There must be a negotiated end to the Ukraine War. The alternative is nuclear armageddon.
The Russian demands are more negotiable than realised. Following the US-backed Maidan coup of 2014, and the subsequent 2014-5 Minsk accords, Russia gained the promise of autonomy for the two Russian-speaking provinces (oblasts) of Lugansk and Donetsk in Donbas, Ukraine.
But it did nothing to protect that autonomy, which was quickly violated by Ukrainian extremists.
Moscow has since upped its claim to demand independence for Lugansk and Donetsk and also for adjoining Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces where, as in most of Ukraine, Russian was the lingua franca until the Ukraine extremists gained control in 2014.
But in 2-½ years of fighting since 2022, Russia has only just managed to recover Lugansk and only controls about half of Donetsk plus a small strip of Zaporizhzhia. It occupied, but then withdrew from, Kherson city.
In short, Russia’s present demand for all four provinces is weak. A fair result would be for it to drop the claims to Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for gaining all of Lugansk and Donetsk. Alternatively, it could ask for some form of autonomy for all or part of the four provinces.
Ideally this would also remove the NATO nuclear threat to Moscow, especially if combined with a demand for Ukraine’s neutrality.
But if autonomy is to be part of the solution, Moscow must not repeat the mistakes of Minsk. It must, as in the case of South Ossetia in Georgia, retain the right to station military or place guard-posts to prevent any attempted violation of the autonomy by extremists – something it neglected to do in Donbas.
In Donbas, far from aggressing, Vladimir Putin seemed to think he could rely on diplomatic skills gained form his German-speaking spy days to persuade the Western powers, Germany especially, to behave. Instead, they just laughed at him.
As his critics in Russia have pointed out, Putin wasted eight years fussing around with remodelling the original Minsk agreement (Normandy format etc.), giving the extremists time to shell and kill 18,000 Donbas inhabitants, steal territory, and guarantee that when he did finally move he would be accused of unprovoked aggression – something they could not say in the case of South Ossetia (though they tried).
Incidentally, Putin, on returning from the recent Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, complained how he had to spend much time explaining to participants Russia’s reasons for invading Ukraine. If the participants did not know, how does he expect the rest of the world to know? Moscow’s PR is weak.
Gregory Clark was the first postwar Australian diplomat trained in Chinese, with postings to Hong Kong, Moscow and the UN before retiring in protest against the Vietnam War. After PhD studies at the ANU he became Japan correspondent for The Australian. A spell in Canberra’s Prime Ministers department led to professorships at Tokyo’s Sophia University and emeritus president of Tama University, Tokyo, before becoming co-founder of the very successful English language Akita Kokusai Daigaku. He has now retired to Latin America (Peru) and Kiwi fruit growing in Boso peninsular south of Tokyo.
His works include ‘In Fear of China’ (1969) and several books in Japan on education and foreign policy.
He used to speak Chinese and Russian with fluency. He now speaks Japanese and Spanish.
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