Andrew Sulllivan's "The Dish"
by Dish Staff
Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko met face-to-face in Minsk today, for the first time since June, to discuss the crisis in Ukraine and how to resolve it:
Putin devoted most of his opening remarks to trade, arguing that Ukraine’s decision to sign an association agreement with the EU would lead to huge losses for Russia, which would then be forced to protect its economy. Russia had been counting on Ukraine joining a rival economic union that it is forming with Belarus and Kazakhstan. Ukraine is set to ratify the EU association agreement in September. On the fighting that began in April between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russia separatists, Putin said only that he was certain the conflict "could not be solved by further escalation of the military scenario without taking into account the vital interests of the southeast of the country and without a peaceful dialogue of its representatives."
Poroshenko would be unlikely to agree to Russia’s frequent call for federalization — devolving wide powers to the regions from the central government — but could agree to allow them to have some expanded powers. He also has spoken against holding a referendum on Ukraine’s joining NATO; Russia’s desire to keep Ukraine out of the alliance is seen as one of Moscow’s key concerns.
Just prior to the start of the talks, Ukraine announced that it had captured ten Russian paratroopers on its territory, proving that Russian forces have been deployed on the ground there. The Kremlin admits the soldiers are Russian but claims they ended up in Ukraine accidentally:
"The soldiers really did participate in a patrol of a section of the Russian-Ukrainian border, crossed it by accident on an unmarked section, and as far as we understand showed no resistance to the armed forces of Ukraine when they were detained," a source in Russia’s defence ministry told the RIA Novosti agency. Ukraine said it had captured 10 Russian soldiers, though it did not state how they were caught. Weapons and fighters are able to cross the porous border freely, but until now there has never been confirmation that serving Russian soldiers were active inside Ukraine, despite repeated claims from Kiev and some circumstantial evidence.
For most leaders, this would provide enough of an embarrassment to force a halt in their strategies. Not Vladimir Putin, though. If anyone believes that Putin will slow his roll into eastern Ukraine just because he’s been caught red-handed with paratroopers on the other side of the border, think again. Putin has taken his measure of the West and thinks he can live with the economic pain for the short period of time in which sanctions will bite. Fall is coming, and with it the need for Russian gas in eastern Europe. Nothing in the past few weeks other than the lack of an all-out invasion to relieve the rebels gives any indication that Putin’s plans have been deflected to any significant degree. Don’t expect a few POWs to shame Putin into backing down now.
Also yesterday, Poroshenko dissolved parliament and called for new elections in two months. Steve LeVine analyzes the political situation in Kiev:
While the country is more stable politically since the May elections that brought Poroshenko to power, it remains in a tremendous military and economic crisis. … The more elections Poroshenko gets under his belt, the more legitimacy he hopes he will have, as Russian president Vladimir Putin effectively challenges his right to rule. In the last couple of weeks, Putin has appeared to retreat from his most vitriolic rhetoric regarding Ukraine, but the likelihood is that he will only reluctantly stand down from his ultimate goal, which is to keep Ukraine so destabilized that it cannot join NATO or be a fruitful economic partner of Europe’s.
[Belarusian President Alexander] Lukashenko’s iron-fisted internal politics haven’t changed but he has always remained open to overtures from the west despite his close ties to Russia, said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs and chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defence policy. "The geopolitical situation has changed and now Lukashenko doesn’t seem as awful as he did a year ago," Lukyanov said. Because of its relatively neutral position with regard to both Russia and Ukraine, Belarus has become essentially the only place where leaders from both sides can meet without losing face. "Being a country that’s connected with Russia but can preserve fairly independent politics makes Belarus an important player between Ukraine, the EU and Russia," Lukyanov said. "The EU is forced to relate to [Lukashenko] differently."
Clouding Talks, Ukraine Says It Captured Russian Troops
MINSK, Belarus — Ukraine released video clips on Tuesday of what it said were captured Russian soldiers, raising tensions as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia met in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, with his Ukrainian counterpart, President Petro O. Poroshenko.
In earlier peace talks between lower-ranking officials, Moscow’s position on its role in the conflict in eastern Ukraine has prevented discussion of what Ukrainian officials regard as the key to stopping the conflict: a Russian willingness to acknowledge, and halt, its support for rebels in the cities of Luhansk and Donetsk.
"It makes it very difficult to negotiate anything when Putin says he is not involved," Michael A. McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Moscow and now a professor at Stanford University, said in a telephone interview.
The release of the videos and the high-level talks came a day after Ukraine accused Russia of sending an armored column across the border, prompting Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the United States ambassador to Ukraine, to express alarm on Twitter. "The new columns of Russian tanks and armor crossing into Ukraine indicates a Russian-directed counteroffensive may be underway. #escalation," he wrote.
American and Ukrainian officials have said they are increasingly concerned that Russia is orchestrating a counteroffensive to reverse recent gains by Ukrainian forces. "Russia’s military incursions into Ukraine — artillery, air def systems, dozens of tanks & military personnel — represent significant escalation," Susan E. Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser, wrote in a Twitter post.
Ukraine has repeatedly accused Russia of supporting the separatists, without providing any solid evidence. On Tuesday, Kiev released video clips of four men who, under interrogation, identified themselves as Russian soldiers captured on Ukrainian territory. The men, who were among 10 soldiers Ukraine said it had captured, gave their names and military serial numbers and said they had been sent to Ukraine by their superiors after initially being told they were going on a training exercise.
The videos were posted on the Facebook page of Ukraine’s so-called Anti-Terrorist Operation, just hours before Mr. Putin met Mr. Poroshenko and senior officials of the European Union in Minsk. The meeting between the two presidents, the first since a brief encounter in June, will not end the conflict in eastern Ukraine, analysts said, but could open the way for future talks.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who visited Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, over the weekend, dampened expectations for the Minsk meeting. It "certainly won’t result in the breakthrough" that Germany and others were hoping for, she told German television in an interview broadcast Sunday evening.
The videos released by Ukraine may make it more difficult for the Kremlin to stick to its approach of simply denying that it has any hand in the fighting.
"Everything was a lie. There were no drills here," one of the captured Russians, who identified himself as Sergey A. Smirnov, told a Ukrainian interrogator. He said he and other Russians from an airborne unit in Kostroma, in central Russia, had been sent on what was described initially as a military training exercise but later turned into a mission into Ukraine. After having their cellphones and identity documents taken away, they were sent into Ukraine on vehicles stripped of all markings, Mr. Smirnov said.
In another video released by Ukraine, a man identified himself as Ivan Milchakov, a member of a Russian paratroop regiment from Kostroma, north of Moscow. "Everything is different here, not like they show it on television. We’ve come as cannon fodder," he said, apparently referring to Russian television reports that the ouster of Viktor F. Yanukovych as Ukraine’s president in February had left Ukraine in the hands of fascist fanatics. He said he "did not see where we crossed the border" into Ukraine and had been told he was being sent on "a 70-kilometer march over three days."
RIA Novosti, a state-controlled Russian news agency, quoted an unnamed source from the Russian Defense Ministry as saying the men had crossed into Ukraine by accident. "The soldiers really did participate in a patrol of a section of the Russian-Ukrainian border, crossed it by accident on an unmarked section, and as far as we understand showed no resistance to the armed forces of Ukraine when they were detained," the source said.
Russian Soldiers Captured in Donetsk Region
Ukraine announced on Tuesday that it had detained 10 Russian soldiers in the Donetsk region, about 10 miles from the border. The Ukrainian military has cut the urban centers of Luhansk and Donetsk off from the flow of weapons and fighters from Russia, but feirce fighting continues throughout the region with these cities at the center of the heaviest mortar and rocket attacks.
Sources: Ukrainian Council of National Security and Defense; Pro-Russian separatist leaders
A spokesman for the Ukrainian military, Andriy Lysenko, disputed that account and accused Russia of sending the soldiers across the border on a "special mission," Reuters reported.
Dmitri Trenin, an expert on Russian foreign policy and the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, predicted that Russia would persist with its denials but might be willing to quietly abandon its support over time as it shifted to other ways to pressure Kiev. "There is no solution to the Ukraine issue any time soon," Mr. Trenin said in a telephone interview from Moscow.
Russia has already severed gas supplies to Ukraine, complaining that it has not been paid for previous deliveries, and energy shortages will grow increasingly painful for Ukraine as winter approaches. Moscow’s long-term goal, Mr. Trenin said, is not to force Ukraine to recognize the rebels’ self-declared states but to ensure that Ukraine never joins NATO or allows Western troops on Ukrainian territory.
That goal could be accomplished, he said, by forcing Ukraine to make constitutional changes that would give eastern regions an effective veto over key decisions by the government in Kiev.
Ukraine released video clips on Tuesday of what it said were 10 captured Russian soldiers. Credit Reuters Tv/Reuters
"We are still at the early stages of this monumental struggle," he said. "The eastern rebels may lose their battle and Putin may be willing to accept this as a tactical move. But he is not ready to accept defeat of Russia’s policy in Ukraine."
The gathering in Minsk was originally scheduled as a meeting of the Eurasian Customs Union, a Russian-led economic bloc that includes Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. But the crisis in Ukraine took over as the main issue when President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, the host of the meeting, arranged for Mr. Poroshenko to attend and hold talks with Mr. Putin, their first meeting since a frosty encounter during D-Day commemorations in France in early June.
Mr. Lukashenko told Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, who was also in Minsk, that "we must extinguish the flames of this conflict by all means possible." But he made it clear that the Minsk session was just a start and would not produce a swift settlement. He said it would merely establish a "platform for negotiations."
With Mr. Putin arriving late in the Belarussian capital, the start of the meeting was pushed back an hour to 3 p.m., leaving only a few hours for discussion on the crisis in Ukraine as well as talks about the customs union. Mr. Putin’s original hopes to turn the alliance into an eastern rival to the European Union have faded since Ukraine refused to join.
Mr. Poroshenko has instead chosen to sign a sweeping trade and political pact with the European Union, reversing a decision last November by his predecessor, Mr. Yanukovych, to turn toward Russia instead of Europe. Mr. Putin’s economic bloc, said Mr. McFaul, the former ambassador, will "limp along — but without Ukraine it is a very different organization" from what Mr. Putin had wanted.
Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Washington.
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