After eight months of intense fighting in Ukraine that has seen the Ukrainians begin to regain the advantage over Russian forces, the United States now appears to be pushing for the two sides to get back on the path to negotiations. At the beginning of the week several “leaks” in the American press went in this direction. On Monday, we thus learned in the Wall Street Journal that Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, had recently, and on several occasions, spoken with two senior Russian officials who “The President’s Ear” Cheese fries. About these discussions: the American desire that the Ukrainian crisis does not escalate into a general nuclear conflict.
Secret channel between Washington and Moscow
In fact, behind the reciprocal communication positions, the discussions between the two nuclear superpowers that are the United States and Russia have never stopped since the beginning of the war last February. Thus, in recent months a secret channel has been set up between the two countries, bypassing the head of diplomacy Antony Blinken, head of the State Department (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) in Washington.
The day after the publication of the article by Wall Street Journalit was the turn of Washington Post to explain that Jake Sullivan himself had gone to kyiv in recent days to convince Volodymyr Zelensky not to close the door to possible negotiations. The Americans wanted to make it clear to the Ukrainians that they could no longer demand Vladimir Putin’s exit from power as a prerequisite for any discussion to begin. Clearly, Joe Biden is pushing President Zelensky to declare that Ukraine is open to negotiations with Russia so as not to appear as a blocking factor: “The tiredness of some allies towards Ukraine is a reality”so said an American official al anonymously Washington Post. If these words are meant to be benevolent, we are indeed witnessing a major blow of pressure from Washington on Kiev.
“A window of opportunity for negotiations” between Moscow and Kiev
A few days after the publication of these articles, it was Joe Biden himself who declared: “We need to see if Ukraine is ready to compromise”. This statement comes just after the election of intermediate, which saw Democrats hold out much better than expected against Republicans led by Donald Trump. At the same time, US Defense Chief of Staff General Mark Milley announced that there was “a window ofchanceit is for negotiation » between Moscow and Kiev. We are far from last spring’s belligerent statements against Vladimir Putin. It is that there are only a few days left before the G20 summit to be held in Bali.
The host country Indonesia also asked ” wasgler us diffisreturn at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield ». According to one source turned off, Americans today would be eager to stem the wind of anti-Americanism blowing from the West over the war in Ukraine. To the point that in recent days there has been mention of the idea of a meeting between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin on the occasion of the G20. An abortive project, because the boss of the Kremlin preferred to give up going to Bali, instead sending his head of diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov, to represent him. And as Russian troops retreat into the Kherson region, Putin continues to flex his muscles in his speeches recently explaining that Russia had no “The serious stuff hasn’t started yet”. Next Monday, however, a decisive meeting between the two greatest world leaders, Xi Jinping and Joe Biden, is announced in Bali. For their part, the Ukrainians see these sudden unrest badly and do not hide their concern. One of Zelensky’s advisers, Mikhaïlo Podolyak, recently revealed that he and Zelensky were afraid of the G20 negotiations in Bali and what might happen there, making it clear to the US president “flirting with the abuser ».
Tensions between Washington and Kiev
Behind the scenes, it is not the first time that tensions have arisen between Kiev and Washington. If part of the American security apparatus, in particular the CIA, has always supported Zelensky, the White House has always been concerned with keeping the war in Ukraine within a certain framework. Since their respective elections, relations between Zelensky and Biden have been much more complex than official statements suggest. In June 2021, the two men had met in particular on the gas dossier, when the Americans had then found a compromise with Germany and Russia on the opening of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, which had provoked the ire of the Ukrainians.
But it is also on the nuclear issue that Kiev and Washington have opposing positions. While the Ukrainians, before the Russian invasion, never stopped asking for their effective integration into NATO in order to benefit from the American nuclear umbrella, the White House preferred to ignore these requests. Because to understand the war in Ukraine one must not limit oneself to the question of Donbass, as I explained in my latest book Hidden Wars. Il convient en fait de revenir au mémorandum de Budapest de 1994, signé par l’Ukraine, la Russie, les États-Unis et le Royaume-Uni (ainsi, plus tard, que par le reste des puissances nucléaires déclarées, soit la France et The China). This document had led the Ukrainians to accept the return to Moscow of the nuclear arsenal present on their territory, and inherited from the USSR, against strict guarantees of territorial integrity and security. Hailed at the time as a model of nuclear disarmament (Ukraine signs non-proliferation treaty in parallel [TNP]), however, the memorandum contains a major flaw: the security guarantees are not accompanied by any real defense obligation of Ukraine, and there is no binding sanction or measure in case of violation of the text by one of the countries. However, since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, some Ukrainian elites have continued to publicly deplore the disarmament that took place a decade earlier.
Budapest Memorandum
This debate goes beyond the borders of Ukraine. Last June, Radosław Sikorski, the former Polish foreign and defense minister, declared that Russia had violated the Budapest Memorandum and therefore the West could ” to offer » nuclear warheads in Ukraine for “who can defend its independence ». Five days before the Russian invasion, on February 19, 2022, at the Munich security conference, Volodymyr Zelensky also referred to the 1994 Budapest memorandum explaining that, unless a renegotiation between the signatory parties were initiated quickly, his country would deemed that he was no longer required to fulfill his historic commitments: « Ukraine to kingcu security guarantees for abandoning the thirdit enables meis nuclair of the world. We don’t have that weapon. We don’t even have that security. »
Consequently, at the end of March, the first peace negotiations between Russians and Ukrainians, under the auspices of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, concerned only this strategic issue. The lines from Donbass or Crimea were then postponed. In those crucial days, President Zelensky declared himself ready for his country’s neutrality and promised not to develop atomic weapons, such as Financial Times, if Russia withdraws its troops and if Kiev receives serious security guarantees from both Russia and its allies: «The non-zero stateour state, we are readyts go… If I remember correctly, it’s for cthat Russia started the war [NDLR : la Russie refusant que l’Ukraine se nucléarise à terme militairement] », the Ukrainian president then explained.
Covert negotiations on Ukrainian civilian nuclear sharing
While helping the Ukrainians in the civilian nuclear sector (the American group Westinghouse has been awarded numerous contracts in Ukraine both for the supply of fuel and for the construction of future AP1000 plants), the Americans have, in fact, wanted to maintain contact with the Russian on this file. Both on military and civilian nuclear power. Therefore, according to our information, despite the war, secret negotiations are underway between the United States and Russia on the future sharing of Ukrainian civilian nuclear power: “They know that before the AP1000 power plants were built in Ukraine, neither they nor the Ukrainians will be able to do without the Russians », commented a player in the global nuclear industry.
Among the topics on the negotiating table: the future of the Zaporijjia power plant, the largest in Europe, which before the war supplied almost 20% of Ukraine’s electricity. While the Russians and Ukrainians are fighting over the connection of this plant to their respective electricity grids, the idea is that the plant supplies Ukraine, the occupied territories and Russia, as it did before the February 24 invasion. It is for forgetting that the nuclear issue is also at the heart of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine that the Europeans, and France in particular (still a nuclear power), are condemned to appear in the coming days, leaving the United States, Turkey and even Israel negotiating on the front line against Moscow.
