The tensely-anticipated week of international diplomacy ended anticlimactically for Ukraine.
In rapid succession, Europe hosted meetings of the Group of Seven countries and NATO, followed by a summit between U. S. President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
All eyes were on the “high stakes” summit meeting amid a “low point” in relations for the two countries.
Some observers saw Biden’s sitting down with Putin as pointless.
“Summit was a nothingburger with wilted lettuce,” tweeted Melinda Haring, the deputy director of the Atlantic Council think tank.
Others called it a positive development, praising Biden’s support of Ukraine and laying out concrete grievances against the Kremlin.
“This was the best meeting between an American and a Russian president since Putin is in power,” Roland Freudenstein, policy director at Wilfried Martens Center for European Studies located in Brussels told the Kyiv Post in an email.
“One can debate whether that was necessary to convey the messages that he conveyed to Putin. But the most important fact is that the messages were sent at all, and that they were sent after meeting with America’s friends and allies in Europe,” he went on.
Following the G7 and NATO meetings, international leaders rebuked Putin and called on him to stand down from his relentless seven-year assault on Ukraine that has left nearly 14,000 people dead. However, they mentioned no concrete steps to back up their request.
Ukraine’s attention was also fixed on a possible membership action plan (MAP) for NATO, which the alliance has been promising since 2008. While membership is still on the table, NATO gave few guarantees besides a vague instruction for Ukraine to keep advancing reforms.
“For getting MAP Ukraine implemented enough reforms,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Facebook. He called NATO’s new communique a good one, but added that concrete action should follow: to give Ukraine a MAP in 2022.
Commenting on Ukraine’s possible accession to NATO following his meeting with Biden, Putin said “there is nothing to discuss,” meaning Russia is firmly against it.
Russia-U.S. Summit
Biden rushed to meet Putin during his first foreign trip to Europe, after just five months in office. The American leader had said he wanted to make relations “stable” and “predictable.”
While Biden said that results may take up to six months to materialize, there were no immediate breakthroughs. The parties agreed to return ambassadors to each other’s countries, but this is hardly a sea change.
Speaking in an 18-century villa on the shore of Lake Geneva, Biden and Putin also agreed on further nuclear arms limits, echoing similar talks in Geneva between the U. S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.
“I don’t think he’s looking for a Cold War with the United States,” Biden said of Putin at his press conference following the June 16 meeting. Putin told the journalists there was “no hostility” from any of the sides.
US president Joe Biden arrives in his limousine on his way to board Air Force One Boeing 747 after the US – Russia summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, on Geneva Airport Cointrin, on June 16, 2021. (AFP)
The situation in eastern Ukraine was one of the subjects on the table. Biden said he had told Putin that he supports Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.
Asked about whether Biden considers any military response, he said: “We didn’t talk about military response.”
Biden also brought up Russia’s persecution of opposition leaders including Alexei Navalny, cyberattacks on critical U.S. infrastructure, and meddling in the American presidential elections.
Putin did not take responsibility and responded in his usual manner to “always turn the mirror in the direction of the enemy and point out his weaknesses and miscalculations, without actually responding to his own actions,” said Tatiana Kastoueva-Jean, head of the Russia-NIS Center at the French Institute of International Relations in Paris.
Putin’s whataboutism
After the three-hour meeting, shorter than announced, Biden and Putin held separate press conferences instead of speaking jointly.
Biden said he did this on purpose as he did not want everyone to be “diverted” by “who talked the most.” Meanwhile, Putin used this opportunity to turn all accusations back on the U. S. His press conference was almost twice as long as Biden’s.
Speaking to journalists, Biden said that he made it clear to Putin that the U.S. would react to any of Russia’s misbehavior.
The American leader said that in the event of another hack attack, the U.S. will respond “in a cyber way.” Putin later said that the majority of cyber-attacks are launched from the U.S.
Biden also vowed “devastating consequences” for Russia if Putin’s fiercest critic, Alexei Navalny, dies in prison.
As always, Putin didn’t refer to Navalny by name and said that the opposition leader voluntarily returned to Russia, knowing he’d be detained. Navalny was in Germany recovering from a nerve poison likely administered by Putin’s agents.
Addressing criticism of persecuting his opposition, Putin brought up Jan. 6, when supporters of former president Donald Trump violently stormed the U. S. Capitol, leading to five deaths. “We are sorry for what happened in the United States, but we do not want this to happen in our country,” Putin said, explaining his crackdowns on peaceful gatherings in Russia.
Biden called this comparison “ridiculous.”
US President Joe Biden (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) laugh as they pose for press ahead of the US-Russia summit at the Villa La Grange, in Geneva on June 16, 2021. (AFP)
He also took Putin to task for meddling in U.S. elections, saying this “diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power.”
“His credibility worldwide shrinks,” Biden said of Putin.
Russia’s president did not take responsibility for the interference, which heavily contributed to the decline in relations, the recall of the American ambassador from Moscow and a new round of sanctions against Russia.
“This summit was a very individualistic game of the two politicians. The fact is that from the very beginning there was no expectation of, say, any bilateralism or any cooperation,” Oleksandr Kraiev, an political analyst at Ukrainian Prism think tank told the Kyiv Post. “Both talked from the position of power. Different positions.”
When Biden said he wants “predictable” relations, Putin said it’s the U.S. that is being unpredictable.
“What is stable in supporting a coup in Ukraine?” Putin said, referring to the EuroMaidan revolution that ousted the corrupt, pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Russian state propaganda claims, wrongly, that the protests were an orchestrated coup.
“For the situation to be truly stable we need to agree on the rules of conduct,” Putin said, ignoring the international treaties already in place, like Geneva Convention and the Budapest Memorandum that Russia violates with its aggression towards Ukraine.
Biden said Russia should abide by international norms.
NATO, G7
Predictably, NATO and the G7 countries each chided Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and other countries and called on Putin to back down.
“We call on Russia to alleviate tensions and act in accordance with its international obligations, and to withdraw the Russian military troops and materiel at the eastern border of Ukraine and on the Crimean peninsula,” the G7 countries said as part of their post-conference statement.
“We remain firmly of the view that Russia is a party to the conflict in eastern Ukraine, not a mediator.”
G7 leaders from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the United States meet this weekend for the first time in nearly two years, for three-day talks in Carbis Bay, Cornwall on June 11, 2021. (AFP)
NATO said almost the same thing. It reiterated support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity, condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea, occupation of Donbas, its numerous human rights abuses and recent military buildup.
It called on Russia to reverse the March buildup at Ukraine’s borders, stop restricting navigation in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov and Ukrainian ports.
In an article for Foreign Affairs, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said that deterrence and containment will be required to halt Putin’s belligerence, with NATO being the best forum for the job. Biden, he said, should coax NATO members to spend more on defense and help Ukraine and Georgia defend themselves.
NATO membership
NATO said that the alliance has not changed its mind on admitting Ukraine as a member but gave few details other than to urge Ukraine to continue reforms, especially of the defense sector.
Glen Grant, a defense expert with the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, said that the communique was clear that Ukraine needs to implement reforms and its failure to accept civilian control of the military shows that the government is not serious about meeting NATO values. Indeed, last year, the first civilian defense minister was fired and replaced with a Soviet-era general.
Some observers were dubious about whether the call for reforms was the real reason or just an excuse to keep Ukraine out.
According to the Reanimation Package of Reforms, a coalition of Ukrainian anti-corruption watchdogs, Ukraine met more than 90% out of the 219 NATO standards that were supposed to be elaborated in 2018–2020. Ukraine has adopted more standards than Montenegro, which became a member in 2017.
Foreign Minister Kuleba has expressed the opinion Ukraine has made enough progress with reforms to get an MAP and should not accept a situation where NATO members use reforms as an excuse to get around not trying to anger Russia.
President Volodymyr Zelensky was blunter, saying: “Every day we prove that we are ready to be in the alliance more than most of the countries of the European Union.”
Timothy Ash, an emerging markets strategist with Bluebay Asset Management, was just as straightforward: “Corruption is now being used as an excuse not to grant Ukraine NATO MAP status.”
Both critics and supporters of membership for Ukraine agree on one thing: if Ukraine is admitted, the alliance will have to defend it and that means conflict with Russia. And this is something that multiple NATO members greatly want to avoid.
On June 16, the Kremlin reiterated that Ukrainian membership in NATO would be a “red line” for it. It would be within the Kremlin’s interests to keep Ukraine divided and at war to interfere with its membership ambitions.
Minsk and Normandy
If there was any hope that foreign powers would curb Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine, the past week has done little to kindle it. Putin repeated his mantra that Russia will not budge an inch.
He once again said that Russia would not accept Ukraine’s way of implementing the Minsk agreement, a peace treaty Kyiv and Moscow signed in 2015. Ukraine wants first to regain control over its eastern border with Russia and only then hold local elections in the Donbas. Russia wants elections first.
Russian President Vladimir Putin leaves the ‘Villa la Grange’ after his meeting with U.S President Joe Biden in Geneva, Switzerland in Geneva on June 16, 2021. (AFP)
Following the summit, Biden said both he and Putin “agreed to pursue diplomacy related to the Minsk Agreement.”
Kraiev believes the fact that the U.S. supports the Minsk agreements is a positive sign for Ukraine even though Russia has lost interest.
“Why we can still hold on to the Minsk (agreement), why it can be interesting to us from the pragmatic point of view, because we do not have an alternative to which sanctions (against Russia) can be tied,” he said.
Biden’s interest in Minsk can give this peace process a new lease on life, Kraiev believes.
Ahead of the U.S.-Russia summit, Zelensky was worried that Ukraine’s fate might be decided without Ukraine and said this is not an option. He said he was disappointed that Biden did not meet him before sitting down with Russia’s leader.
During the phone call on June 7, Biden invited Zelensky to visit him at the Oval Office in July.
However, neither Putin nor Biden invited each other to visit following the Geneva summit.
