KYIV – Meeting at a summit in Paris on October 2, Russia and Ukraine reached verbal agreements towards resolving the war in the Donbas, including withdrawing armaments from the conflict line beginning on October 4 and canceling illegal elections planned in the next few weeks, with plans to hold elections in the occupied territories next year.
The meeting also succeeded in extending the ceasefire that has been in effect since September 1 with few injuries and casualties. It set a basic framework for fulfilling the Minsk accords – though without any revealed dates – that is based on granting immunity and amnesty to the Russian-backed terrorists and allowing them to run in elections under a special law to be drafted.
Ongoing disagreements were apparent after the talks. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his advisors vowed not to allow the elections to occur until Russian soldiers leave Ukraine and Ukrainian control of the border is restored. Yet French President François Hollande said elections should occur before these conditions were met, with monitoring performed exclusively by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
As with the approval of the Donbas special status a month earlier, assessments from Ukraine observers ranged from warnings of catastrophe to confidence that the latest agreements will work towards collapsing the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
What was widely apparent, however, is that the likely domestic strife over the election conditions could play directly into Mr. Putin’s hands in undermining Ukrainian statehood.
“Destabilizing Ukraine with an open war is shifting to the back burner,” Vitaly Portnikov, a veteran Kyiv political observer, posted on his Facebook page. “The main task of the Kremlin will become the internal destabilization of our country, including using the resolution of the Donbas conflict. How the Kremlin handles this task and whether Ukrainian society is able to withstand Putin’s new tactics will become apparent in the next weeks.”
The Normandy format summit in Paris – involving German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Messrs. Poroshenko, Putin and Hollande – came on the heels of a United Nations meeting, the opening of the 70th session of the U.N. General Assembly, where much political grandstanding and posturing was performed but little was resolved. Mr. Putin succeeded in shifting the world’s attention away from Ukraine towards Syria, where he had launched a military attack soon afterwards.
The Paris summit was strictly focused on Ukraine. News reports described both the Russian and Ukrainian presidents walking away from the meeting dissatisfied with its results, after shaking hands and meeting around a common table with their French and German counterparts for about four hours.
Mr. Putin also had a private meeting with Mr. Hollande beforehand, during which they reportedly discussed the situation in Syria.
Although Mr. Poroshenko considered a request for a bilateral meeting submitted by Mr. Putin, as reported by the Presidential Administration of Ukraine, the warring leaders didn’t meet. Neither of them spoke publicly afterwards, leaving that task to Mr. Hollande.
“We need to recognize that Merkel and Hollande – each in their own way – are handling their responsibilities as EU leaders and were able to convince Putin to change his agenda from the Russian one to the Western one,” Mr. Portnikov wrote on his Facebook page on October 3. “That’s why it was they who spoke to journalists yesterday while he boiled with anger, like an old tea kettle, and didn’t say a word before or after the summit.”
As the leaders took to the negotiating table, the threat loomed of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics DPR and LPR) holding local elections, under their own conditions, on October 18 and November 1, respectively.
The European leaders had repeated statements in the preceding weeks that these illegal elections would have buried the Minsk accords in the annals of history.
Yet signs of hope emerged on September 29 when the Trilateral Contact Group – involving representatives of Ukraine, the DPR/LPR and the OSCE – agreed to the removal of armaments of calibers less than 100 millimeters from within 15 kilometers (about nine miles) of the conflict line.
Besides agreeing to influence the DPR/LPR leaders to cancel the elections (as the Russian side has denied direct control over them), Mr. Putin also agreed to advise them to hold new elections based on a specially tailored Ukrainian law, which the Donetsk and Luhansk militants would participate in drafting.
“It’s necessary to understand that a large portion of Ukrainian society doesn’t have any desire to raise the issue of negotiations with the separatists,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, the head of the Penta Center for Applied Political Research in Kyiv. “That hasn’t been realized by Merkel and Hollande. The leaders of Germany and France haven’t always had valid assessments of the situation.”
The elections would then occur no less than 90 days after the legislation’s approval, during which the candidates would have political immunity. They would gain amnesty after the elections. Mr. Putin also reaffirmed Russian-backed forces’ plans to withdraw all arms from the conflict line.
The conditions won by Mr. Putin, which work to the advantage of the Russian-backed terrorists, consist of those announced by Mr. Hollande: the Ukrainian Parliament is to approve constitutional amendments and the Donbas terrorists will hold elections based on the special election law with monitoring conducted by the OSCE, after which Russian soldiers would be removed and Ukraine’s control of its border would be renewed.
Mr. Hollande mentioned the need to exchange all hostages as a step before the elections and amnesty being made available to all terrorists.
Yuriy Lutsenko, a close advisor to President Poroshenko, said on October 6 that the Ukrainian government will oppose granting amnesty to those who engaged in torture and murder, naming the most prominent terrorists (Arseny “Motorola” Pavlov, Mikhail “Givi” Tolstykh, Aleksandr Zakharchenko) but not offering any specifics.
It was these conditions that prompted pessimistic Ukraine observers to declare that Ms. Merkel and Mr. Hollande had essentially placed the burden of resolving the war on the Ukrainian government and that this would occur at the expense of the nation’s interests.
Yuriy Romanenko, Kyiv political expert and editor of the hvylya.net news site, said civil war could break out if the Paris agreements are fulfilled. Serhiy Rudenko, the chief editor of espresso.tv and a political commentator, described the new elections planned for February 21 – which would legitimize the Russian-backed terrorists – as “spitting on the memory of those who perished on the Euro-Maidan.”
Implementing the Paris agreements will lead to mass protests, pre-term parliamentary elections and possibly presidential elections in 2016, said Mykhailo Basarab, a Kyiv political consultant. “It’s scary to think of what more can happen,” he said, pointing out that Mr. Poroshenko would be violating numerous promises if the Paris agreements are fulfilled.
The president had called for constitutional amendments only after control of the border is restored, yet the Paris agreements call for this in reverse order. He had also called for approving the amendments after the elections, yet the agreements call for the reverse. Mr. Poroshenko also insisted that the Minsk accords be fulfilled this year, yet it became apparent after the Paris meeting that this is highly unlikely.
Speaking on October 6, Mr. Lutsenko gave the impression that the Presidential Administration plans to contest many points of the Paris agreements post factum. Even before the summit, he said the Verkhovna Rada wouldn’t support elections under conditions of occupation. They might not occur until April of next year, he added.
“Poroshenko forewarned his partners in the negotiations that he can’t guarantee an affirmative position from Parliament regarding the proposed changes,” said Oleksandr Kochetkov, a Kyiv political expert, adding that the information came from the foreign affairs minister and was repeated by Mr. Lutsenko. “The Verkhovna Rada won’t consent to it, so to speak. So we have a field to maneuver on.”
Mr. Lutsenko also said the special election law must guarantee access to Ukrainian mass media on these territories, the participation of Ukrainian political parties, the ability of refugees to vote and the formation of election commissions overseen by the Central Election Commission. It’s unclear whether the DPR and LPR would agree to these terms.
Messrs. Poroshenko and Lutsenko could also be engaging in a strategy that has been employed throughout the Minsk Accords process: withholding information from the public or blatantly distorting information when it’s likely to draw criticism or opposition, Mr. Basarab said.
A glaring example was the president’s October 4 interview with television reporters, in which he claimed that all the steps agreed to on October 2 – amending the Constitution, holding elections, renewing control of the border – would occur by the year’s end, when it was already apparent that would be impossible.
“The president knows a lot more than he’s revealing today,” Mr. Basarab said, adding that he knows intense work is already under way in drafting the special elections law for the Donbas, which will be signed in Minsk. “The Ukrainian government took upon itself such obligations that revealing them to an unprepared society could be very dangerous. He prefers a strategy of revealing concessions in doses to the public.”
Mr. Basarab said he believes Mr. Poroshenko was pressured in Paris to accept the conditions of the plan, which were drafted by French diplomat Pierre Morel. On September 20, Mr. Poroshenko dismissed the Morel plan as just “his personal opinion,” insisting there was no pressure on him from the Europeans.
In the same television interview, Mr. Poroshenko continued to insist there is no Morel plan in place, even though the conditions he agreed to verbally in Paris are identical.
“Understanding their fragile standing and Ukraine’s fragile condition, Poroshenko and his team are trying to offer some explanation to the public,” Mr. Basarab said. “But they don’t have a consistent interpretation of what happened in Paris. The president is acting on a plan that he hasn’t developed independently.”
Those who are optimistic about the negotiations process, led by Mr. Portnikov and Kyiv political veteran Sergiy Taran, said they expect ongoing haggling – throughout 2016 – over the conditions of the elections and implementing other Minsk accords provisions. And it’s quite possible that Russia will stall.
But time is on the side of Ukraine as the current Western sanctions continue to chip away at the Russian economy, Mr. Portnikov said.
In this sense, the Ukrainian government can “endlessly debate” the election and amnesty conditions, and hold votes and re-votes in Parliament on the various issues.
“Coalitions can collapse and be recreated, the president’s poll ratings can drop while the popularity of politicians calling for relinquishing the Donbas and concessions from the West can strengthen,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
“Afterwards there can be the latest meeting of the Normandy format in Paris or Berlin, at which the Russian side will reproach the Ukrainians for failing to engage in a real dialogue with ‘the representatives of Donbas,’ which will lead to the latest postponement of elections. And all this time, sanctions against Russia will be acting,” he commented.
To dispel notions the Europeans had capitulated on Ukraine, Presidential Administration Deputy Head Kostiantyn Yeliseyev made note of numerous Russian demands that were rejected by the Europeans, such as immediate amnesty for all the terrorists and amnesty for all candidates in local elections.
The Russians called for the terrorists to participate in drafting the special status constitutional amendments, which hasn’t happened, he said on October 5. They also called for delaying the launch of the European Union Free Trade Area beyond January 1, which wasn’t allowed, he said.
Yet Mr. Yeliseyev engaged in his own distortions, claiming the Ukrainian government opposes drafting a Donbas special election law, when Mr. Lutsenko said the next day that this is needed.
The rest of Mr. Yeliseyev’s arguments – and the arguments of optimists like Mr. Portnikov – haven’t dispelled the widely held notion that what motivated the Europeans most in Paris was to sweep the Donbas mess under the rug, since they had bigger problems to deal with, both domestically and abroad.
Mr. Poroshenko “underestimated the determination of France and Germany to get the Ukrainian matter out of the way in the most efficient manner possible,” Leonid Bershidsky, a columnist for the Bloomberg News agency, wrote on October 5. “After five hours of talks in the Elysée Palace, the Morel plan was imposed on Ukraine in a form more beneficial to Putin.”