KYIV – The U.S. saw more “openness” from the Russian side, while Moscow said it was “quite doable” to deploy a United Nations peacekeeping mission to Ukraine based on America’s proposals, following talks on January 27 between the designated envoys of each country on the Donbas war.
It was the fourth meeting since last July between Ambassador Kurt Volker and his Russian counterpart, Vladislav Surkov, who have similar mandates to find a lasting peace in the “hot war” as described by the veteran American diplomat.
After their most recent meeting in Dubai, Ambassador Volker said he had a “very detailed” and “thorough” discussion with his interlocutor on an international peacekeeping force that would have “control over the territory [in the war zone of Donbas] and be able to create the conditions for implementing” a previously brokered failed truce that stems from February 2015.
The American envoy related the outcome of talks during a dial-in briefing with journalists on January 29 in which The Ukrainian Weekly participated upon his return. The briefing came after his visits to Kyiv and prior to that Brussels, where he spoke with officials from the European Union and NATO.
Washington’s insistence has been for U.N. peacekeepers to have full access to the war zone in easternmost Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, including Kyiv’s shared international border with Russia, and not just the frontline as Moscow has proposed.
For his part, Mr. Surkov said that there is a “step-by-step [plan for a deploying]… a mission along with implementation of the Minsk agreement’s political terms,” Russia’s state-run news agency TASS reported on January 27.
The reference was to the latest of two failed truces that Germany and France brokered in the Belarusian capital together with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Minsk agreement stipulates that both sides stop fighting and withdraw military personnel and hardware from the frontline. Conditions also call for Kyiv to regain control of its border with Russia, that amnesty be given to people who fought against Kyiv forces, and that the region be given special status with regard to language and economic ties with Russia. In addition, local elections should be held in the areas not currently controlled by the Ukrainian government.
“It is a balanced approach, on which we have insisted,” Mr. Surkov told TASS of his interlocutor’s proposals. “We shall study it closely and will give a response in due course. After that, we shall invite Kurt [Volker] and his colleagues to a new [fifth] meeting.”
The American envoy repeated that his goal is simple: “We seek the restoration of sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine and the safety and security of all Ukrainian citizens, regardless of ethnicity, nationality or religion.”
So far, more than 10,300 people have been killed and up to 2 million displaced since Moscow-led forces invaded Ukraine starting in February 2014. Ukraine’s territory of Crimea was illegally annexed in March of that year, while a separate incursion led to 35 percent of the Donbas being occupied by Russian-commanded and -controlled forces in April 2014.
U.S. releases “Kremlin Report”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury Department exposed 210 Russian officials and billionaires to potential sanctions early on January 30 based on the Combating America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) that Congress passed six months earlier in a veto-proof vote.
The list, which is being called the “Kremlin Report,” came less than two months before Mr. Putin will most likely be elected to another six-year term as president of Russia on March 18.
The legislation was drafted to punish individuals closely tied to the Russian leader for his war mongering in Ukraine and alleged sanctioning of interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
“The obvious aim was to identify those who had made their fortune on illicit contacts with the Kremlin,” wrote Swedish economist Anders Aslund on January 30 for the Atlantic Council, where he is a senior fellow.
However, six months of work ended in a fiasco when “somebody high up” simply “threw out the experts’ work and instead wrote down the names of the top officials in the Russian presidential administration and government plus the 96 Russian billionaires on the Forbes list,” he wrote. “In doing so, this senior official ridiculed the government experts who had prepared another report, rendering CAATSA ineffective and mocking U.S. sanctions on Russia overall.”
U.S. President Donald Trump subsequently notified Congress that he won’t “impose new sanctions on Russia at this time,” reported Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
RFE/RL also reported: “However, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on January 30 that ‘in the near future, you’ll see additional sanctions.’ He added that such sanctions could come ‘in the next several months, maybe a month.’”
Experts consulted by the Treasury Department argued that the list should include people genuinely close to Mr. Putin and those who have enriched themselves “through corrupt commercial operations with the Putin regime.”
Using Forbes’ other two lists on Russia would have better fulfilled the purpose of CAATSA, wrote exiled Russian dissident Leonid Bershidsky for Bloomberg View on January 30.
“Following these criteria would have meant using… rankings of the wealthiest officials and legislators and ‘government contract kings.’ These provide a far more accurate picture of who has benefited from the regime,” he commented.
Reacting to the State Department announcement that it will not impose additional sanctions because existing legislation is a “deterrent,” the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, the largest advocacy group for Ukrainian Americans, voiced disappointment in a January 30 statement on its Facebook page.
“When President Trump signed CAATSA into law [in August], his signing statement signaled that he was not necessarily bound by the letter of the law,” the statement read.
The UCCA furthermore stated that the latest measures weren’t a “deterrent (to) the Kremlin’s most-recent illegal actions and subversive methods.”
The statement continued: “Additional sanctions, as authorized initially in 2014, and all other means of punishment against Putin’s criminal regime must be aggressively implemented, before a contentious 2018 election season renders our government paralyzed again.”
Still, Russia voiced aggravation about the potential sanctions list.
Mr. Putin called the move “an unfriendly act,” while signaling, “I won’t hide it: we were waiting for this report.”
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said the significance of the potential sanctions list was “zero.”
New evidence of Russia’s involvement
More evidence of direct Russian involvement in the Donbas war was added to the already large body of proof when Reuters reported on January 29 that a Russian army general had commanded forces in the Donbas for about a year starting in autumn 2015.
The news agency said that Valery Asapov had died in Syria 2017 while on active duty after his military stint as the leader of the 1st Army Corps of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic.” In the Donbas, he used a false identity and was known under the code name of Tuman, or fog in the Ukrainian and Russian languages.
Ukrainian authorities had sanctioned the now deceased Mr. Asapov in 2016 as a war criminal.
Close encounter over Black Sea
American and Russian military aircraft came dangerously close, within five feet of each other, in international airspace over the Black Sea on January 29, according to the U.S. Navy.
A Russian SU-27 fighter jet’s actions were “determined to be unsafe” when it closed within five feet of a U.S. EP-3 Aries aircraft during an interception maneuver through the American plane’s flight path, causing it to “fly through the SU-27’s jet wash.”
The intercept lasted two hours and 40 minutes, the U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa Public Affairs’ office stated in a news release.