On Dec. 9, 2019, President Volodymyr Zelensky met with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Paris at the Normandy Four summit peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, mediated by Germany and France.
It was the two presidents’ first face-to-face meeting. As of now, it remains their only meeting.
Three months later, during an interview with The Guardian in March, Zelensky made a threat: He would walk away from the peace talks if there wasn’t a breakthrough one year after his meeting with Putin.
That year has passed, but Russia’s position has not changed. The aggressor country that has led a proxy war in eastern Ukraine since 2014 has not made any concessions.
Now, Zelensky has come to the crossroads. He must decide what to do next.
Political analysts say there is little reason to expect Zelensky’s next step to be as radical as he previously promised. They called his deadline for Putin as “sincere hope” that simply did not come true.
But Ukraine’s stance in the peace negotiations will likely get tougher, experts believe. Some of these changes have already begun.
One year, little progress
To Zelensky, simply holding the Normandy meeting was a victory. Previously, the negotiations had been stalled for three years.
One year later, however, it is clear that the meeting brought little in the way of results. Ukraine and Russia once against find themselves in a deadlock.
The 2019 meeting did clarify some things. It was the first time when Zelensky announced he wanted to revise the Minsk agreements, achieved in 2015. He wants Ukraine to regain control over its border with Russia before holding local elections in the war-torn Donbas. Russia wants elections to take place first — as outlined in the Minsk agreements.
In the end, Putin suggested that Ukraine must negotiate directly with Russia-backed militants. Zelensky rejected this idea, as Ukraine views them as Russia’s forces, not independent actors.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky arrives at the Elysee Palace to attend a summit on Ukraine, on Dec. 9, 2019, in Paris. (AFP)
Still, the Ukrainian president called the results of the meeting “a draw.” The Normandy Four signed a memorandum calling for an immediate ceasefire and a number of other measures. So far, only the ceasefire and provisions on opening front-line crossings and on approving new disengagement sites have been implemented.
Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta Center for Political Studies, believes the inexperienced Zelensky sincerely hoped the negotiations would be fruitful.
“He did not know what Putin is like and whether it is possible to negotiate with him,” Fesenko said. “But Putin is Putin.”
The next Normandy Four meeting was scheduled for April, but never took place due to the coronavirus pandemic and disagreements on the timing.
Quit the Minsk talks?
Now, as Zelensky’s deadline passed, he might seek to exit the Minsk talks. Will that happen is an open question.
His press secretary, Iuliia Mendel, declined to say.
“The search for new approaches to Minsk peacemaking is ongoing,” Mendel told the Kyiv Post in a written statement. “Speaking of the Trilateral Contact Group, the Ukrainian delegation is constantly changing the format and looking for a new one in the negotiation process to make it effective.”
The Trilateral Contact Group consists of Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). It has been holding meetings in Minsk since the beginning of 2014. The Normandy Four summit is a higher level of the same peacemaking process.
However, political analysts believe there is no way Ukraine will walk away from the peace talks.
“Leaving the Minsk negotiations is almost impossible. And every attempt to do so will bring negative consequences for (Ukraine), first and foremost,” Fesenko said.
If Zelensky walks away from Minsk, Ukraine will look like “a violator of the peace agreements” and a country that does not want peace, Fesenko said.
“This will spoil our relations with our international partners,” he said.
From left: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel attend a Normandy Four meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris, on Dec. 9, 2019, to negotiate peace in the Donbas. (AFP)
Moreover, according to Fesenko, that would effectively give Moscow the green light to resume the full-scale war in the Donbas.
Marya Zolkina, political analyst at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation agrees that Ukraine will not officially suspend the negotiations.
She expects another approach: “In reality, the Ukrainian side will insist in 2021 — and it has already started doing so — on revising some points of the Minsk agreements.”
“This is kind of a diplomatic trick,” Zolkina added.
Ukraine’s tactics
What exactly the Zelensky administration will attempt to do with the Minsk agreements is unclear. Zolkina sees three possibilities.
The first one is continuing the status quo. The second is changing the most controversial provisions of the Minsk protocols. And the third is to agree on the deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping mission to the Donbas.
The latter two plans both concern the main stumbling block in the negotiations: the border, which Ukraine wants to control before holding local elections in the Russian-occupied Donbas.
Zelensky’s office wants to change the document in order to have it say that Ukraine must control the border before elections take place.
“This scenario is the most likely,” Zolkina said.
She believes Ukraine is already heading in this direction. In November, former Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, who heads Ukraine’s delegation to Minsk, submitted his new peace plan to the Trilateral Contact Group.
Called the Joint Steps Plan, it is the first document that officially declares Ukraine’s vision for border control followed by elections. It is also the first ever document to impose direct responsibilities on Russia.
The Plan calls on the Kremlin to cancel a number of laws and decrees that, according to Ukraine, directly interfere with the lives of people living on the occupied territories of the Donbas. One of them is Putin’s decree that allows the residents of the occupied Donbas to acquire Russian passports through a simplified procedure.
The West supports Ukraine’s new more proactive position, according to Zolkina.
A year ago, at the post-summit press conference, Merkel supported Zelensky’s approach.
“There is a question on whether this document (the Minsk agreements) can or cannot be amended. There are some suggestions from President Zelensky regarding changing it… We hope that this document will be flexible again and that it will be revived,” Merkel said at the time.
(L) Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and German Chancellor Angela Merkel listen to (R) Russia’s President Vladimir Putin as they attend a press conference after a summit on Ukraine at the Elysee Palace, in Paris, on Dec. 9, 2019. (AFP)
Fesenko also sees three possible approaches that Ukraine could take, albeit slightly different ones from the ones suggested by Zolkina.
Besides maintaining the status quo and changing the Minsk protocols, Ukraine could also freeze the conflict.
In his view, the most unlikely plan is revising the protocols.
“Russia will not agree to Ukraine’s terms and the only possible compromise is to hand control over the border to a third party, the UN peacekeepers or the OSCE,” Fesenko said.
Read more: Ukraine’s frustration grows with OSCE as peace-talks mediator
“But Ukraine won’t regain exclusive control of its border,” Fesenko added. “Don’t even dream about it.”
Given the reality of the situation, freezing the conflict is more possible than rewriting the protocols. This would effectively require imposing a full-scale ceasefire without a political settlement to the conflict.
A ceasefire has already been in effect since July 27. It is the most successful halt to the hostilities since the war erupted in 2014. Still, since it came into force, four Ukrainian soldiers have been killed.
According to Fesenko, Putin may agree to laying down arms if some Western sanctions are lifted.
However, Ukraine is most likely to simply maintain the status quo, Fesenko believes.
“It’s a dead end. It is impossible to fulfill the Minsk agreements in their current form, especially the political part,” he said. “And it is too risky for Ukraine to walk away.”
Zelensky toughened up
Both experts agree that Zelensky has recently taken a more aggressive approach to the negotiations after starting his presidency with the naive hope for a quick resolution to the war.
Moreover, Zelensky’s credibility has suffered because he failed to clearly communicate his proposals on the Donbas to the public.
Controversial appointments and dismissals within the peacemaking group have also provoked the ire of his critics. The most outrageous was the appointment and subsequent firing of 88-year-old former Prime Minister Vitold Fokin, who denied that Russia was waging war against Ukraine.
It took Zelensky a year in office to change his policy on peacemaking. The first positive change came in June with Kyiv’s appointment of four new members to its delegation to Minsk. They are natives of the Donbas who left for Ukrainian-controlled territory after Russia invaded their home in 2014.
This was Kyiv’s attempt to fix what it viewed as injustice: Russia-backed delegates from the Donbas have been present in the Minsk talks since 2014, while pro-Ukrainian Donbas natives were not.
People cross the reconstructed bridge that connects Ukraine-controlled and Russia-occupied territories in front line town Stanytsya Luhanska, Luhansk Oblast, on Nov. 20, 2019. (President's Office)
The next positive step came in November with the launch of Ukraine’s new Joint Steps Plan, political analysts believe.
Apart from politics, there have been a few humanitarian wins. Since the last meeting in Paris, Ukraine managed to bring 200 political prisoners home, according to Mendel.
Kyiv also implemented a disengagement of forces near the Stanytsia Luhanska front-line checkpoint. That allowed for the reconstruction of the local bridge, which international observers touted as a major humanitarian victory for the civilians crossing the contact line every day.
Last December, Ukraine also expanded the list of goods that can be taken across the contact line and increased weight and value limitations. The Russian side did not reciprocate.
In November, Ukraine opened seven checkpoints, including two new ones, in the towns of Zolote and Shchastya as part of its commitments at the Normandy summit. However, the de facto authorities of the occupied areas have kept their checkpoints closed, using the pandemic as an excuse.
Currently, there is only one checkpoint open in both directions, Stanytsia Luhanska, and the Olenivka checkpoint on the occupied side is open twice a week.
