By Eric S. Edleman & Franklin C. Miller
Friday, March 07, 2025
During the February 28 meltdown in the Oval Office among
President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump—claiming that he alone can bring peace to Ukraine,
thereby ending the largest war in Europe since World War II—declared, “I think
President Putin wants peace.” Earlier, when asked whether he trusts that Russia
wants peace, Trump, seemingly based on publicly undisclosed conversations with
the Russian dictator, said, “I do.”
Zelensky, in the most polite and respectful way possible
under the circumstances, had been trying to raise a fundamental issue about the
Trump administration’s approach to reaching an agreement: Putin is
fundamentally untrustworthy. His track record, both with regard to the war in
Ukraine and more broadly with respect to previous agreements made with the
United States, is consistent—he lies and cheats. And that is why Zelensky and
Ukraine require substantive security guarantees that go beyond mere pieces of
paper.
Putin’s previous broken pledges on Ukraine.
The premise that Ukraine is the party posing an
inconvenient obstacle to peace because it insists that any agreement must be
backed up by stronger guarantees ignores the history of Russia’s failure to
respect the unbacked guarantees it had already agreed to.
In September 2014—in the wake of Russia’s illegal seizure
of Crimea, its creation of irregular forces to take portions of the Ukrainian
regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and finally the insertion of regular Russian
forces into those territories—the Ukrainian government, the Russian government,
and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) negotiated
the Minsk Protocol and Accompanying Memorandum. Minsk I, as it came to be
known, called for a ceasefire and prisoner exchanges. The fighting continued,
however, with continued gains by both the Russian irregular and regular forces,
and by January 2015 the agreement collapsed. Seeking to restore the peace, a
Franco-German-led initiative resulted in a new agreement, dubbed Minsk II and
again signed by representatives of the OSCE, Ukraine, and Russia, creating a
second ceasefire.
Russian forces proceeded to violate that agreement and,
after taking additional territory, halted—leaving an uneasy truce in place. Finally,
in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Minsk II no
longer existed and then proceeded to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
It was this sorry history to which Zelensky was trying to
draw Trump’s and Vance’s attention during the Oval Office debacle—and in fact
he had already provided U.S. negotiator Keith Kellogg with a list of some 25
Russian ceasefire violations since the 2014 destabilization of Ukraine. This
tortured history, forgotten by most in the West, explains the Ukrainian
position that any agreement must be backed by meaningful security guarantees
for Ukraine.
This is even more the case since Putin’s violations of
the Minsk agreements built upon his disregard of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum,
in which security assurances were provided by the U.S., U.K., France, and
Russia when Ukraine gave up any claim to the nuclear weapons left on its soil
after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The broader picture of Putin’s duplicity.
The United States has its own long historical record of
negotiations with Russia, which can be summed up by Ambassador Charles “Chip”
Bohlen’s famous axiom that the fundamental Russian negotiating stance is,
“What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable.” The late Secretary of State
George P. Shultz (for whom one of the authors worked as a junior diplomat)
amended Bohlen’s adage by declaring that “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours
is mine too.”
The Russian record of adherence to accords negotiated
during or after the Cold War makes for depressing reading and underscores the
necessity of vigilance and prudence when it comes to any effort to negotiate
not just an end to the war in Ukraine but to any broader U.S.-Russian arms
control or geopolitical agreements.
During the Cold War, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty,
along with the SALT I agreement, was regarded as the cornerstone of strategic
stability, but the USSR was in violation of the treaty for years. Its
construction of the Krasnoyarsk
Radar contravened both the letter and spirit of the treaty because it was
built not on the periphery of the country (for defensive purposes, allowable
under the treaty) but in the center (for battle management). The Russians for
years denied that the radar was a treaty violation before finally giving up in
1989 and dismantling it.
Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has violated or disregarded
nine separate arms control agreements and treaties he either inherited or
signed, including:
·
The Helsinki Final Act
of 1975, also known as the Helsinki Accords, wherein signatories pledged
not to use military force to change borders in Europe
·
The aforementioned Budapest
Memorandum of 1994
·
The Istanbul Document
of 1999 (in which Russia pledged to withdraw its military forces from
Georgia and Transnistria in Moldova)
·
The Presidential
Nuclear Initiatives of 1991 and 1992 (in which Russia pledged to withdraw
from active service various naval tactical nuclear weapons and to eliminate all
ground-launched tactical nuclear weapons)
·
The 1992 Open Skies Treaty
(in which Russia blocked U.S. access to parts of Russia clearly provided for
under the treaty and also deviated from agreed flight paths over the U.S. that
were mandated by the treaty)
·
The 1999 Vienna
Document (Russia falsified and concealed military exercise information
which it had agreed to provide)
·
The 1987 Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) Agreement (which Russia violated by covertly
developing and then deploying a missile
which exceeded the permissible range limits established by the treaty
·
The 1997
Chemical Weapons Convention banning retention of chemical warfare agents,
and
·
The 2011 New START
Treaty (Russia has withdrawn from participation in treaty-mandated working
groups and inspections)
Additionally, Russia is almost
certainly violating the 1972
Biological Weapons Convention by maintaining an active bioweapons
capability.
Russia also routinely violates the 1972 Incidents at Sea
Agreement and the 1989 Dangerous Military Activities Agreement, including
buzzing the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea and unsafe approaches to U.S.
aircraft operating in the Black Sea. Recent revelations of intelligence
suggesting that Russia might be prepared to violate the Outer Space Treaty by
putting a nuclear weapon into orbit are yet another indication of Moscow’s
contempt for solemn international obligations.
Given this deliberate and well-documented track record,
the bar for holding Moscow accountable for its actions under any agreement it
might sign regarding Ukraine’s future, much less the kinds of nuclear arms
control agreements in which President Trump has also shown
an interest, should be exceedingly high. Indeed, the first Trump
administration demonstrated it would check Russian bad behavior when it removed
any constraint that the INF Treaty and Open Skies Treaty imposed on the U.S.
after Putin had gutted those pacts. The second Trump administration would do
well to review the policies it pursued during the first term in office when it
understood those dangers.
Would Putin tolerate a Western-oriented, independent
Ukraine?
Putin may well seek to convince Trump he “wants peace.”
The question is, what sort of peace does he seek? Some Americans are convinced
he would accept an independent, democratic Ukrainian state. But that
hope-inspired approach surely misreads Putin’s willingness to countenance an
end to the conflict on any terms other than capitulation.
As former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Richard
Shirreff recently told
the BBC’s Ukrainecast, “What Russia is about is removing Ukraine from
the map as a sovereign state. … Because that’s deep in the Russian DNA. And I
think any American negotiator who doesn’t understand that and thinks there can
be a durable, lasting solution with a sovereign Ukraine, and that Russia will
accept that, is deluding themselves.” Russian official statements since last
month’s talks in Saudi Arabia have validated Shirreff’s judgments. Putin’s
representatives have and continue to indicate they will not make any
concessions that allow the continued existence of an independent Ukraine tied
to the West and have stressed that any settlement must resolve the alleged
“root causes” of the conflict (code for preventing a sovereign Ukraine from
choosing its own geopolitical orientation). They specifically demanded an
explicit reversal of the 2008 NATO
Bucharest Summit Declaration welcoming Georgia and Ukraine’s aspirations to
join the alliance at some future date. As a result, short of a total surrender
to Putin’s position—something no American president or Ukrainian president or
NATO ally should accept—the prospects for a lasting, negotiated peace, are
quite remote, as President Zelensky recently noted.
If Moscow really does want peace, as Trump claims, it
faces two substantial challenges—to actually negotiate in good faith and to
abide by what is eventually agreed to. Russia’s lamentable history of
noncompliance shows that either one, let alone both, might be impossible for
Vladimir Putin.
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