Nearly three years into Russia’s war against Ukraine, the Ukrainian government looks to be slowly preparing the public for a bitter compromise with the Kremlin.
In December, billionaire oligarch Viktor Pinchuk suggested big concessions need to be made to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in exchange for reintegrating Russian-occupied areas of the Donbas back into Ukraine.
Back then, President Petro Poroshenko vehemently denied he had anything to do with Pinchuk’s plan and publicly condemned it.
But now sources interviewed by the Kyiv Post and public statements by figures linked to the government show that Ukrainian authorities are, indeed, in talks with Russia and the West on reintegrating the occupied territories and urgently trying to reach a compromise with Russia.
This lends credence to speculation that Pinchuk’s proposals were authorized by Poroshenko, although the concessions currently under discussion may not be as wide-ranging and radical as those suggested by Pinchuk.
Yarema Dukh, the foreign media coordinator at the Presidential Administration, and Volodymyr Aryev, a lawmaker for the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko faction in parliament, didn’t deny that talks are taking place.
But they said there would be no major concessions going beyond the terms of the unfulfilled Feb. 11, 2015, Minsk peace agreement.
That deal required Ukraine to give autonomy to Russian-occupied areas, grant amnesty to separatists and hold local elections there.
Unusual statements
The Kyiv Post’s diplomatic and security sources say that Poroshenko’s administration intensified negotiations on the Donbas earlier this year as U. S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly praised Russian dictator Putin, took office.
This coincided with a flurry of unprecedented statements by officials indicating that Ukraine would start reintegrating the Russian-held parts of Donbas in 2017.
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said on Jan. 17 at a meeting with the State Border Guard’s leadership that they should be prepared to take control over the border between the Donbas and Russia in 2017.
“I want each one of you to understand that this is not a propagandist statement, not some sort of fixation – this is an objective reality that we will face in the near future,” Avakov said.
And Yevhen Marchuk, Ukraine’s representative in the Minsk contact group, said in a Feb. 6 interview with the Liga.net news site that Ukraine is approaching a “painful stage” in the peace talks, during which it will have to compromise.
Meanwhile, the Cabinet on Jan. 11 approved a plan to make it easier to cross the border between the Ukrainian-controlled and Russian-occupied areas of the Donbas, and to ease the access of the occupied territories’ residents to Ukrainian government services, health care, education and Ukraine’s taxation system.
The plan was prepared by Occupied Territories Minister Vadym Chernysh, who also gave a rare interview to gazeta.ru, a Kremlin-linked news site, on Jan. 19.
His deputy Georgy Tuka surprised many by saying in late December that Ukraine would start reintegrating the Donbas in the fall of 2017.
In an interview with the Kyiv Post on Feb. 7, Tuka said that the process may begin even earlier, when Russia starts withdrawing its heavy weapons from the area.
Plan for militants
Tuka attributed his predictions to a drop in Russia’s financing of the occupied territories, intelligence reports about an alleged increase in pro-Ukrainian sentiment there, and Russian-separatist forces’ reluctance to continue fighting.
He said hundreds of armed separatists have already defected to the Ukrainian side over the last two years.
“There are entire armed units ready to lay down arms if they receive guarantees from Ukraine that they will not be prosecuted.”
Tuka added that Russia seems to be ready for concessions “given how fast militants have started leaving this world.” Tuka, as well as other observers, implied that the Kremlin was killing off uncontrollable hot-headed separatist leaders to make a deal with Ukraine easier.
Since 2014, at least a dozen separatist leaders have been killed or died in mysterious circumstances. The most recent ones include Donetsk-based Somalia Battalion commander Mikhael Tolstikh, known by the nickname Givi, Luhansk-based Oleg Anashchenko, and Valery Bolotov, ex-head of Luhansk’s separatists.
Tuka also voiced a plan on how Ukraine may get rid of armed militants when it takes the occupied territories back.
“There are approximately 40,000 combatants, who are divided into three groups of the same size: citizens of Ukraine, non-Ukrainian paramilitary units (99 percent of them are Russians) and regular Russian troops,” he said.
The Russian troops will leave Ukraine’s territory as soon as they receive the order, and local militants will mostly agree to lay down arms, but the Russian mercenaries will pose the biggest problem, Tuka said.
“Specialists say that it would be enough to liquidate 50–100 of the (mercenaries’) leaders, and the rest of them will disband,” he added.
Plan for civilians
Civilians who collaborated with the Russian-separatist authorities, including public officials, judges and teachers, should be given an amnesty from prosecution, but should lose their jobs and be deprived of the right to participate in elections, Tuka believes.
The local elections envisaged by the Minsk deal should take place in the Russian-occupied areas a few years after Ukraine takes the territory back, Tuka said. Before that, the area should be governed by Kyiv-appointed military governments without elected legislatures, similar to the arrangements in Kramatorsk and Severodonetsk, he argued.
Tuka said that tycoon Rinat Akhmetov or allies of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych could be appointed to run these transition governments. They are seen as compromise figures, acceptable to both the Ukrainian and the Russian authorities.
Western pressure
Western diplomats’ statements also indicate that major concessions to the Kremlin are being discussed.
Ernst Reichel, Germany’s ambassador to Ukraine, said on Feb. 7 that local elections in the occupied territories could be held even before Russia withdraws its troops from the area – an idea also voiced by Pinchuk. That would allow the Kremlin to hold sham elections and appear to legitimize its puppets.
Balazs Jarabik, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that if Ukraine fails to implement the Minsk deal, the West could drop the Donbas-related sanctions against Russia this year, leaving just the “largely symbolic” sanctions over the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea. The lifting of sanctions was also one of the concessions proposed by Pinchuk.
Pinchuk also suggested removing Crimea from the agenda of the peace talks as one of Ukraine’s possible concessions.
This has been variously interpreted as Ukraine ceasing to raise the Crimean issue at international organizations, keeping silent about human rights violations in the peninsula, or not recognizing the Crimean Tatars’ rights as an indigenous people.
Aider Muzhdabayev, a vice president of the Crimean Tatar ATR TV channel, said that, if implemented, a deal on the reintegration of the occupied territories would likely lead to the Ukrainian authorities effectively ceasing to protect his community’s interests in Crimea.
But it will be not easy to make parliament adopt legislation on unpopular concessions to Russia – moves that could trigger street protests and civil unrest.
The Samopomich party is the most vehement critic of any talks about the reintegration of separatist-held Donbas. However, the government may count on the support on the Opposition Bloc, the People’s Will and Vidrodzhennya – offshoots of Yanukovych’s Russia-friendly Party of Regions.
Trojan horse
Critics say that the reintegration of the occupied parts of the Donbas could be part of a Kremlin plan to bring Ukraine back into its sphere of influence – in line with Pinchuk’s idea of the country dropping all plans to join the European Union and NATO.
Politician Viktor Medvedchuk, a close friend of Putin, is playing a key role in Russian-Ukrainian negotiations on the Donbas, the Kyiv Post’s sources say.
“They’re preparing a Trojan horse that will be integrated into Ukraine,” Muzhdabayev said. “…The Federal Security Service and Russian military headquarters will keep working (in the occupied territories of the Donbas). It’s just a puppet theater.”
The Kremlin will replace more hardline separatist leaders with more moderate ones, but Russia will keep its troops and political presence in the Donbas, he argued.
As a result of reintegration, “Russia will also be able to delegate its puppets into Ukrainian politics,” Muzhdabayev said.
Tuka agreed that Russia would try to use its leverage in the Donbas to influence the whole of Ukraine. “I have no doubt (Russia) will not leave them alone,” he said. “But (Russian agents) are already present everywhere in Ukraine, and they will continue doing their dirty job anyway.”
Viktor Trepak, an ex-deputy chief of the Security Service of Ukraine, said in a Feb. 1 interview that Russian-Ukrainian “diplomatic ties have allegedly been downgraded to zero but in reality top-level relations, with (Medvedchuk) acting as an intermediary, are very active.”
“(The authorities) are playing with the West, but are at the same time leading Ukraine towards Russia,” he added.
