following the shuttle negotiations in Saudi Arabia earlier this week, both sides undertook to halt attacks on energy infrastructure and on maritime operations in the Black Sea. But interpretations of the agreements differed between the Russian, Ukrainian and US versions in several key elements. 
 
Russia claimed the ban on energy strikes began on 18 March and said it had recalled its warplanes, but then launched fresh attacks before the ink was even dry; it has struck Ukraine’s energy sites on eight separate occasions since. Its commitment to the Black Sea deal is also in doubt after it later imposed conditions relating to the lifting of sanctions on its agricultural exports before agreeing to implement it. 
 
It’s worth noting that both pledges made so far benefit Russia more than Ukraine. Kyiv has achieved notable success over the past year or so in pushing Russia out of the western part of the Black Sea to facilitate its own grain exports, and in targeting Russian oil refineries and military energy facilities in long-range attacks. Even if fully implemented, neither deal would affect the war on the front lines or diminish the relentless Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure.
 
Putin is dragging his feet in the negotiations precisely because he has no desire to settle for peace just yet. What he really wants out of any potential peace deal is territory. The Kremlin is stepping up its efforts to consolidate control over the four Ukrainian regions it partially occupies - which amount to about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. 
 
A decree that Putin signed on 20 March is the latest step in the Russification of the illegally occupied regions. The decree mandates that Ukrainian citizens “illegally” staying in Russia must obtain Russian documents or leave. In other words, Ukrainians who refuse to accept Russian passports and citizenship will be kicked out, or to put it another way, the regions will be ethnically cleansed. 
 
The issue of the occupied Ukrainian territory was something the Russians were keen to discuss with the US delegation in Saudi Arabia this week, as Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and chief Russia negotiator, unwittingly revealed in an interview with the far-right political commentator Tucker Carlson on 21 March.
 
“They’re Russian-speaking…There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of people indicated they want to be under Russian rule,” Witkoff said, parroting Russian disinformation. Displaying a shocking ignorance for someone involved in such high-level negotiations, Witkoff was unable to name the four regions in question, referring to “these so-called four regions - Donbas, Crimea… and there’s two others”. He didn’t even get the first two right: the four regions that Russia illegally annexed in 2022 are Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
 
Witkoff also muddled the concept of Russian-speaking Ukrainians with ethnic Russians, and made the assumption that those who speak Russian would ally themselves with Russia, which is far from the case. Equating Russian speakers with Russians who support the war, and using language as a motivation for the war, is an oft repeated chapter in the Russian playbook. My own Ukrainian relatives are Russian speakers; they most definitely are not Russian sympathisers.
 
The referendums that Witkoff referred to, held in September 2022, were a sham, secured by the Russian military amid widespread voter intimidation - often at gunpoint, and contravened both Ukrainian and Russian law. Freedom of speech and assembly were denied, no procedures were in place to guarantee the safety and confidentiality of voters. Many pro-Ukrainian voters were persecuted, some were even murdered. No independent observers were present and there were no systems to prevent voter fraud.
 
The BBC reported at the time that in some towns, Russian soldiers with guns stood with a ballot box in the main square to collect votes. Elsewhere, they went door to door. "You have to answer verbally, and the soldier marks the answer on the sheet and keeps it,” one woman recounted.
 
Voting was hastily organised in a matter of days and took place only in the parts of the four regions that were under Russian control - those living in areas of the four regions still held by Ukraine did not have a voice. In spite of this, the Kremlin claimed that the referendums gave Moscow the right to annex the four regions in their entirety. At that time, Russia occupied most of Luhansk and Kherson regions, but only around 60% of Donetsk, and in Zaporizhzhia it has never even controlled the state capital. The city of Kherson (capital of the region of the same name) was occupied by the Russians at the start of the full-scale invasion but liberated in November 2022, prompting thousands of residents to take to the streets in celebration.
 
Russia claimed that 99% of voters in Donetsk region were in favour of becoming part of Russia, 98% in Luhansk, 87% in Kherson and 93% in Zaporizhzhia. The results were recognised by only two countries - Russia and North Korea, neither of them known for being a beacon of democracy.
 
“Any annexation of a state's territory by another state resulting from the threat or use of force is a violation of the principles of the UN Charter and international law,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the time. “The so-called referendums cannot be called a genuine expression of the popular will.”
 
Steve Witkoff, it would seem, disagrees.

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Photo by FlyD on Unsplash
 
 

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