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Russia Undercuts Macron During His Visit to Ukraine

Russia Undercuts Macron During His Visit to Ukraine

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President Emmanuel Macron of France, right, with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Kyiv on Tuesday.
Credit…Ukrainian Presidency, via Associated Press

KYIV, Ukraine — The Kremlin on Tuesday rebuffed the idea that President Emmanuel Macron of France and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had made meaningful progress toward defusing the Ukraine crisis in their high-stakes meeting in Moscow.

Statements by Russian leaders appeared to undercut French diplomatic authority, and even credibility, just as Mr. Macron arrived in Ukraine to continue his shuttle diplomacy, with 130,000 Russian troops just outside Ukraine and the White House warning that an attack on Ukraine could be imminent.

Even before Mr. Macron’s plane touched down in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, rejected reports that the two presidents had reached any agreement to de-escalate, suggesting that it was the United States, not France, that had standing to negotiate such a deal.

“In the current situation, Moscow and Paris could not make a deal. France is an E.U. and NATO member,” he said, adding: “France is not leading NATO.”

He also took issue with news reports quoting French officials as saying that Mr. Macron had left Moscow with commitments that Russian troops would not stay in neighboring Belarus after the completion of military exercises this month, and that Russia would not conduct any new military maneuvers near Ukraine in the near future.

The deployment to Ukraine was always intended to be temporary, but Russia made no promise about when it would end, Mr. Peskov said. He declined to comment on the report about new maneuvers, but Russia said on Tuesday that elements of its navy had been dispatched to the Black Sea waters near Ukraine.

200 MILES

Moscow

BELARUS

POLAND

RUSSIA

Border with Russian units

Kyiv

KAZAKHSTAN

UKRAINE

MOLDOVA

Russian units

ROMANIA

CRIMEA

BULGARIA

BLACK SEA

Transnistria, a

Russian-backed

breakaway region

of Moldova.

Russia invaded and

annexed the Crimean

Peninsula from

Ukraine in 2014.

Approximate line

separating Ukrainian and

Russian-backed forces near

two breakaway provinces.

300 MILES

Moscow

RUSSIA

BELARUS

Border with

Russian units

Kyiv

UKRAINE

CRIMEA

BLACK SEA

Russia annexed

the Crimean

Peninsula from

Ukraine in 2014.

Transnistria, a

Russian-backed

breakaway region

of Moldova.

Approximate line

separating Ukrainian

and Russian-backed

forces.

Mr. Putin and Mr. Macron held a five-hour, one-on-one meeting at the Kremlin on Monday night, and then a joint news conference that went well past midnight. Mr. Putin swung between ominous and something verging on optimistic, keeping his comments vague enough to keep the world guessing.

“A number of his ideas or proposals — which it is probably too early to speak about — I see as rather feasible for creating a foundation for our further steps,” he said of Mr. Macron. But he also warned of war with NATO if Ukraine joins the alliance, and did not rule out an invasion, though the Kremlin has insisted it has no plans for one.

In Kyiv on Tuesday to meet with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, Mr. Macron said: “You must not underestimate the tension that surrounds the situation that we are living through, its unprecedented nature. I do not believe this crisis can be solved thanks to a few hours of discussions.”

Mr. Peskov said that Mr. Putin was prepared to keep negotiating over Russia’s security demands in Eastern Europe, but added: “So far, we don’t see and feel the readiness of our Western counterparts to take our concerns into account.” The United States and NATO have flatly rejected Russian demands to cease the bloc’s expansion into parts of Eastern Europe that Moscow considers part of its sphere of influence.

Mr. Macron emphasized that addressing Russia’s concerns about NATO and its presence in Eastern Europe was only one half of the diplomatic approach he was pursuing. The other, to address the continuing conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in two breakaway eastern Ukrainian provinces through the so-called Normandy Format, showed more signs of promise. Negotiators from France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia are expected to meet again in Berlin this week to continue to work through disagreements around the terms of a 2015 cease-fire.

Mr. Zelensky said that he viewed the upcoming Berlin meeting positively, although he did not yet see an indication that Russia was willing to end its occupation of Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized in a 2014 invasion, and pull Russian troops from the eastern Ukraine region known as Donbas. Ukraine has said that a Russian withdrawal is a prerequisite for any deal.

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Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said on Tuesday that his government would not cross “red lines” that infringe on its sovereignty in negotiations on a settlement with Russia.

The shuttle diplomacy undertaken this week by President Emmanuel Macron of France is in part exploring whether Ukraine and Russia can agree to a settlement that might ease the broader tensions in Europe after Russia massed troops near Ukraine’s borders.

After talks with Mr. Macron in Moscow on Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia suggested that Moscow would insist Kyiv accept its terms on a cease-fire agreement for the war in eastern Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces have been locked in a bloody stalemate with Russia-backed separatists since 2014. That agreement — negotiated in Minsk, Belarus, in 2015 — includes terms that could give the Kremlin a way to influence Ukraine’s foreign policy decisions.

“You may like it, you may not like it — deal with it, my gorgeous,” Mr. Putin said of Ukraine’s president, using a crude expression derived from a Russian rhyme.

Speaking to reporters in Kyiv on Tuesday, Mr. Kuleba said that the Russian government was seeking to force a settlement on Ukraine to destabilize the country’s internal politics in ways that might benefit Russia, without having to resort to military action despite having deployed around 130,000 troops near the border, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials. He said that Ukraine could not be forced into agreeing to Russia’s terms on the settlement deal, known as the Minsk accords.

“We see that Russia’s current baseline scenario is to try to destabilize the internal situation in Ukraine by using the threat of force, but not of the armed forces themselves,” Mr. Kuleba said.

“I have said many times, including yesterday, that we are open to dialogue, we are constructive, we are looking for a diplomatic solution, but we will not cross our red lines, and no one will be able to force us to cross them,” Mr. Kuleba said.

Mr. Putin’s comments highlighted the unpalatable options for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, making explicit that if he accepts Moscow’s terms, they will have been forced on Kyiv.

Mr. Zelensky, a former comedian, won a 2019 election with 73 percent of the vote after campaigning on a platform of pursuing a peace settlement with Russia. But his political opposition is sure to seize on any signs of yielding to Russian pressure.

Mr. Putin’s comment led news reports in Ukraine on Tuesday, and members of organizations opposed to concessions to Moscow posted on social media that the Russian leader had used a rape metaphor. Mr. Putin, wrote Oleksandr Ivanov, a coordinator of the Resistance Movement Against Capitulation, “once again demonstrated the true essence of the Minsk agreements, which is the rape of Ukraine.”

On Monday, before his meeting with Mr. Putin, Mr. Macron told reporters that “one of the models on the table” for de-escalating the crisis was the “Finlandization” of Ukraine. That term alludes to how Finland, facing the Soviet Union during the Cold War, was able to maintain independence from its powerful neighbor and survive as a democracy on condition of strict neutrality.

In the current context, it would mean that Ukraine would never join NATO — a scenario that Western officials characterize as a far-off possibility, but one that the Kremlin describes as an existential threat — and that Russia would exercise considerable influence over its political options.

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Credit…Vitaly NevarTASS, via Getty Images

Some analysts worry that President Vladimir V. Putin’s engagement in diplomacy is merely buying time for Russia’s military to make final preparations for an invasion of Ukraine.

On Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement that six large landing craft from the Russian Navy’s Baltic and Northern Fleets, capable of carrying thousands of troops, had been dispatched to the waters off Ukraine in the Black Sea, raising concerns that they could open a new vector of attack.

The statement said that the ships were scheduled to take part in planned military exercises. Military analysts, however, say that combining the ships with forces already deployed to the Black Sea region would provide a significant amphibious assault force capable of threatening a large area of the coastline of Ukraine, which has only a limited coastal defense system.

In particular, analysts say, Ukraine lacks long-range anti-ship missiles with which to counter Russian forces in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, a small body of water over which Russia has exerted naval dominance since its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Russia’s announcements of large-scale military drills in the region have prompted fears that they could be the pretext for an attack against Ukraine. The deployment of troops to Belarus, thousands of miles from their permanent bases, has been viewed as a threat against Kyiv.

President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Tuesday that Mr. Putin had confirmed, in their five-hour meeting in Moscow on Monday, that he would withdraw troops from Belarus after the exercises, which are scheduled to conclude on Feb. 20, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

Mr. Peskov said that Mr. Putin did not give a date for their withdrawal, but added: “No one has ever said that Russian troops would stay in Belarus. This was never on the agenda.”

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The leaders of France, Germany and Poland said there would be “far-reaching consequences” against Russia, but did not specify what those steps might be.CreditCredit…Pool photo by Thibault Camus

BERLIN — Two days of whirlwind diplomacy concluded Tuesday with the leaders of Germany, France and Poland standing side by side and pledging “far-reaching consequences” for Russia if it attacked Ukraine — but without specifying what those would be or what other steps might lead to a de-escalation of tensions.

President Emmanuel Macron of France arrived in Berlin to brief Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Andrzej Duda of Poland on his meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, on Monday. Earlier the French leader had traveled to Ukraine to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Mr. Scholz had returned from a meeting in Washington with President Biden.

While progress in defusing the Ukraine crisis remained elusive, Mr. Scholz and his French and Polish counterparts stood side by side and stressed their unity in the face of Russian aggression — what Mr. Duda described as “the most difficult situation we find ourselves in since the year 1989.”

“The most important thing today is unity and solidarity,” said Mr. Duda, whose country borders Russia and Ukraine to the east, as well as Russia’s ally Belarus. “We have to show that we speak with one voice, that we are a community and that our will cannot be broken. We also have to show that we will take no step back. We leave no one behind.”

“Europe has not seen such a movement of troops since World War II,” he said of the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.

All three leaders stressed their determination to preserve peace.

“We all share one goal,” Mr. Scholz said. “Preserving peace in Europe with diplomacy and clear messages and the common readiness to act jointly.”

Mr. Macron called “peace and stability” in Europe “the most precious thing we have,” while Mr. Duda expressed optimism that Europe would manage to avoid war.

But all three were scarce on detail in their statements, which each lasted for about four minutes, and they did not take any questions from journalists.

Mr. Scholz, who has been trying to dispel doubts that Germany was prepared to accept the cost of economic sanctions, echoed the language he had used a day earlier in Washington, warning Moscow of tough consequences but without specifying what they might be.

“A further violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine is unacceptable and would lead to far-reaching consequences for Russia, politically, economically and surely geo-strategically, too,” Mr. Scholz said. “Yesterday in Washington I spoke extensively to U.S. President Biden about that and we were completely united on that.”

Mr. Macron, who has spoken with Mr. Putin five times by telephone in recent weeks and on Monday in person, stressed the importance of engaging Russia in dialogue.

“It’s about defending the principles Europe developed over the last 30 years, the sovereignty of all states, the territorial integrity, also our values,” he said. “We have to find the ways and means to hold this ambitious and important dialogue with Russia.”

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Credit…Kimmo Brandt/EPA, via Shutterstock

President Emmanuel Macron of France invoked a Cold War-era term on Monday, telling reporters on his flight to Moscow that “Finlandization” of Ukraine was “one of the models on the table” for defusing tensions with Russia.

On Tuesday, standing alongside President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Kyiv, Macron denied making the remark, which appeared to put him at odds with not only the Ukrainians but also the United States. But the idea is once again being discussed in diplomatic circles.

The term refers to Finland’s strict neutrality during the Cold War, enshrined in a 1948 treaty with Moscow when tensions between the Soviet Union and the West were at a high. The treaty ensured Finland that unlike other countries in Eastern Europe, it would not face a Soviet invasion, but in return, it agreed to stay out of NATO and allowed the giant next door to exercise significant influence over its domestic and foreign policy.

Ukraine, formerly a part of the Soviet Union, has increasingly tilted toward the West, economically and politically, while resisting Russian influence. In 2008, NATO said it planned eventually for Ukraine to join the alliance, a popular idea within the country, though it has never actually applied for membership and NATO officials say it would not happen any time soon.

“Finlandization” would appear to rule out that possibility, and allow Moscow a heavy hand in Ukrainian affairs — concessions Kyiv and NATO have rejected as unacceptable.

“All of this goes against what Ukraine has been striving for,” said Anna Wieslander, director for Northern Europe at the Atlantic Council. “It would be a big shift from a long-term political aim of joining NATO and joining the E.U., which is what they have wanted.”

The arrangement Mr. Macron appeared to suggest is “a way of solving a problem by making a decision over the head of the Ukrainians,” said Richard Whitman, an associate fellow at the policy analysis group Chatham House.

President Biden has said that nations must be free to choose their own alliances.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has long maintained that Ukraine and Russia are effectively one country, with insoluble historic and cultural ties. In 2014, after mass protests forced out a pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, and supported a separatist war in eastern Ukraine that is still dragging on.

With Mr. Putin determined to expand his sphere of influence and undermine an independent Ukrainian government, and the West making it clear it would not go to war against Russia to defend Ukraine, some experts have argued that “Finlandization” is the best course Ukraine can take.

The Kremlin is acutely aware that Finland, once a neutral buffer state between the Soviets and NATO, has become far less neutral, tilting strongly toward the West since the Soviet Union collapsed.

“While it remains outside NATO to this day,” said James Nixey, the director of European Union-Russia relations at Chatham House, “Finland is completely compatible with NATO, and with Western security architecture, and is very much ‘on side’ as far as a unified concept of European security is concerned.”

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Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

President Biden said it. His secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said it and so did his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.

But Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany could not bring himself to state what to his allies is obvious: That in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline connecting Germany and Russia under the Baltic Sea will die.

Standing next to Mr. Biden at the White House on Monday during a long-awaited visit — intended to assuage doubts over Germany’s reliability as an ally — Mr. Scholz was asked repeatedly about Nord Stream 2, but declined even to say the pipeline’s name.

“Many thanks for your question. I want to be very clear,” he said, and then proceeded to be anything but.

“We have intensively prepared so we can concretely impose the necessary sanctions if there is military action against Ukraine.”

Could he explicitly commit to shuttering Nord Stream 2 in case of an invasion?

“We will act together, and we are united,” Mr. Scholz said.

Mr. Biden tried to clarify. “If Russia invades, that means tanks and troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” Mr. Biden said. “We will bring an end to it.”

It was the latest awkward moment for Germany’s new Social Democrat-led government, which has been at pains to stress its commitment to Western unity in the face of Russian aggression, but has wavered on the specifics of economic sanctions that would hurt Germany, too. Germany relies on Russia for more than half of its gas imports. As it phases out nuclear and coal power in the coming years, that dependency is set to persist and maybe even rise, at least in the short term.

In Germany, the news media were abuzz with the chancellor’s verbal acrobatics. Even before the current crisis, the pipeline had stirred controversy for bypassing Ukraine and depriving it of transit fees. “The pipeline whose name mustn’t be spoken,” the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper said.

“It’s a bit of a comedy,” said Jana Puglierin, director of the European Council of Foreign Relations. “Everyone knows that when push comes to shove, there won’t be a pipeline.”

In many ways, Mr. Scholz himself appeared to acknowledge that when he said, alongside Mr. Biden, that their two nations would “act unified and jointly,” and that “there will be no measures where we will act differently.”

German officials play down the importance of mentioning the pipeline by name, but argue that Mr. Scholz does not want to be seen as acting on American pressure.

But Nord Stream 2 has in some ways become a symbol of Germany’s Russia policy, which critics say has lacked leadership.

“Instead of alleviating suspicions, Scholz is feeding them by not saying the words,” Ms. Puglierin said. “He has created a completely unnecessary but very real problem.”

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Credit…Pool photo by Bernd Von Jutrczenka

As Chancellor Olaf Scholz hosted his French and Polish counterparts in Berlin, the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, donned a bulletproof vest and military helmet and traveled to the front line between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists.

It was her second visit to Ukraine since taking office two months ago, an attempt at showing Germany’s solidarity with Ukraine after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s new coalition government has faced accusations of wavering in its commitment to take a tough line on Russia.

Ms. Baerbock, a Green politician who has been more hawkish on Russia than many in her boss’s Social Democratic Party, toured the village of Shyrokyne, which in 2014, in the first phase of the war in the Donbas region, was the site of heavy fighting. Once a holiday destination on the Sea of Azov, about 20 kilometers east of the city of Mariupol, the village on the Ukrainian-controlled side of the line is a reminder of “war in the middle of Europe,” Ms. Baerbock said later.

Violations of the cease-fire line remain commonplace. Ms. Baerbock met residents affected by the simmering violence.

“What I saw today in Shyrokyne deeply shook me,” she tweeted afterwards. “No briefing replaces one’s own impressions. It’s important to me not to forget the people here. We owe it to them to do everything for a peaceful solution of the conflict — they can count on us.”

German refusal to send weapons to Ukraine has been one of the most contentious issues in its relationship with eastern European allies, who mock Berlin for recently offering to send “5,000 helmets.”

Last spring, another Green politician, Robert Habeck, then co-leader of the Greens with Ms. Baerbock and now economy minister in Mr. Scholz’ government, undertook a similar trip to the Donbas and caused a storm in Germany, saying that it was hard to deny Ukraine defensive weapons.

Ms. Baerbock did not go that far on Monday. During her last visit to Kyiv she had already ruled out sending German arms to Ukraine.

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U.S. and Germany Promise a ‘United’ Response to Russia

After a meeting with Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, President Biden said the U.S. would “bring an end” to Nord Stream 2, a Russia-to-Germany pipeline, if Moscow invades Ukraine.

“Top of our agenda today was our united approach to deterring Russia’s threats against Ukraine. If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again, then there will be, we — there will be no longer Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Reporter: “But how will you — how will you do that exactly? Since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?” “We will, I promise you we’ll be able to do it.” “I want to be absolutely clear. We have intensively prepared everything to be ready with the necessary sanctions if there is a military aggression against Ukraine. It is part of this process that we do not spell out everything in public because Russia could understand that there might be even more to come. To our American friends, we will be united. We will act together and we will take all the necessary steps, and all the necessary steps will be done by all of us together.”

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After a meeting with Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, President Biden said the U.S. would “bring an end” to Nord Stream 2, a Russia-to-Germany pipeline, if Moscow invades Ukraine.CreditCredit…Cheriss May for The New York Times

After meeting with the leader of Germany, President Biden said on Monday that their countries would take a “united” approach to rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine, despite concerns in Washington that Germany has not been a forceful enough partner in confronting Russia.

“If Russia makes a choice to further invade Ukraine, we are jointly ready,” Mr. Biden said, standing beside Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House, “and all of NATO is ready.”

Their meeting, the first since Mr. Scholz took office in December, was intended to publicly shore up a key link in the Western alliance as it confronts the Russian military buildup surrounding Ukraine, one of its gravest challenges since the Cold War. Among the main concerns ahead of the meeting, Mr. Biden’s advisers said, was Mr. Scholz’s reluctance to sign onto punishing economic sanctions in the event of an invasion, or to call off the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

On Monday, Mr. Biden, who has refrained from publicly criticizing Mr. Scholz, said that the Germans supported a “strong package” of sanctions but did not detail what those would be. In recent weeks, Mr. Biden has threatened severe economic sanctions against Russia’s financial sector and members of President Vladimir V. Putin’s inner circle.

Mr. Biden defined invasion in the most traditional terms — troops and tanks — not addressing a number of other ways his aides fear Mr. Putin could bring the country to its knees, including organizing a coup or conducting crippling cyberattacks.

“If Russia invades, that means tanks and troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” Mr. Biden said. “We will bring an end to it.”

When asked exactly how, Mr. Biden said, “I promise you we’ll be able to do it.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Scholz and Mr. Macron met in Berlin with the president of Poland, Andrzej Duda, for talks on Ukraine. And next week, Mr. Scholz is scheduled to follow Mr. Macron by visiting both Moscow and Kyiv.

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Credit…Associated Press

At the end of the Cold War, the third largest nuclear power on earth was not Britain, France or China. It was Ukraine.

The Soviet collapse, a slow-motion downfall that culminated in December 1991, resulted in the newly independent Ukraine inheriting roughly 5,000 nuclear arms that Moscow had stationed on its soil. Underground silos on its military bases held long-range missiles that carried up to 10 thermonuclear warheads, each far stronger than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Only Russia and the United States had more weapons.

The removal of this arsenal often gets hailed as a triumph of arms control. Diplomats and peace activists cast Ukraine as a model citizen in a world of would-be nuclear powers.

But history shows the denuclearization to have been a chaotic upheaval that shook with infighting, reversals and discord among the country’s government and military. At the time, both Ukrainian and American experts questioned the wisdom of atomic disarmament. The deadly weapons, some argued, were the only reliable means of deterring Russian aggression.

Today Ukraine has no easy path to producing or acquiring the materials to build a bomb. Even so, the nuclear genie is once again stirring as Russian troops encircle the nation and wage a shadow war in its easternmost provinces.

“We gave away the capability for nothing,” said Andriy Zahorodniuk, a former defense minister of Ukraine. Referring to the security assurances Ukraine won in exchange for its nuclear arms, he added: “Now, every time somebody offers us to sign a strip of paper, the response is, ‘Thank you very much. We already had one of those some time ago.’”

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We spent the day with Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines of the conflict with Russia-backed separatists near the southeast border with Russia.

“Four days after I got here, they fired mortars at us,” said Artem, a young Ukrainian soldier, adding: “I was so close to death.”

He is among the soldiers deployed to the frontline in eastern Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists have waged a grinding war with Ukrainian forces since 2014 along the so-called line of contact, a roughly 250-mile-long barricade of trenches and fortifications. Some 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have lost their lives in the fighting.

A New York Times video team recently traveled to the frontline in Vodiane, Ukraine. Watch the full video above.

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Credit…Alexander Nemenov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MOSCOW — After touring the grand, marble-clad Victory museum in Moscow, dedicated to the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany in World War II, the two visitors concluded that the situation today is not all that different: Russia is under attack again.

“America badly wants to start this war,” said Olga A. Petrova, a retiree, referring to the simmering conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine. “NATO wants to bring its troops to our borders, they looked for our weak spots and they found Ukraine,” she said, adding that Americans “don’t even know where Ukraine is on the map.”

Mrs. Petrova’s conviction that the United States is fomenting war between Russia and Ukraine reflects the thinking of many Russians, including her companion, Tamara N. Ivanova, who watches the two main talk shows on the country’s state-run television channels.

It is a message hammered home daily by the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.

Russians argue over a host of domestic issues, like the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic or ballooning inflation. Others, fed up with the Kremlin’s manipulation of the news media, have just opted out. But there is one thing on which many seem to agree with President Vladimir V. Putin: If war does come, it will be the Americans’ fault.

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Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

As European leaders try to find a diplomatic solution to the Russia-Ukraine standoff, much of the talk has focused on using what are known as the Minsk accords as a framework for resolving the crisis.

But the accords are notoriously ambiguous. They are unpopular in Ukraine, Kyiv and Moscow interpret them very differently, and each side accuses the other of failure to comply with them. They were supposed to create a cease-fire in a war in which the firing has never entirely ceased.

Eight years ago, Russian-backed separatists went to war against Ukraine and seized a chunk of territory in the east, bordering Russia. France and Germany brokered talks with Ukraine and Russia that led to the signing in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, of cease-fire agreements in 2014 and 2015.

In them, the former president of Ukraine, Petro O. Poroshenko, accepted what are generally viewed as unfavorable political terms; the second deal was signed while thousands of Ukrainian soldiers were surrounded, and Mr. Poroshenko’s immediate goal was to save them. In the view of many Ukrainians, fulfilling the accords would be a concession to Russian military aggression.

In Russia’s view, fully implementing the accords would effectively rule out NATO membership for Ukraine, fulfilling one of the Kremlin’s key demands in the current crisis.

In the Ukrainian interpretation, the breakaway areas would be represented in government only after free elections there. The powers granted to these regions, Ukraine argues, could also be limited — and would certainly not include a veto over NATO membership.

Fighting became less intense after Minsk but did not stop; most of the war’s casualties followed the accords. The second agreement laid out a plan to reintegrate the separatist-held regions into Ukraine on terms that the Kremlin says would give its proxies there veto power over Ukrainian foreign policy decisions.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, has flatly ruled that out. “This is not going to happen,” he said. “Never.”

But a hint at a possible compromise came in January when the Ukrainian government signaled it was ready to reconsider a law that it had shelved on special status for the regions — suggesting a willingness to engage with Russia on the issue. Mr. Macron praised this step at his news conference with Mr. Putin in Moscow on Monday.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said last month that if Ukraine implemented the Minsk accords in Russia’s interpretation, “of course, then, we will be satisfied with this result.” But he said he “hardly believed” this was possible.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/08/world/ukraine-russia-news