Thursday, March 28

Russia claims Crimea and Donbas despite acknowledging that Ukraine agrees to its demands


A Ukrainian soldier patrols a street in the town of Lukianivka, on the outskirts of kyiv. / AFP

Moscow accepts that kyiv renounce NATO, to have nuclear and destruction weapons or to allow military bases of foreign countries on its territory

Tuesday’s meeting in Istanbul of the Russian and Ukrainian delegations to try to find a way out of the current conflict resulted in very little progress. Representatives from kyiv presented their Russian colleagues with a draft of a possible agreement to end hostilities and announced that there was an agreement that, in exchange for giving up NATO membership, Ukraine would receive security guarantees from various countries, including including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Turkey and Israel. They also proposed formulas, one of them with an extension of the negotiation of up to 15 years, to make it possible for Donbas and Crimea to become part of Ukraine again.

However, the head of the Russian delegation and adviser to the Kremlin, Vladimir Medinski, poured a real jug of cold water on Wednesday on kyiv’s wishes to solve the current situation in an acceptable and quick way. Medinski warned in a televised appearance before the media that “Russia’s position in relation to Crimea and Donbas has not changed.” In other words, Moscow continues to consider Crimea a constituent part of the Russian Federation and the two self-proclaimed republics of Donbas, Donetsk and Lugansk, independent states.

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Moreover, Russia does not even think about sitting down to talk to anyone about its “sovereign right” over Crimea and, as for Donetsk and Lugansk, it continues to officially defend that their respective territories are not what the Minsk agreements mark within the outline of the called “contact line”, but the two provinces in their entirety as they appear in the demarcation in force since Soviet times. Hence the battles currently being waged by the Donbas separatist forces against the Ukrainian Army in their eagerness to gain more territory.

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ukrainian will

But it is that Medinski above affected this Wednesday that «kyiv, for the first time, has shown in writing the will to comply with Moscow’s fundamental demands to build normal relations and, I hope, good neighborly relations with Russia in the future». And it is that in Istanbul it was already specified that the “security guarantees” that Ukraine will receive will not be extended to Crimea and Donbass. kyiv has even pledged that it will never try to recapture such territories by force.

So Medinski sold the outcome of the negotiations in Istanbul as a “success” for Russia. In his words, “Ukraine essentially accepted the fundamental demands not to join NATO, to give up nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, and to refuse to deploy foreign military bases on its territory. It also undertakes not to carry out military maneuvers with foreign forces without the consent of the guarantor countries, one of which is Russia. No one said anything to the press in Istanbul about this last demand and the inclusion of Russia in the group of countries that will have to guarantee Ukraine’s security.

Finally, the head of the Russian delegation assured that “if these conditions are met, the threat of creating a NATO bridgehead on Ukrainian territory will be eliminated.” “This is in essence the meaning and importance of the document preliminarily agreed with Ukraine at a sufficiently high level (…) the work continues,” Medinski added, in relation to the negotiation meetings planned for the future.

It so happens that Medinski, 51, was born in the city of Smelá, in the Cherkassy region, in the central part of Ukraine, in a Russian family. His father was a military man and was stationed there. But they moved to Moscow in the early 1980s. After finishing school, Medinski entered the Moscow State Institute for Foreign Affairs (MGIMO), whose studies he completed in 1992. He later joined United Russia, the party of the President Vladimir Putin, and in 2003 he became a deputy. He was appointed Minister of Culture in May 2012, a position he held until January 2020. Since then he has been an adviser to Putin and now head of the Russian negotiating delegation in the talks with Ukraine.

The Russian opposition considers him an “ultra-conservative” politician very much in line with Putin. He has written several books on the history of Russia and a novel ‘Stená’ (The Wall), published in 2012, which has even been taken to the theater. In 2015, Medinski called Putin an “absolute genius of contemporary real politics.” One of Medinski’s most criticized pronouncements was when, in 2019, he defended the controversial Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany as “a triumph of Joseph Stalin’s diplomacy.” He has also come out in support of figures such as Tsar Ivan the Terrible.

Being in charge of the Ministry of Culture, Medinski was the architect of the banning of the film ‘El niño 44’, starring the British Tom Hardy and set in Stalin’s USSR, he said “distorts historical facts”. Another film that could not be screened in Russian cinemas was ‘The Death of Staliní by Scottish director, Armando Iannucci. Medinski considered it a “derision” and “a clear example of the ideological war against Russia” of the West.

So, as many analysts think, Medinski’s function is none other than to give an image of supposed interest in finding an agreement to end the war in Ukraine, when, judging by the facts on the ground , there does not seem to be the slightest interest in anything other than completing the occupation of all of Donbas, including the martyr city of Mariupol, and, perhaps, keeping Kherson province and the strip that connects Donetsk under the control of Russian troops with the Crimean peninsula through Berdyansk.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, estimated this Wednesday in relation to the current state of talks with Ukraine that “at the moment, we cannot report anything very promising or progress. There is much work to be done”. He also pointed out that “we carefully avoid making public statements on the substance” of the issues discussed in the talks, since, he stressed, “we believe that the negotiations should be carried out discreetly.” However, Peskov said that “it is positive that the Ukrainian side has finally begun to formulate its proposals in a concrete way and to put them in writing.”

On Tuesday in Istanbul, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin spoke of “drastically reducing” military operations around kyiv and Chernigov in order to “increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for new negotiations with the ultimate goal to sign an agreement» with Ukraine. However, the Ukrainian authorities have denounced bombings against Chernigov and do not observe a real withdrawal of the Russian Army. The assistant to the Ukrainian Presidency, Oleksiy Arestovich, assured this Wednesday that “the war continues.” He accused Russian forces of laying mines as they retreated from some areas.


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