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It’s been a rough couple of months for President Joe Biden and his feckless foreign policy team. Israel is going its own way in its war against Hamas, with renewed bombing in Gaza, and the American public is bitterly divided, all of which is reflected in polls that continue to be unfavorable to the White House.
Meanwhile, the president and his foreign policy aides have also been left on the outside as serious peace talks between Russia and Ukraine have rapidly gained momentum.
“Everyone in Europe is talking about this”—the peace talks—an American businessman who spent years dealing with high-level Ukrainian diplomatic and military issues in the government told me earlier this week. “But there are lots of questions between a ceasefire and a settlement.” The veteran journalist Anataol Lieven wrote this week that the battlefield situation in Ukraine and thus “a ceasefire and negotiations for a peace settlement are becoming more and more necessary for Ukraine.” He said that it was “exceptionally difficult” for the Ukrainian government headed by Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to talks, given its repeated refusal to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The driving force of those talks has not been Washington or Moscow, or Biden or Putin, but instead the two high-ranking generals who run the war, Valery Gerasimov of Russia and Valery Zaluzhny of Ukraine.
The ingredient that triggered the private talks is a shared understanding that Putin would not object to a settlement that fixed borders according to where the troops were in place when the peace talks ended. Russia would be left with unchallenged control of Crimea and, pending an election to be held under martial law in March, with essential control of the four provinces, or oblasts, that Russia annexed last year: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and the still embattled Kherson. In return—in a concession not foreseen—Russia, that is, Putin himself, would not object to Ukraine joining NATO.
In a November 1 interview in the Economist: Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukraine army, stunned the editors by acknowledging that his war with Russia is “into a stalemate. It would take a massive technological leap to break the deadlock.” The general revealed that his troops had advanced by less than eleven miles since the much advertised Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia got under way early last summer. “There will be most likely no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” Zaluzhny said. “The simple fact is that we see everything that the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing. In order for us to break this deadlock we need something new, like the gunpowder which the Chinese invented and which we are still using to kill each other.”
The interview made headlines around the world—it’s news when the general running a war announces the war is deadlocked—and, of course, it enraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the general publicly apologized for his remarks.
But Zelensky is still running the country, and it is known in some quarters in Europe that Russia and Ukraine are now engaged in serious peace talks. Zelensky is resisting such talks and has announced he will seek re-election on a platform that calls for a full withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine before any peace talks can resume. The country is currently under martial law, so elections cannot take place. Zelensky continues to mobilize troops for the Ukrainian army, with a reported new call-up of those between the ages of seventeen and seventy.
There must be a backstory when a commanding general tells a prominent magazine that his and Russia’s army are locked in a stalemate. And here it is, as told to me by two Americans with direct knowledge of these matters.
The interview with the Economist was arranged, as the editors of the magazine were not aware, after a series of general-to-general communications with Valery Gerasimov, who has been the chief of the general staff of Russia’s military since 2012. He is also Russia’s first deputy minister of defense. Gerasimov was especially close to US Army General Martin Dempsey, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Barack Obama from 2011 to 2015. Dempsey and Gerasimov initially met many years earlier at social events when both were captains and commanded opposite tank units in West and East Germany.
One American official involved early on in the general-to-general talks told me: “This was not a spur-of-the-moment event,” he said. “This was carefully orchestrated by Zaluzhny. The message was the war is over and we want out. To continue it would destroy the next generation of the citizens of Ukraine.”
The official acknowledged that “there is no question” that Zaluzhny “had some help in deciding to go public from some key Americans.”
“What was the objective of this amazing story?” the official asked. “To get the Ukraine leadership”—meaning Zelensky and his coterie—“to agree to a settlement and to realize that to continue the war was self-destructive.” He said that there was what he called “a bigger objective”: to get the Ukrainian citizenry “to the point where they would agree to negotiations” to end the war.
Meanwhile, on the Russian side, the official said, “Gerasimov also realized that from a military perspective the war in Ukraine was a destructive stalemate.” The Russian general “finally convinced Putin that there was no victory to be had. The Russian losses were disproportionate.
“But how to convince Zelensky?” the official said. “He is a madman who staked his life upon winning politically and militarily. He is an obstacle to a settlement, and he has many allies in the Ukrainian military. So the message that was sent to Zelensky is that we are going to have talks with the Russians with or without you and they are going to be military to military. Your neighbors are fed up with you, especially Poland and Hungary, and they want their Ukrainian refugees to go back to a peaceful country,”
The other issue facing Zelensky, the official said, is economic: “How do you operate a country with no GNP?”
The deal now on the table for Zelensky, the official said, offers the possibility of Russian support for Ukraine to finally be allowed to join NATO. Crimea would stay in Russian hands, and there would be freely monitored Russian presidential elections in the four partially occupied oblasts claimed by Russia. Two weeks ago Putin signed legislation that allowed voting in those provinces to be held under martial law.
“The White House is totally against the proposed agreement,” the official said. “But it will happen. Putin has not disagreed.” It is thought that Putin will “want to make a deal.”
There is much work left to do on many details of the proposed agreement, the official said. He provided a daunting list: "War criminals on both sides. Citizenship. Compensation. Ordnance disposal. Cross-border economics. Access and, most importantly, the political cover story. Neither side wants to be blamed for a ‘sellout’ and are looking for peace with honor. Trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube won't be easy, but most important to prevent future flare-ups. We have all winter to work it out and some good folks lending a hand.”
The official told of a recent encouraging sign. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently asked to be invited to the NATO international security conference that took place this week in Montenegro. “He was extended an invitation and accepted,” the official said. “The United States was informed but not given a veto.”
A second American , whose information comes from overseas, confirmed that Russia might be willing to “allow Ukraine to join NATO,” but he added an important caveat. Under the tentative agreement, NATO would have to commit to “not place NATO troops on Ukrainian soil.” The agreement also would not allow NATO to place offensive weapons in Ukraine, but defensive weapons systems would be permitted.
The American added that Russia would agree, were the proposed peace talks to succeed, to rejoin the Comprehensive Nucear-Test-Ban Treaty from which it recently withdrew. It also would agree to remove its military from areas near the Baltic states and Moldova.
He told me that the proposed settlement has inherent logic because of the on-the-ground military realities. Russia, like Ukraine, he said, has been unable to launch penetration attacks deep across the war’s current front. “They tried but failed. Inefficient and wasteful as its military is, Russia can hold on to territories they have conquered in eastern Ukraine. And we are heading into the winter months, during which the mud and snow make any progress impossible.”
The two generals may continue to talk and Putin may indeed be interested in a settlement that gives him permanent control of Crimea and the four provinces he has claimed, but Zelensky remains the wild card. The American official said that Zelensky has been told that “this is a military-to-military problem to solve and the talks will go on with or without you.” If necessary. the American official told me, “We can finance his voyage to the Caribbean.”
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Eén vraagje nog : hoeveel zieltjes zijn er tot nu in totaal door de vleesmolen gegaan?
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