The Social World

Tag: Kirill Dmitriev

  • Why Putin thinks he’s winning

    Why Putin thinks he’s winning

    The Kremlin pulled out all the stops for the visit of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow yesterday. Accompanied by Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev, Witkoff and Kushner strolled through crowds on Red Square with minimal security after lunching at a fancy restaurant on Petrovka street. Not coincidentally, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi was also in town for a meeting with Russian Security Council head Sergei Shoigu, where Russia affirmed its support for Beijing’s One China policy. 

    It was a sophisticated piece of great power signaling intended to send a multi-part message to Donald Trump. First and foremost, the Kremlin was showing off its new solidarity with China – the DragonBear alliance ready to step up as the world’s next dominant superpower. Second, it was demonstrating that Russia regards Ukraine as a mere detail in a much larger geopolitical realignment where three great powers carve up the world between them and Europe is relegated to a yapping irrelevance. Third, by walking Witkoff through the streets of Moscow – including a stroll past the TsUM department store with its window displays piled with luxury, sanctions-busting Western goods – the Kremlin was showing off the Russian capital’s obvious wealth, stability and security. This is a city that hasn’t noticed there’s a war on, went the Kremlin’s not-so-subliminal message. It’s a city where top officials can stroll through crowds with no fear of being accosted by angry citizens. 

    Even as he talks about a peace plan for Ukraine, Vladimir Putin believes that the world is going his way. Yes, his economy has been battered by huge war expenses and sanctions – and is about to be battered a whole lot more by Ukrainian attacks on shadow fleet tankers at sea, on oil terminals and refineries. But all in all, Putin has good reason to believe that his opponents and rivals from Washington to Brussels to Kyiv are in worse shape than he is. And that belief is the wellspring of his stubborn insistence on sticking to his maximalist war aims. Even as European leaders and Volodymyr Zelensky whittle down the White House’s 28-point peace plan – dubbed the “28PPP” – the Kremlin seems to be going in the opposite direction, insisting that the 28PPP does not go far enough in Russia’s favor. 

    The very fact that Washington is so eager to talk peace is seen by the Kremlin as a sign of weakness, argues former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev, the most senior Russian official to defect to the West in protest at the 2022 invasion. “The emergence of such a US initiative signals, in Putin’s view, that Washington is capitulating … not because it has suffered losses but because it is tired, frightened and eager to avoid involvement,” wrote Bondarev in a recent essay. From Russia’s point of view, Trump is “declaring the impotence of a superpower incapable of defending its own interests.” Worse, Trump “does not understand that once a state pledges support to an ally, it cannot abandon that promise so ostentatiously,” says the former diplomat.  

    The Trump administration has already indicated it is willing to recognize both the Donbas and Crimea as Russian. More significantly, even prominent pro-Ukraine Senator Lindsey Graham has made it clear that the US will never contemplate Ukraine in Nato – something that has long been obvious but which former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken refused, fatefully, to put on paper on the eve of the war. With Kyiv’s most powerful one-time ally already conceding these fundamental points at the very beginning of talks, why would Putin not be tempted to push for even more? 

    On the front lines in Ukraine, Russia is positioning itself for further advances on the ground. The grim and protracted battle for control of the Donbas town of Pokrovsk – which Putin announced had fallen this week – have distracted attention from much larger Russian advances in the south around Zaporizhzhia. Russian forces occupied some 193 square miles of territory in November, mostly in this sector, four times more than in September. The Kremlin’s troops are now just around 12 miles from the provincial capital of Zaporizhzhia – the third largest city on the eastern bank of the Dnipro river after Kharkiv and Donetsk – and are moving to surround Hulaipole. Moscow’s ruthless and systematic air war against Ukraine’s energy grid is moving towards its grim goal of plunging whole regions into winter darkness. 

    In Kyiv the political mood is febrile. Last week Volodymyr Zelensky was forced to fire his closest adviser and right-hand man Andriy Yermak after anticorruption police investigating an ugly $100 million embezzlement scheme of defense construction funds raided his home. The war profiteering scandal has already claimed several of Zelensky’s top ministers and friends. This week Ukrainian MPs blocked the start of parliamentary proceedings with chants of “government out!”

    According to Zelensky’s former spokesperson Iullia Mendel, “Ukraine’s parliament is paralyzed … The country’s long-simmering political crisis has now reached its boiling point.” Political analyst Volodymyr Petrov, a longstanding friend and mouthpiece of Zelensky’s, claimed in a television interview on Tuesday that found Zelensky “tired of us … I feel like he’s decided to send us all to hell … he’s tired of explaining to all of us why the fuck we need this war.” He also predicted, without producing evidence, that “by 15 December we will sign a ceasefire and Zelensky will leave.”

    Zelensky himself has been touring European capitals to drum up diplomatic and financial support, exchanging hugs on the steps of Paris’ Elysee Palace with his stalwart supporter – and critics say, fellow lame-duck – French President Emmanuel Macron. Characteristically upbeat, Macron claimed that a new round of European sanctions against shadow fleet tankers that carry some 40 per cent of Russia’s oil will soon bring Russia to its knees. ‘I truly believe that in the coming weeks, the pressure on Russia’s economy and its ability to finance the war will change dramatically,’ said Macron.

    Yet even as he spoke, the European Central Bank effectively killed off Europe’s plan to raise a €140 billion ($163 billion) “reparations loan” backed by frozen Russian assets on the grounds that the loan would violate EU treaties. “This shows the hard limits of ‘donor-onomics’,” says former head of Ukraine’s Central Bank Kirilo Shevchenko. “Europe wants to support Ukraine at scale, but no major institution wants to underwrite the legal and political risks tied to Russia’s immobilized assets.” The proximate result of that decision is that Kyiv is fast running out of options to finance a continued war. 

    Even former Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, a long-time stalwart of talks with Ukraine’s allies for the first three years of the war, admits that “the time has come to acknowledge a deep and painful truth” that “Ukraine is facing a tactical defeat … as soon as we recognize that and face it, we can start rebuilding our future.”

    With military disaster and political crisis stalking Kyiv, an economic squeeze rendering Europe strategically impotent and a US administration in a hurry to do a peace deal at almost any price, it’s small wonder that Putin believes that time and destiny are on his side. Yet at the same time, as Kuleba pointed out, Ukraine remains independent and free, for all Putin’s attempts to crush it. And as long as that remains true what Putin has achieved is not victory but a very bloody annexation of the Donbas, leaving the remaining 80 per cent of Ukraine beyond his command. 

  • Why would Putin sign Trump’s peace deal?

    Why would Putin sign Trump’s peace deal?

    It was summer 2022. Ukraine had just taken back Kyiv, people were returning to the city, and the mood was one of euphoria, triumph and success. I was having dinner with a Ukrainian official in a neon-lit seafood restaurant in the center of the city, the curfew nearing. “If this ends like the West Germany or Korea scenario, that would be the best outcome,” I said to him. He snapped at me: “You want me to tell my relatives in Kherson that they will never live in Ukraine?”

    Three years later, and even that unwelcome outcome is now far from what Kyiv is being offered by the Trump administration. Reports suggest that Ukrainian officials have agreed to a modified version of the initially leaked 28-point plan, stressing that the agreement is contingent on “sensitive issues” being settled directly between President Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump. But a source familiar with the discussions said that Zelensky is not likely to visit Washington this week as he requested time to consult with the European leaders.

    Kyiv has accepted the structure of the deal as it no longer believes it has a better option. Reports of Ukraine’s acceptance came as Moscow warned that any final version must adhere to the “spirit and letter” of the Trump-Putin talks in Alaska suggesting Russia expects its demands to be cemented in the agreement.

    Trump’s push for a peace plan came at the weakest political and military position Ukraine has been in since the start of the war. The political class was distracted by a corruption scandal, public morale strained after months of Russian attacks and the government bracing for another hard winter. It was against that backdrop that Zelensky sent a senior official to tell Washington that “we are ready to work seriously on a plan,” one senior official said.

    In Miami, Zelenskiy’s national security council head, Rustem Umerov, met with President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kushner’s involvement was taken in Kyiv as a sign Trump was personally engaged. It came sometime after Witkoff had met with Russia’s middle-man Kirill Dmitriev in Miami in October, where Dmitriev had discussed a potential plan of agreement with the US side. 

    Parts of the potential negotiation framework, sources say, were already known to the Ukrainians, but not as the 28-point document that later would be leaked to the press. “Some parts of the plan definitely existed. There were many plans coming back and forth,” a Ukrainian official told me. 

    The proposal, criticized in both the US and Europe, originally laid out a settlement built on territorial concessions and strict limits on Ukraine’s security options. It required a full Ukrainian withdrawal from Donbas, the creation of a demilitarized buffer zone effectively left on Russia’s side, and the de facto recognition of Russian control over Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk. The front line in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia would be frozen, Ukraine’s military capped at 600,000 personnel and Kyiv barred from pursuing NATO membership or hosting foreign troops. 

    The US says Ukraine has now agreed to work with a modified version of this plan. One reported change is that the cap on Ukraine’s armed forces has been raised to 800,000, but beyond that, the scope of the revisions remains opaque. A Ukrainian source says that the new plan includes a form of US security guarantees for Ukraine and it may require congressional approval, but did not disclose details. For now, the substance of the updated proposal remains largely unknown.

    The war of attrition has exhausted the Ukrainian Army and society. Today, frontline units complain of having to spend longer periods at the positions while the rest of the country continues to live. Those in the trenches have grown angry at their compatriots who drink in the bars and go about their days. 

    But even those in relative safety in Kyiv are not truly safe. The nightly attacks, massive rocket barrages and drones, keep them awake and in the basements every other day. In the background of peace talks in Geneva, Russia launched one of the largest attacks in weeks against Kyiv and other cities on Monday night.

    As Zelensky’s envoy headed to America last week, a corruption scandal had taken over Ukraine. Everyone from taxi drivers to government sources spoke of the “Mindichgate” in Kyiv that implicated the president’s inner circle and his partner Timur Mindich in a scheme through which he and other high-level officials had enriched themselves by $100 million.

    In Washington, officials appear to have read this moment as an opening to push a deal on Zelensky. A day after Zelensky met with his party, parts of the document had already begun circulating. 

    “You cannot say no to these people,” remarked a Ukrainian official who said that Dmitriev has sold Witkoff, who had been to Russia multiple times but was yet to make a trip to Kyiv, a bright plan for a joint Russian-American future. “If you’re in the middle, you get punches from both sides,” he added.

    If you strip the proposal down to its core, everything turns on security guarantees and that’s the part so far undefined by the plan. “Without security, any kind of deal is useless,” one senior Ukrainian official said. For Russia, any deal that guarantees Ukrainian security in the future with US protection is unacceptable. Three years later, meeting the same official in the same neon-lit restaurant, he explained why: “Trump rationalizes Russia. He thinks they want to make returns, that they’re ready to exit the war if they see it as advantageous,” while “Russia has always viewed the United States as a strategic opponent and is interested in the strategic defeat of the United States.”  

    So far, Ukrainian officials see no real appetite in Washington to offer the kind of security guarantees that would make any deal long-lasting. The reason, they argue, is that Moscow opposes it, and the US seems unwilling to cross that line. When I asked another senior official whether leaving Ukraine without credible guarantees would amount to a strategic win for Russia and a loss for the US, he answered bluntly: “If the US does not care for its power,” he said, “why should I?”

  • Witkoff’s Ukraine peace proposal is unworkable

    Witkoff’s Ukraine peace proposal is unworkable

    With Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s political authority already under grave assault in the wake of a major corruption scandal, he now faces a new challenge – this time from his erstwhile ally, the United States. A high-level US delegation led by army secretary Daniel Driscoll is meeting Zelensky in Kyiv today to present the latest version of a peace plan aimed at ending the war.

    The contents of the plan have not been officially revealed and so far it has not been publicly endorsed by Donald Trump. But two things are already clear. One is that there’s nothing new in it. And two, there’s nothing good in it for Zelensky.

    The latest plan was thrashed out during a series of secret meetings between Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev and his US counterpart Steve Witkoff in Florida earlier this month. The details of the 28-point proposal were leaked yesterday to Axios, apparently by the Russian side, and accidentally confirmed by Witkoff himself who tweeted that the reporter “must have got this from K.” Presumably, Kirill Dmitriev himself.

    The plan differs little from previous proposals already rejected by the Ukrainians and is, in essence, a restatement of the maximalist demands with which Vladimir Putin began the war. One clause demands that Ukraine cede the remainder of the Donbas region that Russia has so far failed to occupy, another calls for Kyiv to cut its armed forces by half and reduce or altogether abandon certain types of weaponry, particularly long-range missiles that could hit targets in Russia. Kyiv would also have to agree to reduce or halt Nato military assistance and ban Nato boots on the ground in any form – thus scuppering any chance of a peacekeeping force envisioned by the Franco-British-led “coalition of the willing.” In terms of domestic policy Ukraine would be required to recognize Russian as an official state language – in fact something supported by Zelensky when he was first voted into power in 2019 as a candidate who could reach a compromise with Moscow. The deal also demands that Kyiv grants formal status to the Russian Orthodox church, which the Zelensky government had targeted as an agent of Kremlin influence.

    The deal is “exactly what Putin has always demanded – de-Nazification, demilitarization and partition,” says a former senior member of the Zelensky administration who is currently in Kyiv. “What did we fight for, if only to arrive back where we were at the beginning… People will ask, who made us spill our blood?”

    The proposals on the table today in Kyiv are, without a doubt, far worse for Ukraine than any of the Minsk accords signed in 2014-15 but rejected by many Ukrainian nationalists. Indeed, when Zelensky came close to doing a deal on the breakaway republics of Donbas in October 2019 and again in 2021-22, an active and aggressive “Resistance to Capitulation Movement” linked to the Security Service of Ukraine threatened Zelensky with a “veterans’ Maidan” if he “capitulated” to Russia.

    The terms are also harsher than the draft peace deal discussed in Istanbul in March and April 2022 but abandoned by Ukraine as being too punitive.

    Even in the extremely unlikely event that Zelensky were forced into signing away the Ukrainian-held part of the Donbas, the moment he did so Ukraine would become instantly ungovernable. Frontline Ukrainian units who have fought for years to hold the so-called “fortress belt” of cities from Sloviansk to Kramatorsk would likely refuse orders to withdraw. “This [deal] demands that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians be forcibly evacuated from their homes or handed into Russian captivity,” says the Ukrainian official, who spent two years as a member of Zelensky’s cabinet. “There is no way our forces would abandon these people… and government that signed such a deal would be treated as traitors and overthrown.”

    The demand for a pull-back in Donbas makes the Witkoff-Dmitriyev plan, as it stands, politically and militarily impossible to implement. Which raises crucial questions: is Putin deliberately insisting on an unworkable deal because he does not want peace? Or are some parts of his demands, for instance the remainder of Donbas, a negotiating position he is prepared to abandon?

    Another question is why the US is pushing for this deal in the full knowledge that neither Zelensky nor any other Ukrainian president could ever agree to it. Acquiescing to the partition along the line of control is already politically painful and perilous enough – but demanding a voluntary withdrawal from lands successfully defended by the blood of thousands of young Ukrainians is a deal-breaker. It’s possible that Trump wants to wash his hands of the whole Ukrainian mess and walk away, blaming Zelensky’s supposed intransigence. It’s also possible this is just another zig-zag in Trump’s diplomatic slalom over Ukraine, sliding back and forth between threats to Zelensky and threats to Putin. It’s not even clear whether Trump or Secretary of State Marco Rubio even fully endorse the latest plan, with their respective spokesmen remaining resolutely tight lipped.

    One thing is clear – this is not a proposal that Zelensky can sign. But with the front lines slowly advancing westward, his own political credibility crumbling under allegations of outrageous war profiteering against his closest allies, money running out, and Russian assaults on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure increasing in accuracy and impact, Zelensky is also running out of options.