A Peace Summit For Ukraine Does Not Appear Likely

NBC News reports, Ukraine aims for a peace summit by the end of February, foreign minister says:

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s foreign minister said Monday his government is aiming to have a peace summit by the end of February, preferably at the United Nations with Secretary-General António Guterres as a possible mediator, around the anniversary of Russia’s war.

But Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told The Associated Press that Russia could be invited to such a summit only if it faced a war crimes tribunal first.

Dude, war crimes trials take years just to collect the evidence and identify witnesses, let alone the complexity of the actual  trial. There is still an active war crimes tribunal for the Kosovo War (1998-1999) in The Hague. War crimes tribunals typically come after the cessation of hostilities.

Kuleba also said he was “absolutely satisfied” with the results of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the U.S. last week, and he revealed that the U.S. government had made a special plan to get the Patriot missile battery ready to be operational in the country in less than six months. Usually, the training takes up to a year.

Kuleba said during the interview at the Foreign Ministry that Ukraine will do whatever it can to win the war in 2023, adding that diplomacy always plays an important role.

“Every war ends in a diplomatic way,” he said. “Every war ends as a result of the actions taken on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.”

Kuleba said the Ukrainian government would like to have a peace summit by the end of February.

“The United Nations could be the best venue for holding this summit, because this is not about making a favor to a certain country,” he said. “This is really about bringing everyone on board.”

On Dec. 12, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine planned to initiate a summit to implement the Ukrainian peace formula in 2023.

At the Group of 20 summit in Bali in November, Zelenskyy presented a 10-point peace formula that includes the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the withdrawal of Russian troops, the release of all prisoners, a tribunal for those responsible for the aggression and security guarantees for Ukraine.

Asked about whether they would invite Russia to the summit, he said that Moscow would first need to face prosecution for war crimes at an international court.

“They can only be invited to this step in this way,” Kuleba said.

The foreign minister again downplayed comments by Russian authorities that they are ready for talks.

“They regularly say that they are ready for negotiations, which is not true, because everything they do on the battlefield proves the opposite,” he said.

In comments released Sunday on Russian state television, Putin claimed that his country is ready for talks to end the war in Ukraine but suggested that the Ukrainians are the ones refusing to take that step. Despite Putin’s comments, Moscow’s forces have kept attacking Ukraine — a sign that peace isn’t imminent.

There is also this from the terrorist state of Russia, the aggressor in this war which invaded the territory of Ukraine, the first time in Europe since the end if Word War II, in violation of the United Nations Charter.

Reuters reports, Russia’s Lavrov: Either Ukraine fulfils Moscow’s proposals or our army will decide:

Moscow’s proposals for settlement in Ukraine are well known to Kyiv and either Ukraine fulfils them for their own good or the Russian army will decide the issue, TASS agency quoted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying.

“Our proposals for the demilitarization and denazification [not a thing] of the territories controlled by the regime, the elimination of threats to Russia’s security emanating from there, including our new lands [illegal annexation], are well known to the enemy,” the state news agency quoted Lavrov as saying late on Monday.

“The point is simple: Fulfil them for your own good. Otherwise, the issue will be decided by the Russian army.”

So essentially, “surrender or die.” Not a peace negotiation offer.

Moscow has been calling its invasion in Ukraine a “special military operation” to “demilitarise” and “denazify” its neighbour. Kyiv and its Western allies call it an imperial-style aggression to grab land.

In September, Moscow proclaimed it had annexed four provinces of Ukraine – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – after holding so-called referendums that were rejected as bogus and illegal by Kyiv and its allies.

On Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow was open to negotiations and blamed Kyiv and its Western backers for a lack of talks, a stance Washington has previously dismissed as posturing amid persistent Russian attacks.

Lavrov told TASS that when it comes to how long the conflict will last, “the ball is in the regime’s court and Washington behind it.”

This war will end only when Russian forces suffer a humiliating defeat in Ukraine and are forced to withdraw from the sovereign territory of Ukraine. This will be a long slog. A humiliating defeat could cascade into Vladimir Putin being overthrown by his own inner circle, in keeping with Russian history.

Putin is also destroying his own country with his war of aggression against neighboring Ukraine. This Forbes interview with The Code of Putinism, explains Russia’s Economic Prospects Have Gone From Bad To Terrible (excerpt):

Stuart Anderson: How do you think Vladimir Putin and those around him view the progress of the war in Ukraine since the widescale invasion began in February 2022?

Brian D. Taylor: Putin and his team certainly understand that the war has not gone according to plan. Two key moments stand out: the decision to withdraw units attacking Kyiv in March and April and the decision to announce a so-called “partial mobilization” in September. In the first case, Putin had to give up on his goal of quickly toppling the Ukrainian government. In the second case, he had to acknowledge that Russian casualties (killed and wounded) were so immense in the first seven months of the war that Russia needed hundreds of thousands of new troops to stabilize the front.

That said, I think Putin and his military and security elites—known collectively as the siloviki — still do not believe that Russia has lost the war. They hope to outlast Ukraine and the West by mobilizing more troops, inflicting enormous suffering during the winter on the Ukrainian population by targeting civilian infrastructure, and waiting for collective Western support for Ukraine to splinter and fall apart.

Anderson: You have pointed out the Russian economy stagnated even before the sanctions imposed in 2022. What are the biggest economic problems Russia and Russians face today and in the coming years?

Taylor: The biggest economic problem that Russia and Russians face today is, of course, the war. Instead of an expected growth of around 4% for 2022-2023, Russia’s economy is expected to decline by 8% over those two years. Sanctions have hit production in key sectors very hard, and the effects will continue to mount. The government is shifting to a wartime economy, which means even more state control and military spending and less investment in human capital such as education and health care.

Hundreds of thousands of educated, young workers have left the country, and several hundred thousand more Russian citizens have been mobilized for war rather than productive pursuits—not to mention the roughly 100,000 casualties so far. Living standards will continue to fall, and an increase in wage arrears and unemployment seems inevitable as well. Longer term, the Western shift away from Russian oil and gas brought on by the war will undermine Russia’s most important economic sector.

The Russian economy has been underperforming for 15 years due to poor institutions—weak rule of law, poor protection of property rights, corruption—and consequentially relatively low domestic and foreign investment. Now due to the war, Russian economic prospects have gone from lackluster to dreadful.

Anderson: Russia has openly broadcast on TV that it is taking Ukrainian children to Russia, which many people consider kidnapping [it is]. Can you explain Russian boasting about what appears to be a violation of human rights and war crimes on a mass scale?

Taylor: I think these actions, although obviously deplorable, are perfectly consistent with Kremlin messaging about the war. In Putin’s own words, Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.” Putin cannot even imagine that Ukraine would choose to align with the West unless it was somehow tricked or coerced into doing so.

When he launched the February invasion, he asserted that Ukraine was ruled by a “neo-Nazi” government that was committing “genocide” against its own people. Thus, the Russian state portrays these kidnappings not as a war crime but as a benevolent act to rescue endangered children from an evil illegitimate government in Kyiv. It’s nonsense, of course, but that doesn’t mean the views are not seriously held by both Russian state officials and the Russian families who say they are “adopting” these children.

Anderson: One notices the use of Soviet flags and symbols by the Russian Army in Ukraine and still see statues of Lenin in Russia. Since Christianity is now supposed to be an important part of Russia’s identity, why does the government continue to promote Soviet symbols and Lenin?

Taylor: Putin’s Russia promotes a weird mishmash of symbols and identities. In his long speech justifying the February invasion, Putin bitterly denounced Lenin for creating the Soviet Republic of Ukraine, which he considers an artificial construction. Yet, as you note, in other settings and circumstances, Putin fully embraces Soviet history and symbols. I think the way to make sense of this is to understand Putin as someone who believes in the imperial Russian myth of 1,000 years of continuous Russian history. For him, pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Russia are all part of a single story of “historic Russia” and its rightful status as a Great Power.

Of course, Russia is not the only country that tells a story about itself that is at odds with a much more complicated historical reality. This war is a tragic reminder of the potential dangers when myths of imperial greatness serve as a guide to contemporary foreign policy.

Anderson: A Russian commentator raised an obvious contradiction in the rhetoric about Russians and Ukrainians being one people and post-Soviet peoples belong together, arguing if Russians would not surrender because they lost heat or electricity during the winter, why should anyone expect Ukrainians to do so. What do you think?

Taylor: I can’t but agree with the commentator you mention. I refer once again to Putin’s February 21 speech, in which he said about Ukrainians: “These are our comrades, those dearest to us . . . colleagues, friends . . . but also relatives, people bound by blood, by family ties.” Yet the actions of Russia for the last nine months shows that Putin sees no problem with the murder and torture of those he refers to as comrades, friends, and relatives.

It’s not surprising that Ukrainians see his statements as empty words and have become even more determined to hold on to their sovereignty and freedom in the face of Russian efforts to inflict immense suffering on civilians through these bombing campaigns against civilian infrastructure.

Anderson: The Institute of the Study of War said recently that Putin “continues to reject the idea of Ukrainian sovereignty in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with serious negotiations.” Do you agree?

Taylor: One hundred percent. Putin has made clear for many years that he does not think Ukraine is “even a state,” as he told George W. Bush in 2008. This war—which goes back to 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea—stems directly from Putin’s refusal to see Ukraine as a sovereign state with the freedom to make its own political and foreign policy decisions.

In his view, Ukraine must be in Russia’s “sphere of control,” as Fiona Hill and Angela Stent put it. Just two months ago, Putin forcibly asserted that he was annexing four regions of Ukraine that, according to international law and multiple agreements between Russia and Ukraine, are legitimately part of Ukraine.

If Putin wanted to end the war, there is nothing stopping him from pulling Russian forces back to Russia’s legitimate international borders.

This war stops when the deranged war criminal Vladimir Putin is stopped by the Russian people. They are not at this point yet, but they will get there. Hopefully Ukrainians will be able to hold out long enough for this to happen. Slava Ukraini!