We know how wars start, but not how they end. It is a hackneyed phrase but, once again, it comes in handy when talking about Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The official or informal expectations of the Kremlin collide with what, according to its envoys to the negotiations held this week in Istanbul, could end up being accepted by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
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Putin’s speeches before the war seemed to imply that the Russian president wanted to recover the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire, before the Soviet Union.
It seemed like rhetoric from two centuries ago and a policy just as old, but the threat was real due to the presence of more than 100,000 Russian soldiers on Ukraine’s borders. Putin was not just talking about consolidating his control over Crimea and the Donbass region (east). He was referring to what was once Russian, to Moldova, the Caucasus, parts of Romania and Poland, and the three Baltic republics. Many analysts wondered who would be the next victim after Ukraine.
The war twisted the Kremlin’s military plans and at the same time its political expectations. The Russian negotiators, according to their statements in Istanbul and Moscow in recent days, they would accept a peace agreement that prohibited Ukraine from joining NATO (no European country wanted Ukraine in the Atlantic Alliance, and in Washington, since the years of George W. Bush, no president promoted that idea); that Ukraine did not have NATO military bases (the alliance does not have military bases in any country that is not one of its members) and maintain control of Donbass and Crimea.
In practice, return to the pre-war situation.
Such a pact would keep everything as it was. The value of the negotiations is doubtful because the Kremlin negotiates with one hand while striking with the other.
As his men sit with Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky’s men in Istanbul, his artillery continues to pummel Mariupol and block access for Red Cross humanitarian convoys to evacuate civilians and deliver aid.
Should we believe Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov when he says that there are “significant advances” in the negotiations or NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg when he says that Russian troops are not withdrawing but “repositioning” to launch stronger attacks?
If on Wednesday it seemed that Lavrov was right, on Thursday the Kremlin spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, said that in Istanbul “nothing promising occurred in the negotiations.”
Neutrality in exchange for security guarantees
Gwendolyn Sasse, an expert on the former Soviet world and Eastern Europe, explains that “Zelensky seems willing to accept a neutral status for Ukraine in exchange for strong security guarantees. But without the necessary political will on the Russian side, a mutually acceptable agreement does not seem within reach.”
Five weeks of war leave some certainties. Russia did not correctly calculate the resistance that the Ukrainian Army would offer, did not prepare its offensive well, did not oil its logistics lines and did not know how to deal with the Ukrainian guerrilla tactics.
They also make it clear that Moscow had two main goals: to seize kyiv to behead the Ukrainian government, and to occupy the southern bank to connect Donbass with Crimea. If the second part, waiting for the fall of Mariúpol, seems to have it within reach, the first has it further and further away.
How strategic is the current withdrawal?
In fact, this Saturday the Ukrainian government confirmed that “the entire kyiv region was liberated” after the withdrawal of the Russian forces, assured the Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Defense, Ganna Maliar. “Irpin, Bucha, Gostomel and the entire kyiv region were liberated from the invader,” she said through her Facebook account.
Which suggests that, as was said a few days ago, the Russian forces were going to concentrate on the front lines in Donbass and in the south of the country, around martyred Mariupol, in order to achieve their strategic goal of setting up a land corridor between the Donbass and the Crimean peninsula, annexed in 2014.
“With the rapid withdrawal of the Russians from kyiv and Chernigov … it is quite clear that Russia chose another tactic,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mikhailo Podoliak wrote on Telegram. That tactic is to “retreat to the east and south, maintain control of vast occupied territories and gain a powerful foothold there,” Podoliak added.
Strategic retreat? It is the great doubt, but the truth is that since the beginning of the invasion, on February 24, Russian forces invested a lot of effort to besiege the Ukrainian capital without being able to approach it, amid logistical difficulties, heavy casualties and a ferocious resistance of Ukrainian forces and citizens.
“They put columns of tanks in rows along highways, exposed to grenade launchers that one man can handle and that require little training. And they are easy targets for drones.”
The Russian Army may have lost in Ukraine in five weeks as much military equipment and men as it lost in 10 years, in 1979 and 1989, in Afghanistan.
A former military high command of a European country explained to EL TIEMPO that the Russian use of tanks seems to be taken from the military tactics of the Second World War: “They put columns of tanks in rows along the roads, exposed to grenade launchers that can be handled by a single man and that hardly need training. And they are easy targets for drones.”
Can Russia do as in Chechnya and level the cities with artillery to expose its troops and their material less? This military man replies that for that Russia should have control of the air space that it does not have and that even its artillery would be within range of the Ukrainian missiles and rocket launchers supplied by the United States and the Europeans. Everything leads to the origin of this note. What does Russia want, what resistance to (economic) pain does it have and what means is it willing to use to achieve its goals?
A Scandinavian diplomat explains that Russia behaves like a country from centuries ago, for which physical and military control of territories counts, when other authoritarian powers, such as China, learned long ago that they can achieve their goals without firing a shot, simply with its economic penetration, as it does in Africa.
IDAFE MARTIN PEREZ
Correspondent of THE TIME
Brussels
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