The latest news on the meeting of European leaders that Emmanuel Macron will convene in Paris this morning published in The Financial Times online edition presents many questions that are not now unanswerable, but which should be identified at once if we are to make sense of the announcements made at the end of this gathering.
First, it would now appear that the leaders present will be more numerous than originally stated. Besides Germany, Poland, Italy and the United Kingdom, who were named initially, it seems that the heads of government from Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark will be there. Moreover, and very importantly, we can expect NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to have a seat, which is quite extraordinary given that Team Trump stated explicitly that any peace-keeping force provided under the terms of an eventual peace settlement will not be a NATO mission.
Extraordinary as it may be, it fits in with the concept that the Europeans seem to share, that the ‘peace keepers’ are there to protect Ukraine from some expected attempt by the Russians to renew their aggressive war and seize more territory at some date in the future. That is to say, they willfully ignore the possibility, shall we say the likelihood that violations of any cease-fire and agreed borders will come from the revanchist Ukrainian side. That is precisely what happened during the positioning of OSCE monitors at the Donbas-Ukraine line of confrontation to enforce the Minsk-2 agreements.
The OSCE monitors were rapporteurs, nothing more. But their reports in the weeks prior to the Russian invasion in February 2022 clearly showed that the Ukrainian side was greatly increasing the frequency of its artillery barrages directed at the civilian population on the ‘rebel’ Donbas side in what could be construed as a ‘softening up operation’ ahead of the massive armed attack on the Donbas that the Kremlin feared was coming, and against which it had prepared its own 150,000 soldiers stationed at Ukraine’s borders.
If the peace-keeping force that the Europeans will propose today, specifying at their meeting in Paris the numbers of soldiers and equipment available for the mission, is intended to look only one way, at Russian violators of the peace terms, then indeed war will break out again. Under this protective cover, the Ukrainians may start lobbing missiles and artillery shells over their heads against the Russian settlements on the other side of the border. In short, that would be a self-fulfilling prophecy of Russian ‘aggression’ to come and is precisely the opposite of what Team Trump’s stated objective is – namely a definitive end to hostilities and normalization of relations with Russia.
As I have written in the past week, the mention by Team Trump of a ‘non-European’ contingent in the future peace-keeping force is precisely to ensure that the force is not a NATO mission. The reason is clear: Vladimir Putin surely told Trump that the Russians will not accept a NATO presence in Ukraine whatever it may be called. Full stop.
The sad reality is that the European leaders assembling today in Paris are diehard enthusiasts for precisely the situation that Team Trump rejects: they do not want a durable peace with Russia and a revision of the European security architecture that brings Russia in from the cold. The sense of their insistence that Ukraine be a party to the negotiations from the start is that Ukraine would be allowed to present yet again its claims to recovery of all its lost territory and to receive war reparations from Russia. In short, they want to receive at the peace table what Ukraine and the US-led West have lost on the battlefield. This runs directly against the thinking of Team Trump and we may expect a harsh clash between the sides in the coming week or so.
Proof of my formulation of the problem is to be found in the latest statements of Antonio Costa, head of the European Council, who will also be participating in the Paris meeting at the invitation of Emmanuel Macron. He is cited in today’s FT thus:
The negotiations on the new security architecture need to take into account that Russia is a global threat, not only a threat to Ukraine
Gilbert Doctorow |
