Russian ruler Putin and his entourage have repeatedly signaled that they are ready to negotiate to end the war in Ukraine. Whatever they say: Ukraine should be dismantled.
Since the beginning of the open Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, a negotiated solution has been repeatedly called for or hoped for. Most recently, the former Federal Chancellor and Russian gas manager Gerhard Schröder called for a German-French negotiation initiative.
Negotiations, that sounds good, after all, not all wars end at the negotiating table – in the 20th century they did according to the historian Jörn Leonhard 40 percent. But the call for negotiations with Russia often suggests that there is a willingness to talk in the Kremlin that the West as a whole and Ukraine are not taking advantage of. Is that so? Does Putin want to negotiate?
In conclusion, this question cannot be answered – Putin may not even know what he really “wants”. But you can examine his statements to see whether he signals a willingness to negotiate. This is what he does: Putin repeatedly declares that he is ready to negotiate. “We have never rejected negotiations,” he said, for example, in a TV interview that was broadcast in Russia a few days before the presidential election.
There is something for everyone when it comes to signals
However, the interview also contains completely different signals, it is a constant “yes, but”. Putin says: “Are we ready to negotiate? Absolutely. But we are definitely not ready for talks based on any kind of ‘wishful thinking’ that comes from taking psychoactive drugs; rather, we are ready for talks , which are based on the realities that have developed on the ground.” For the Russian audience, the reference to drugs is clear: Putin and Russian propaganda constantly accuse the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of being addicted to drugs.
Putin’s mention of “realities on the ground” indicates that Russia would not be willing to return conquered territories. After all, the Kremlin has already declared the four Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as Russian national territory through a constitutional amendment, even without fully controlling them. That doesn’t sound like you’re willing to negotiate. “Peace negotiations mean that the parties sit down at the table and look for compromises on how they can live in lasting peace,” says peace and conflict researcher Nicole Deitelhoff ntv.de. “If one side dictates to the other how this should happen, then that is not peace negotiations, then that is a surrender.”
In the interview, Putin also said that it would be “ridiculous” if Russia negotiated “just because of them [den Ukrainern] the ammunition is running out.” The sentence was then immediately followed by the point that Russia was of course open to a “serious discussion” and wanted to resolve “all conflicts” peacefully – only to immediately restrict that a “break” should not serve to do so that “the enemy” is arming itself with new weapons. The opposing signals alternate, there is something for everyone. In this way, Putin is driving the wedge deeper between those in the West who believe negotiations are necessary and those who find it absurd.
It is unclear what Putin means by “security interests.”
But what could ceasefire or even peace negotiations be about if Putin is willing to talk? As in virtually all of his statements about Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the Kremlin chief also spoke in his pre-election interview about how the West has been ignoring Russia’s security interests for years. This includes NATO’s eastward expansion, which Putin wanted to reverse even before the war.
However, the “return of NATO’s military-technical infrastructure to the level of 1997” demanded by Russia has always been out of the question for the affected states. The attack on Ukraine makes it even more impossible for NATO troops to withdraw from Poland, the Baltics, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – that would be tantamount to abandoning these states.
Nevertheless, Putin again called for “security guarantees for the Russian Federation.” Instead of explaining what these might look like, Putin said he didn’t trust anyone. “I don’t know whether there’s a substantial idea behind it or whether it’s some kind of embarrassing argument,” says Deitelhoff about the demand for security guarantees. It could be that Putin means buffer zones between Russia and NATO, or assurances that Ukraine will never join NATO, or the resumption of confidence-building measures. “Putin’s ideas that NATO’s eastward expansion can actually be reversed, or the complete demilitarization of Ukraine – the West and Ukraine cannot seriously guarantee that,” said the scientist. “Everything indicates that Russia would then simply overrun Ukraine.”
“Propaganda Secret Service Spokesperson”
Security expert Nico Lange also sees it that way. “It’s always pretended that Ukraine just has to say, ‘Well, we’re freezing now.’ And then there is a ceasefire and then we can talk to each other,” Lange told ntv. “But the point is: if the Ukrainians didn’t fight, Putin would just keep marching.”
After the election results were published, Putin said in a press conference on Sunday evening that he did not rule out “establishing a buffer zone in the current areas controlled by the Kiev regime.” This must be so large that it would be “difficult to overcome it with the foreign weapons available to the enemy.” What is meant is not the buffer zone to NATO mentioned by Deitelhoff, but between the unoccupied areas of Ukraine and Russia.
According to Russian media reports, the Moscow-installed head of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”, Denis Pushilin, said that the boundaries of this buffer zone would depend on which weapons Western countries deliver to Ukraine. For Nico Lange, talk of such a “buffer zone” is a “Russian justification in this typical propaganda secret service speak for re-invading the Kharkiv region of Ukraine and driving out the Ukrainians there.” This is “very dangerous, aggressive rhetoric.”
Russia only wants to talk to the “masters” of Ukraine
Geographically, Putin’s war aim in Ukraine remains unclear: does he want to take over Ukraine completely or install a satellite regime in a kind of rump Ukraine? It is clear that the “denazification of Ukraine”, which Putin had already spoken of in his declaration of war on February 24th, is a code for the removal of the democratically elected government in Kiev.
This makes it unlikely that Putin would be willing to engage in real negotiations with Ukraine; The “security guarantees” he demands, whatever they might look like, could only be provided by the USA and NATO anyway. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said a year ago that Russia could not talk to “a half-decayed neo-Nazi country” that was “under foreign rule.” Talks are only possible “with his masters, namely with Washington.” Equating the democratically elected Ukrainian government with “fascists” or “Nazis” has been part of the standard repertoire of Russian state propaganda for ten years.
Ultimately, Ukraine should be dismantled
In the TV interview, Putin left it to his interlocutor, the television propagandist he had appointed, Dmitri Kiselyov, who was also the general director of the state news agency Rossiya Sevodnya, to raise the old Nazi accusation. Kiselyov said that “Nazi regimes” would not dissolve on their own, but would “disappear as a result of military defeats.” This was the case in Germany, Italy and Japan and will also happen with the “Bandera Nazi regime”.
The fact that Putin sees Ukraine as a territory that should be carved up by neighboring countries becomes clear elsewhere in the interview. If Polish troops go to Ukraine to supposedly secure the Belarusian-Ukrainian border in order to relieve Ukrainian troops, “then the Polish troops will stay there,” Putin explains. Because the Poles wanted back the part of western Ukraine that Stalin had taken from them. The formerly German Wroclaw (Breslau), for example, was populated by many Poles who were expelled from Lviv, but a return is no more an issue in Poland than the shifting of the German eastern border in Germany.
The only question that remains open is whether Putin and those around him believe what they are spreading. It was only at the beginning of March that Medvedev, deputy head of the Russian Security Council, announced that Ukraine was “definitely Russia.” He showed a map, in which Ukraine was largely swallowed up by Russia, and smaller parts by Poland, Hungary and Romania. In this Russian dystopia, all that remains of Ukraine proper is a patch around Kiev on the western side of the Dnieper.
By the way, this is the reason why Ukraine is currently rejecting negotiations. Putin’s statements and the systematic war crimes committed by the Russians in Ukraine are evidence that this war is about Ukraine’s existence as a state and as a society.