Suchergebnisse

In the New Yorker this week, journalist Keith Gessen wrote a piece disentangling what he called "the painful and knotty arguments" over whether and when Washington should pursue negotiations in Ukraine.


He uses the example of Samuel Charap, a researcher at the RAND corporation — who has made the case for the United States to seek an endgame to the war — to explore the calls from a small group of experts in Washington, who, in Gessen's formulation "argue that there might be a way to end the war sooner rather than later by freezing the conflict in place, and working to secure and rebuild the large part of Ukraine that is not under Russian occupation"


The piece answers what the author sees as the four key questions about when and whether diplomacy can be successful, analyzing the debates over nature of negotiations, the military outlook for the foreseeable future, Vladimir Putin's ultimate intentions, and, as Gessen put it on Twitter, if there is "any acceptable solution, even a temporary one, that leaves parts of Ukraine occupied by Russian forces?"


On the first question, Charap offered his thoughts on what diplomacy looks like, and what it hopes to achieve. "Diplomacy is not the opposite of coercion," he told the New Yorker. "It's a tool for achieving the same objectives as you would using coercive means. Many negotiations to end wars have taken place at the same time as the war's most fierce fighting."


Charles Kupchan, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has also argued that Washington needs a plan to get to the negotiating table, is quoted in Gessen's piece describing what the initial stages of such diplomacy at the conclusion of the current counteroffensive could look like.


"I wouldn't say, 'You [referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] do this or we're going to turn off the spigot.' But you sit down and you have a searching conversation about where the war is going and what's in the best interest of Ukraine, and you see what comes out of that discussion."


On Thursday, the New York Times released a podcast titled "Is it Time to Negotiate with Putin?," which seeks to answer similar questions, and comes to the conclusion that the war will not end with a decisive victory for either side.


"We've sort of moved well out of the kind of the fairy tale stage of this conflict," said New York Times opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen, who added that it was time for a new frame for discussions. She also noted that there were other countries with an interest in this war, and their views may contrast with those in Washington and Kyiv. "You have a lot of different power centers, or emerging or aspiring power centers in the world seeing this conflict through lots of different lenses, you know, and jockeying for their own interests," she said. "And this kind of no negotiation at all position that the Ukrainians have is, I think, increasingly running up against this multiplicity of interests that are pressing on lots of different pressure points around the globe."


Part of what seems to be animating these assessments is the realization that Kyiv's counteroffensive will not end in an overwhelming win, and that, as a result, the alternative is a protracted war in Ukraine.


In mid-August, Politico's NatSec daily newsletter reported that a growing number of U.S. officials are wondering whether Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was right when he called for the beginning of negotiations with Russia last November, when Ukraine had clear momentum on the battlefield.


"Most people now recognize that Plan A isn't working. But that doesn't mean they're prepared to discuss Plan B," Charap says in the New Yorker story. For him, what that Plan B should be is clear: "It would be a diplomatic strategy."


In other diplomatic news related to the war in Ukraine:


—For the second time since Russia left the Black Sea grain deal in July, a ship safely left Ukraine through a temporary humanitarian corridor. The ship, which departed from the port of Odessa last weekend, was carrying steel bound for Africa. Meanwhile, the Turkish and Russian foreign ministers met on Thursday to discuss possibilities for reviving the deal, but the talks ended without any meaningful progress according to the New York Times.


The meeting was reportedly a preparatory meeting for a future summit between the two countries' leaders, though a date has not yet been set. The Times says that the discussion was centered around "a plan that [Moscow] casts as an alternative to the deal, one that appears aimed at helping its own exports. (...) In its proposal, Russia says it envisions sending one million tons of grain to Turkey — at a price subsidized by Qatar — that would then be transported to countries that need it."


—The Wall Street Journal reports that "The Biden administration and its European allies are laying plans for long-term military assistance to Ukraine to ensure Russia won't be able to win on the battlefield and persuade the Kremlin that Western support for Kyiv won't waver." According to the report, Western officials are seeking ways to make pledges for Ukraine's defense more permanent in case Donald Trump or another candidate who is skeptical of sending more aid is elected president of the United States in 2024.


—The Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven wrote in the Guardian this week about Russian public opinion over the war in Ukraine and the prospect of future negotiations. "From conversations I've had, it appears that a large majority of elite and ordinary Russians would accept a ceasefire along the present battle lines and would not mount any challenge if Putin proposed or agreed to such a ceasefire and presented it as a sufficient Russian victory," Lieven writes. "The general elite aversion to pursuing total victory in Ukraine is however not the same thing as a willingness to accept Russian defeat – which is all that the Ukrainian and US governments are presently offering. Nobody with whom I have spoken within the Moscow elite, and very few indeed in the wider population, has said that Russia should surrender Crimea and the eastern Donbas."


U.S. State Department news:


The State Department did not hold its regular press briefing this week.

Economic sanctions —an increasingly popular tool for policymakers in Washington — can hinder peacemaking efforts, according to a report published on Monday by the International Crisis Group.


The key questions of when to impose sanctions, how to use them as leverage, and when to lift them have never been as salient, after the U.S. and the West imposed the harshest global embargoes on Russia in history after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022 — yet an end to the war, much less a diplomatic course, is as elusive as ever.


A review of U.S. sanctions policy, released by the Treasury Department in October 2021, showed that over the last two decades, the use of sanctions by Washington had increased by 933 percent. As the Crisis Group report notes, the rationale for implementing these sanctions typically includes cutting off adversaries' resources, punishing individuals or governments for human rights abuses, or trying to push warring parties toward negotiations.


Yet, the report finds, "sanctions sometimes hinder conflict resolution efforts. They can inhibit peace processes and post-conflict recovery, constrain peace organisations, undercut negotiations and entrench divisions between conflict parties."


Criticism of Washington's use of sanctions is nothing new. But past critiques have often focused on the humanitarian consequences of this kind of economic warfare and its unsatisfactory track record when it comes to altering the behavior of targeted individuals or governments.


The report, which adds to the growing critique, is based on three years worth of interviews with officials, foreign diplomats, members of civil society, conflict parties, and individuals in countries affected by sanctions, like Afghanistan, Colombia, Syria and elsewhere.


"While sanctions have found favour as a tool that allows the U.S. government to pursue policy objectives in conflict settings without the blood and treasure required for military campaigns, these tools are not cost-free," the report reads. "Some of the downsides manifest themselves as impediments to peacemaking priorities, including Washington's own."


The unclear parameters when sanctions are imposed, and the uncertainty over the conditions under which they will be lifted or eased can impair Washington's leverage in conflict resolution. "The U.S. does not always make clear what parties can do that will lead to sanctions relief. In some cases, Washington has not laid out any such steps or it has outlined steps that are unrealistic," writes the Crisis Group. The report continues:



"In others, the U.S. was never willing to lift sanctions in the first place. Elsewhere, Washington's communication on sanctions has been vague, leaving targets in the dark about what might lead to reversal. (...) Without clarity on why they were sanctioned and what they can do to be delisted, targets have little incentive to make concessions in exchange for relief. For U.S. officials, negotiating without the ability to lift sanctions is, according to one diplomat, like 'playing poker with someone else's money.'"



Another problem is that due to bureaucratic inertia, fear of being labeled "weak," or other considerations, Washington is slow to lift or ease sanctions. In Colombia, for example, Crisis Group found, "[s]ome former combatants who had laid down their weapons were so disillusioned by the daily hurdles they faced in integrating into civilian life that, in the words of a former FARC commander, they 'decided to go to war again.'" This happened because, even after signing a peace deal with Colombian authorities, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were still subject to U.S. sanctions, making it difficult for former rebels to integrate back into Colombian society.


The most ambitious of Washington's current sanction projects are those currently placed on Russia, which the Biden administration has consistently referred to as "unprecedented." The report points out that these are a large part of why, despite early signs that his administration was aware of the shortcomings of sanctions, "in his second year in office, President Biden designated nearly 2,500 new groups and individuals, almost double the listings the Trump administration had made at the peak in 2018 (1,474)."


The goal of these sanctions was to punish the Putin government in Moscow for its invasion and to make it rethink its its aggressive military goals in Ukraine by starving it of money and resources. Washington and the West have also gone after oligarchs in hopes of threatening Putin's backdoor access to funds and elite support. It hasn't exactly worked out that way, a clear example of what Crisis Group warns about in its report today, says QI's Director of Strategy George Beebe.


"The Biden administration has hoped that sanctions would force Putin to recognize that the costs of invading Ukraine outweigh the benefits," Beebe says.


"But this hope was based on the mistaken belief that Putin saw the invasion as an ambition rather than as something vital to protecting Russia from NATO encirclement. Sanctions rarely dissuade states from defending what they regard as their vital interests regardless of the costs," he added. "They could in principle be useful as leverage in negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, but Washington has given the Russians little reason to believe it would lift or ease sanctions even if Putin were to end the invasion tomorrow."

Update 8/23, 5:40 p.m. ET: Russia's Federal Air Transport Agency confirmed that Yevgeny Prigozhin was on board the plane that crashed in Russia on Wednesday, adding that "all on board were killed."





Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian private militia group known as the Wagner Group, was reportedly killed in a plane that crashed in Russia on Wednesday. Russia's emergency ministry said that all 10 people on the aircraft died, including seven passengers and three pilots, though it did not immediately confirm whether Prigozhin had been on board.


Russian officials have said that a man with Prigozhin's name was among the passengers on the flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg. NBC News' Richard Engel noted on Twitter that a Wagner-affiliated Telegram group claimed that a second plane attributed to Prigozhin's fleet landed safely at Ostafyevo Airport.


According to the Financial Times, "The aircraft, an Embraer Legacy, was the same that Prigozhin had regularly used to travel around Russia and as far away as Africa, according to flight tracking site Flightradar24."


Wagner-affiliated Telegram accounts have claimed that the plane was shot down by Russian air defenses.


"We have seen the reports. If confirmed, no one should be surprised," wrote Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, on Twitter.


The Wagner group chief has been in the headlines this year for his involvement in the war in Ukraine and his disputes with leadership in Russia, which culminated in his group's aborted "march on Moscow" earlier this summer.


As The Quincy Institute's George Beebe and Anatol Lieven noted in May, Wagner had "gained new prestige after taking the lead in the bloody and long-drawn-out, but ultimately successful battle for the town of Bakhmut." The leader of the mercenary group, however, quickly soured on leadership in Moscow.


"Prigozhin has long been critical of Russia's military leadership, complaining publicly about its incompetence and corruption, and contrasting its purported passivity and incompetence to what he portrays as Wagner's patriotism and bravery in defending the motherland's interests in Ukraine, Syria, and beyond," Beebe and Lieven wrote, about month before the short-lived mutiny.


"But his recent interview on the internet channel Telegram marks a drastic escalation and extension of his long-standing attacks (...) He is now attacking the entire conduct of the war in Ukraine and declaring its results to date to have been a disastrous failure."


On today's events, Lieven said there will be "a very widespread assumption that he was assassinated, on the orders either of President Putin himself, or of Prigozhin's long-standing enemies within the Russian military, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov." Lieven adds:



We will probably never know for sure the truth behind the crash of Prigozhin's plane, but the assumption of an assassination will be strengthened by the fact that on the same day, it has been announced that air force chief General Sergei Surovikin has been fired. Surovikin was close to Prigozhin, and though he appeared in public during the Wagner mutiny to appeal to the Russian military to remain loyal to the state, ever since then he has been kept out of public view and — it has been assumed — in detention.






Prigozhin had largely left the public eye after ending his revolt attempt and striking a deal with Putin, in which he agreed to relocate his fighters to Belarus. The mercenary head has reportedly been spotted in Belarus and Russia since then, but he apparently re-emerged on video for the first time on Monday, suggesting he was in Africa, as part of an effort to "Wagner in recent years has deployed thousands of its troops in at least five different countries across the continent. The mercenary group has been accused of being involved in massacres and other human rights abuses in Mali and elsewhere.


The Russian media outlet Sirena pointed out that Prigozhin was falsely reported to have been among the dead in an October 2019 plane crash in Congo before eventually resurfacing.