French President Emmanuel Macron’s effort to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin not to launch a military offensive against Ukraine is repeating the mistakes that Neville Chamberlain made in his Munich Agreement with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, according to a senior Ukrainian diplomat.
“Macron came to Ukraine … as Chamberlain came to London, saying, ‘I brought you peace.’ He didn’t consult with us,” Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Kingdom Vadym Prystaiko, a former Ukrainian foreign minister, told the Washington Examiner this week. “He went to Putin, straight, agreed with him something, and he returned back to Ukraine telling those guys, ‘I brought you peace. Take it.’ It’s not even ‘Take it or leave it.’ [It’s] ‘Take it. Don’t thank me. Take it.’”
Putin’s mobilization of military forces around Ukrainian borders has continued by degrees in recent months — to the point that U.S. officials now fear that “a major military action” could begin within days as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned Friday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has cautioned against overstating the threat in order to avoid provoking a panic. Ukrainian officials, who have grown accustomed to military threats over the last seven years of conflict with Russia, believe that Putin is trying to scare U.S. and European officials into buying peace at the expense of Ukraine.
“Chamberlain also came and [said,] ‘I brought you peace in Europe, and Germans will not move further because they already have everything they wanted,’” Prystaiko said Wednesday. “We believe that by feeding something to an aggressor is not making him peaceful, he’s just becoming more cocky because he believes that, actually, it’s working.”
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Prystaiko’s perspective, offered in a pair of conversations that coincided with trans-Atlantic efforts to jump-start a diplomatic resolution to the tensions, illuminate Ukrainian strategic calculations in a crisis that could end with the most significant military conflict in Europe since the end of World War II. The interviews account for Ukrainian government statements that have irritated Western officials and might also shed light on Putin’s actions.
Putin, in this telling, has engaged in a multipronged effort to shred the Budapest Memorandum — the 1994 agreement that saw Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan surrender the nuclear weapons that they had inherited from the late Soviet Union. That document guaranteed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the disarmed former Soviet vassal states, but Putin has taken advantage of protests in both countries to deepen the Kazakh and Belarusian authorities’ dependence on Russian support. Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has pledged allegiance to a controversial “union state” with Russia and allowed Putin to deploy a substantial contingent of Russian forces into Belarus, where they are in easy striking distance of the Ukrainian capital.
“So both of them are now back in Putin’s pocket,” Prystaiko said in the first interview with the Washington Examiner, referring to Belarus and Kazakhstan. “But the biggest challenge, the biggest prize, Ukraine, is still on the table, and he believes that the fruit is ripe enough to come and get it.”
That first conversation occurred the week that U.S. and NATO allies offered their written responses to a so-called draft treaty that Russia had published. Those Kremlin proposals amounted to a demand that NATO stop accepting new members and agree to the practical dismantling of the security relationships that link the original members of NATO to the Central and Eastern European countries that joined the alliance after the fall of the Soviet Union.
As those Western responses were delivered to Moscow, Macron’s team hosted a meeting of the so-called Normandy Format — which includes France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine — a quartet that convened early in the war and negotiated a pair of deals known as the Minsk agreements. Those pacts were negotiated by Zelensky’s predecessor during a period of intense violence while Putin portrayed Russia as an outside observer rather than a participant in the conflict. The provisions of the second Minsk deal left Putin’s team optimistic that Kyiv would soon be required to rewrite the Ukrainian Constitution in a way that would give Russia’s proxies in eastern Ukraine a permanent and powerful place in the Ukrainian political system.
“That would mean that the Ukrainian government couldn’t apply to join NATO — that would mean that the Ukrainian government might be pushed toward a ‘Finlandization’ model,” former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor told the Washington Examiner, referring to the deal that organized relations between Finland and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. “And the Ukrainians will never, by the way, accept — never accept — the Russian interpretation. They won’t. Because if it were to come about, it would mean the Finlandization, or worse, of Ukraine.”
The second Minsk deal requires Ukraine to hold elections in the Donbas region controlled by forces loyal to Russia and, eventually, give the officials who win those elections a “special status” within the Ukrainian system. Ukrainian officials have refused to hold those elections until Russian-led forces relinquish control of the territory they hold in eastern Ukraine on the grounds that a free and fair election cannot take place in an occupied territory.
“We’re trying to get out of this gridlock of Minsk, with minimal losses, because the document is outdated, old, and it was not very well crafted in the first place,” Prystaiko said in the Jan. 27 interview. “It served its purpose — it stopped the immediate escalation and immediate bloodshed — but there is very little in Minsk to really resolve the whole issue.”
Putin wants Zelensky to hold direct talks with the Russian proxies in Donbas as a key step toward implementing Minsk II, but Ukrainian officials refuse to do so. That demand is widely regarded as a trap emulating Russia’s approach to a territorial dispute with Moldova, where Russian officials have established a sort of “political, economic, and military protectorate,” as one Polish analyst put it, in a bid to force “the federalization of Moldova, which would have led to paralysis of the central state authorities through the autonomy” of the Russian-controlled proxies.
“The principled position of Ukraine is that we are not going to have direct conversations with Luhansk and Donetsk,” Prystaiko said in the first interview, referring to the Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine. “The danger is here that Europe and the United States are worrying so much [about] the new war … to be ignited in this part of the world might want to recommend Ukrainians to play a bit softer and to find a compromise with Russia. That’s, I believe, what the Russians are doing.”
Prystaiko said he believes that Putin has made his “unrealistic” demands for NATO’s contraction in order to make a political victory over Ukraine look reasonable by comparison. “Everybody believes that Russia will actually invade Ukraine, and the flexibility of the Ukrainian government in the Minsk format will look like a very reasonable price to pay to avoid war in Europe — which is exactly the Russians’ idea,” he said. “To scare everybody with this escalation, to corner Ukrainians, and make us come to the compromises.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba declared, shortly after the Paris meeting of the Normandy Format, that Kyiv would give Russian proxies the kind of special status that the Kremlin envisions. Such an agreement, according to Prystaiko, would spark the kinds of protests that brought down pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
“People who would not like to see this sort of compromise come to the president’s office and topple down the whole government,” the Ukrainian ambassador said in the first interview. “And Ukraine is quite famous in doing that. That would be [the] easiest way for Putin to achieve his prime goal — [the] Ukrainian system is collapsed, he can do whatever he likes, and the new government, which will come on the remnants, will be much, much easier to deal with.”
Putin and other senior Russian officials, for their part, have emphasized throughout the process that they expect France and Germany to put additional pressure on Ukraine.
“We are asking Paris and Berlin to be more assertive in urging Kyiv to implement its obligations,” Russian Ambassador to Germany Sergey Nechayev said this week, per a state media translation of his remarks. “We see that Ukraine is not implementing the key points. In addition, we hear outlandish statements from Kyiv that the Minsk process is allegedly dead and that there will never be a negotiated special status for Donbas.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken endorsed Ukraine’s approach to the Minsk agreements as a “good faith” effort this week while emphasizing that the Russian-controlled regions can receive special status only through “the appropriate sequencing” — an apparent reference to Ukraine’s demand that Russian forces leave the region before any elections are held. That statement irritated Moscow. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman countered that Blinken is threatening “a collapse of the peace process.”
Macron’s statements have sent a more troubling signal from the Ukrainian perspective. For one, the French president announced in Moscow that a piece of legislation about how to reintegrate the Donbas into the Ukrainian state was scrapped at Putin’s behest, in the context of the Normandy Format negotiations. This statement contradicted the official explanation for the withdrawal of the draft bill, according to a Central European analyst, because Zelensky’s team had portrayed the decision as a voluntary move motivated by a desire to tweak the legislation.
“So then the Ukrainian government looked ridiculous and stupid in the eyes of their own citizens,” former Czech official David Stulik, an analyst at the European Values Center for Security Policy in Prague, told the Washington Examiner. “This is an extremely sensitive issue for Ukrainians because they are very nervous — I mean, ordinary citizens are very nervous — to hear that their government is bending to the pressure from the West or from Russia.”
Prystaiko, speaking to the Washington Examiner on Wednesday after Macron’s visit to Moscow and Kyiv, said he was “quite pessimistic of the sort of direction we’ve been pushed into.” On Thursday, the national security advisers of the Normandy Format held another meeting, but this one ended without “any visible, tangible results,” as the Russian official involved in the talks put it. On Friday, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser urged any Americans in Ukraine to leave within 48 hours.
“If a Russian attack on Ukraine proceeds, it is likely to begin with aerial bombing and missile attacks that could obviously kill civilians without regard to their nationality,” Sullivan said. “No one would be able to count on air or rail or road departures once military action got underway.”
Biden’s team has tried to forestall that assault by promising to punish any invasion by imposing severe economic sanctions on Russia and beefing up the U.S. military presence in neighboring countries while opening the door to negotiation about various security concerns. Ukrainians are of the mind that whether Putin chooses “the path forward on diplomacy” or “the path of further conflict” (to borrow Blinken’s phrase), his goal will be the same — to present Zelensky with a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.
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“The price, the compromise, would be too high to swallow … something which goes against our vision of how our state survives this ordeal with Russia,” Prystaiko said in the Jan. 27 interview. “I have to tell you that if the price is too high, Ukraine will be considered as not cooperative, but we will not budge here because we do believe sincerely that this is too dangerous for us to go [along with] the compromise Russians are seeking.”
