Turkey’s efforts to mediate the conflict between Russia and Ukraine seem to shed light on Vladimir Putin’s intentions.
This Thursday, the Russian president called the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and told him what were the precise demands of Russia for a peace agreement with Ukraine.
In a BBC interview with Erdogan’s main adviser and spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin -who was part of the small group of officials who heard the call- it became clear that Russian demands are divided into two categories.
According to Kalin, the first four demands are not too difficult to meet for Ukraine.
The main one is Ukraine’s acceptance that it should be neutral and should not seek to join the NATO. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has already conceded that.
There are also other demands in this category which mostly seem to be elements that would make Moscow save face.
Ukraine would have to submit to a disarmament process to ensure that it is not a threat to Russia. There should be protection for the Russian language in Ukraine. And to that is added the “ denazification” that Putin speaks of.
This is deeply offensive to Zelensky, who is Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust, but the Turkish side believes that it will be quite easy for Zelensky to accept.
Perhaps it is enough that Ukraine condemns all forms of neo-Nazism and vow to crack them down.
The hard part
In the second category of demands is where the difficulty would lie.
In his phone call, Putin said that he wants negotiater face to face with President Zelensky before being able to reach an agreement on these points.
The Ukrainian president has already said that he is prepared to meet with the Russian president and negotiate with him face to face.
Ibrahim Kalin was present during the call from Putin and Erdogan.Kalin was much less specific on these issues.
He simply explained that they involved the “State of Crimea” and the “State of Donbas”, regions in eastern Ukraine some parts of which have already broken away from the country and reaffirmed their Russian identity.
Although Kalin did not go into details, it is assumed that Russia will demand that the Ukrainian government cede territory in eastern Ukraine. That would be deeply controversial.
The other assumption is that Russia will demand that Ukraine formally accept that Crimea -the peninsula that was illegally annexed in 2014- now belongs to the Russian Federation. If this is the case, it will be a bitter pill for Ukraine.
However, that is already a fait accompli, despite the fact that Russia has no legal basis to possess Crimea and, in fact, signed an international treaty after the fall of the Soviet Union, before Vladimir Putin came to power, accepting that the peninsula was part of Ukraine.
Even so, President Putin’s demands are not as harsh as some people fear and seem not worth all the violence, bloodshed and destruction that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine.
Given his tight control over the Russian media, it should not be too difficult for him and his servants to present all this as a great victory.
However, for Ukraine it would have serious repercussions.
If the small details of any agreement are not resolved with great care, the President Putin or his successors could always use them as an excuse to invade Ukraine again.
It could take a long time to reach a peace agreement, even if a ceasefire stops the bloodshed in the meantime.
Ukraine has suffered terribly in recent weeks, and the reconstruction of the towns and cities that Russia has damaged and destroyedwill take a long time. Also the relocation of the millions of refugees who have fled their homes.
And what about Vladimir Putin himself? There have been suggestions that he is ill or even mentally unbalanced
But Kalin says he did not detect “not at all” nothing unusual about the phone call. According to him, Putin had been clear and concise in everything he said.
Even if he manages to present an agreement with Ukraine as a glorious victory over neo-Nazism, his position against the Russians will remain weakened.
More and more people are realizing that exceeded himself.
And the stories of soldiers who have been killed or captured are spreading rapidly.
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