Roger Cohen and Andrew E. written by cremero
The standoff with Russia over Ukraine has entered a crucial phase this week. The United States has drawn attention to NATO and shifted forces to the east. Moscow has prepared even more forces on the Ukrainian border. But under those tensions, diplomatic avenues are being explored and a roadmap of possible solutions, still amorphous, is taking shape.
President Joe Biden will meet with Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday, and French President Emmanuel Macron will meet with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Moscow at the same time before traveling to Kiev.
With the Biden administration’s tough stance, Germany lying low, and Putin determined to force a solution to Russia’s security grievances, it is Macron who has established himself at the center of diplomacy in Europe. As for Moscow, he is a “quality negotiator,” as Putin called Macron, according to a senior French presidential official, speaking on condition of anonymity, in keeping with the French government’s practice.
The opportunity for Macron to lead the effort to create a new European security structure has put him front and center on perhaps the biggest stage of his presidency, just two months before the elections. This has given him the opportunity to step into a larger leadership role for the whole of Europe and to put some meat on his sometimes grandiose vision for an allied, but more independent Europe with the United States.
“Do we want a Russia that is fully integrated with China or somewhere between China and Europe?” France’s economy minister, Bruno Le Maire, who is very close to Macron, said on Friday that Russia and China declared their friendship “no boundaries” and called on NATO to “abandon its ideological Cold War approach”. Did.
For France, Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s choreographed embrace on the eve of the Beijing Winter Olympics was a demonstration of the ominous sweeping effects of the Ukraine crisis, as Macron embarks on several days of intense diplomacy.
The risks are just as great as the potential payoff for Macron. A solution to the crisis seems very elusive for now, even though Putin has made less direct threats towards Ukraine over the past week.
The French president has a dual purpose: to prevent a war that threatens the concentration of massive Russian forces on the Ukrainian border; and to address Russian grievances that provoked NATO expansion to the east in 1999 and 2004, with the ultimate aim of integrating Russia into a new European security system that offsets its access toward China.
It’s a tall order, but Macron has never lacked for audacity. He has to tread carefully. Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official who is now research director of the European Council on Foreign Affairs, said: “There is despair in European countries, including Germany, with Mr. Macron’s tendency to go ahead and yell at him for doing nothing.” ” relations. “That weakens her.”
French officials described in broad outlines that Macron would take a dual approach in his meetings with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The first is to use the Normandy format – a grouping of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia – to bolster the 2015 Minsk 2 Agreement, a deeply obscure document that achieved a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine but has proven largely inefficient. , not least because no one agrees with its meaning.
Could some interpretation of the agreement, including the final powers of the detached Donbass region on national policy, go towards satisfying Putin’s insistence that Ukraine never join NATO, the United States and France? Including adamant in rejecting the demands of his associates?
The second, in close consultation with Biden, is to secure a tangible signal of de-escalation that reverses Russian military build-up and, as a means of achieving this, finds that Putin’s final “reddish” in the confrontation. What is “line”.
The senior French presidential official said the focus of the Western conflict with Putin lies in “the expansion of NATO and the inclusion of countries from the former Soviet space”, which “created an area of instability that has to be reduced.” Said Putin had told Macron that he wanted a “talk of substance” that would go “to the heart of the matter”.
In fact France is saying that Putin’s demands, which include pushing back NATO from former Soviet-controlled countries, may never be satisfied, but “getting to the bottom of the matter” involves acknowledging that That the expansion of NATO caused lasting grievances with Russia as well. Because it gained independence for 100 million Central Europeans.
No one believes that Romania, Lithuania and other states that have joined an expanded NATO are ever going to leave it, or that NATO is ever going to repudiate its 2008 Bucharest statement that Ukraine will become a “member” of the alliance. But, as shown by Turkey’s nearly 60-year flirtation with the European Union, there are ways to turn candidacy for membership of an organization into an indefinite holding pattern.
“We can take a step towards Putin, recognizing that he is not entirely wrong,” said Justin Vays, the former head of policy planning at the French foreign ministry, who now heads the Paris Peace Forum.
“Ukraine is not a member of NATO and, to my knowledge, will not be for some time,” a senior French presidential official said.
Macron wants to find out whether US offers last month can be supplemented by further confidence-building measures that allow a exit from the crisis.
The US resolution included calls for greater transparency about missile deployments in Eastern Europe and mutual commitments by both the United States and Russia to refrain from deploying missiles or troops in Ukraine. Putin has dismissed the US response to his demands as inadequate.
“Conceptually the second day’s arms control proposals could be combined with some sort of consultation mechanism for a change in NATO status, or some sort of moratorium on NATO expansion, or some constructive interpretation of the Minsk Agreement that the Donbass Constituent Assembly Shapiro, a former State Department official, suggested what the government would do.
However, none of these seem likely given Putin’s unprovoked direct threats to Ukraine, his annexation of Crimea, his invasion of Georgia in the minor 2008 war, and his history of breaking treaties. With muscular proactive diplomacy, the Biden administration has signaled it is in no mood to compromise.
It often seems that Putin is only the latest exponent of Joseph Conrad’s Russian official “almost sublime disdain for the truth”.
Despite this, Macron, who knows a Russian invasion of Ukraine would send gas costs high at a time when French voters are angry about lost purchasing power, sees some potential in the Normandy format. A first meeting last month ended with limited progress, a second meeting is scheduled soon, and a summit of French, German, Russian and Ukrainian leaders has been suggested.
The Minsk 2 Agreement calls for the “decentralization” of Ukraine by granting “special status” over areas of the former now controlled by separatists, with “specialties” agreed upon “with representatives of these regions”.
Russia has argued in a constructive interpretation of these “specialties” that they should include giving elected representatives in these regions a veto over Ukrainian foreign policy decisions, including membership in NATO. In this way, Ukraine would effectively become part of Russia’s sphere of influence.
“It’s not going to happen,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba said last week. “never.”
Zelensky, the president, seemed more ambiguous. “If it’s not NATO, then point to some other security guarantee,” he said last month. It was not clear what was on his mind.
The “security guarantees” given by the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia vowed to respect Ukraine’s existing borders and sovereignty, proved useless.
Absent other avenues, the Normandy format at least brings the parties closer together. Shapiro argued that it could help build stability.
“Instability is Russian strength. Stability is our strength,” he said. “The expansion of NATO and the European Union was a very powerful way to secure democracy in Eastern European countries. But we got out of it what we could. If you believe in the superiority of the Western economic and political model, as I do, sustainability illustrates this, and sphere of influence is a very good way to establish that.”
The French official, Putin said, “wants long-term visibility” on Ukraine and Europe. Macron appears to be playing a potentially dangerous game, trying to balance the “new European security order” he has said he wants with his commitment to the United States and the NATO alliance.
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