Considerable attention has been paid to whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is serious about negotiating a peace or whether he is delaying to provide time to achieve all of Russia’s goals on the battlefield. The Kremlin, itself, has said that, though they take the Trump administration’s diplomatic efforts seriously, they cannot simply be accepted “as they are” because they have not yet addressed “Russia’s core demand, that is, the need to resolve the issues stemming from the root causes of this conflict.”
Russia has been accused by some of rejecting Trump’s ceasefire. The Kremlin has called the issue “complex” and cautioned against expectations of “immediate results.” Some of Russia’s “core demands,” like guarantees Ukraine won’t join NATO and protection for ethnic Russians in Ukraine, are reasonable; some, like maximal restrictions on the Ukrainian armed forces and Ukraine ceding more territory at the negotiating table than it has lost on the battlefield, are not.
Less attention has been paid to whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is serious about negotiating a peace. Though it is frequently claimed that, unlike Putin, Zelensky has accepted the Trump administration’s ceasefire without preconditions, like Russia, Ukraine has set preconditions. Zelensky has stipulated that children abducted by Russia and Ukrainian civilians illegally held by Russia must be returned. He has identified as red lines, reasonably, that no territory beyond that already occupied by Russia be ceded, and, more unreasonably, that adequate security guarantees be given. Unreasonable because those security guarantees, as Zelensky has previously made clear, must be NATO membership or international forces that include the United States. Recently, Ukraine added the red line that it could not accept limitations on its armed forces: “This is a principled position of Ukraine – no one, and certainly not the aggressor country Russia, will dictate to Ukraine what kind of armed forces Ukraine should have.”
But more immediately, and more provocatively, there has recently been a series of events that Ukraine has seized upon and potentially enhanced to provide a cause for increased Western aid and intervention. Standing between the Trump administration, who is trying to negotiate an end to the war, and Europe, who seems determined to continue the war, Zelensky has bought the rights to these true events and produced stories that may dramatically enhance the facts in order to provide the motivation to bring the U.S. back into the war.
Hellbound and Down 