Want Peace? Understand the parties involved.

The news relating to Russia’s war against Ukraine and the West comes at us so fast and from so many directions that it is impossible to keep up.

Think how scary the news has been the last couple of days for Ukrainian refugees temporarily but legally in this country.  They have been told their status would be revoked, then maybe not, then the President is thinking about it. Both the back-and-forth statements and, if action is taken, are cruel.

As to the war itself, the United States, through multiple administrations, Republican and Democrat, has refused to declare a genuine American strategic objective, certainly not the one that would be in America’s national security interest – assisting Ukraine to defeat Russia.

But now the promoted theme is peace; everyone supposedly wants “peace.”  

Of course, if Vladimir Putin wanted peace, he would not have invaded Ukraine in 2014.  And if he wants peace now, all he has to do is withdraw his bloodstained troops from Ukraine’s sovereign territory.

Below, you will find an editorial from today’s Wall Street Journal addressing the curious approach of pressuring Ukraine to negotiate with Russia while Russia’s demands reject peace.  And an article from The Dispatch reminds anyone who has forgotten or does not want to remember Russia’s history as a pathological liar and treaty violator.

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Kremlin Keeps Escalating

Russia responds to Trump by raising its ‘peace’ demands.

By TheEditorial Board | Updated March 6, 2025 6:37 pm ET

President Trump assures Americans that Vladimir Putin wants “peace” in Ukraine, but the key question is what kind of peace? The answer seems to be a peace of subjugation in which Ukraine is left to defend itself with no outside help until Russia decides to invade again.

That’s the implication of Thursday’s comments from Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, that the Kremlin won’t tolerate Western European troops on Ukrainian soil. “We see no room for compromise,” Mr. Lavrov told reporters Thursday at a press conference in Moscow. The presence of European forces in Ukraine would mean the “undisguised involvement of NATO countries in a war against the Russian Federation. It’s impossible to allow this.”

This is no surprise, as Russia responds to Mr. Trump’s pressure on Ukraine by increasing its demands as part of any agreement with Ukraine. Mr. Trump has already conceded to Mr. Putin’s demand that Ukraine not be allowed to join NATO after the war ends. Now Russia is rejecting the French-British Plan B, which would put some of their troops in Ukraine after the war, though not under NATO auspices.

If Mr. Putin really wants peace, why would he object to a modest deployment that poses no threat to Russia? The answer is that his postwar goal is to leave Ukraine in a weakened state that isn’t aligned with the West and is ripe for his next imperial assault. He wants to own or dominate Ukraine, full stop.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to squeeze Volodymyr Zelensky. The latest report is that U.S. officials want Ukraine’s President to commit to an immediate cease-fire when he signs a mineral-rights deal with the U.S. Mr. Trump is also withholding intelligence that is crucial to Ukraine’s defense. If Mr. Trump wants to end the killing, why is he withholding intel that will encourage Russia to escalate and kill more Ukrainian civilians and soldiers?

So far in this one-sided peace process, Ukraine is supposed to make all the concessions, while Russia demands more rewards for its unprovoked invasion that has killed hundreds of thousands.

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THE DISPATCH

Russia’s Long Record of Broken Pledges and Treaty Violations

Why Volodymyr Zelensky is seeking security guarantees as part of any peace deal.

The Dispatch had a photo of Putin here – I inserted the Ramirez cartoon. — RAM

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By Eric S. Edelman and Franklin C. Miller

Published March 7, 2025

During the February 28 meltdown in the Oval Office among President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump—claiming that he alone can bring peace to Ukraine, thereby ending the largest war in Europe since World War II—declared, “I think President Putin wants peace.” Earlier, when asked whether he trusts that Russia wants peace, Trump, seemingly based on publicly undisclosed conversations with the Russian dictator, said, “I do.”

Zelensky, in the most polite and respectful way possible under the circumstances, had been trying to raise a fundamental issue about the Trump administration’s approach to reaching an agreement: Putin is fundamentally untrustworthy. His track record, both with regard to the war in Ukraine and more broadly with respect to previous agreements made with the United States, is consistent—he lies and cheats. And that is why Zelensky and Ukraine require substantive security guarantees that go beyond mere pieces of paper.

Putin’s previous broken pledges on Ukraine.

The premise that Ukraine is the party posing an inconvenient obstacle to peace because it insists that any agreement must be backed up by stronger guarantees ignores the history of Russia’s failure to respect the unbacked guarantees it had already agreed to.

In September 2014—in the wake of Russia’s illegal seizure of Crimea, its creation of irregular forces to take portions of the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and finally the insertion of regular Russian forces into those territories—the Ukrainian government, the Russian government, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) negotiated the Minsk Protocol and Accompanying Memorandum. Minsk I, as it came to be known, called for a ceasefire and prisoner exchanges. The fighting continued, however, with continued gains by both the Russian irregular and regular forces, and by January 2015 the agreement collapsed. Seeking to restore the peace, a Franco-German-led initiative resulted in a new agreement, dubbed Minsk II and again signed by representatives of the OSCE, Ukraine, and Russia, creating a second ceasefire.

Russian forces proceeded to violate that agreement and, after taking additional territory, halted—leaving an uneasy truce in place. Finally, in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Minsk II no longer existed and then proceeded to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

It was this sorry history to which Zelensky was trying to draw Trump’s and Vance’s attention during the Oval Office debacle—and in fact he had already provided U.S. negotiator Keith Kellogg with a list of some 25 Russian ceasefire violations since the 2014 destabilization of Ukraine. This tortured history, forgotten by most in the West, explains the Ukrainian position that any agreement must be backed by meaningful security guarantees for Ukraine.

This is even more the case since Putin’s violations of the Minsk agreements built upon his disregard of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which security assurances were provided by the U.S., U.K., France, and Russia when Ukraine gave up any claim to the nuclear weapons left on its soil after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The broader picture of Putin’s duplicity.

The United States has its own long historical record of negotiations with Russia, which can be summed up by Ambassador Charles “Chip” Bohlen’s famous axiom that the fundamental Russian negotiating stance is, “What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable.” The late Secretary of State George P. Shultz (for whom one of the authors worked as a junior diplomat) amended Bohlen’s adage by declaring that “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine too.”  

The Russian record of adherence to accords negotiated during or after the Cold War makes for depressing reading and underscores the necessity of vigilance and prudence when it comes to any effort to negotiate not just an end to the war in Ukraine but to any broader U.S.-Russian arms control or geopolitical agreements.

During the Cold War, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, along with the SALT I agreement, was regarded as the cornerstone of strategic stability, but the USSR was in violation of the treaty for years. Its construction of the Krasnoyarsk Radar contravened both the letter and spirit of the treaty because it was built not on the periphery of the country (for defensive purposes, allowable under the treaty) but in the center (for battle management). The Russians [Soviets  RAM]for years denied that the radar was a treaty violation before finally giving up in 1989 and dismantling it.  

Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has violated or disregarded nine separate arms control agreements and treaties he either inherited or signed, including:

  • The Helsinki Final Act of 1975, also known as the Helsinki Accords, wherein signatories pledged not to use military force to change borders in Europe
  • The Istanbul Document of 1999 (in which Russia pledged to withdraw its military forces from Georgia and Transnistria in Moldova)
  • The Presidential Nuclear Initiatives of 1991 and 1992 (in which Russia pledged to withdraw from active service various naval tactical nuclear weapons and to eliminate all ground-launched tactical nuclear weapons)
  • The 1992 Open Skies Treaty (in which Russia blocked U.S. access to parts of Russia clearly provided for under the treaty and also deviated from agreed flight paths over the U.S. that were mandated by the treaty)
  • The 1999 Vienna Document (Russia falsified and concealed military exercise information which it had agreed to provide)
  • The 2011 New START Treaty (Russia has withdrawn from participation in treaty-mandated working groups and inspections)

Additionally, Russia is almost certainly violating the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention by maintaining an active bioweapons capability.

Russia also routinely violates the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement and the 1989 Dangerous Military Activities Agreement, including buzzing the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea and unsafe approaches to U.S. aircraft operating in the Black Sea. Recent revelations of intelligence suggesting that Russia might be prepared to violate the Outer Space Treaty by putting a nuclear weapon into orbit are yet another indication of Moscow’s contempt for solemn international obligations.  

Given this deliberate and well-documented track record, the bar for holding Moscow accountable for its actions under any agreement it might sign regarding Ukraine’s future, much less the kinds of nuclear arms control agreements in which President Trump has also shown an interest, should be exceedingly high. Indeed, the first Trump administration demonstrated it would check Russian bad behavior when it removed any constraint that the INF Treaty and Open Skies Treaty imposed on the U.S. after Putin had gutted those pacts. The second Trump administration would do well to review the policies it pursued during the first term in office when it understood those dangers.

Would Putin tolerate a Western-oriented, independent Ukraine?

Putin may well seek to convince Trump he “wants peace.” The question is, what sort of peace does he seek? Some Americans are convinced he would accept an independent, democratic Ukrainian state. But that hope-inspired approach surely misreads Putin’s willingness to countenance an end to the conflict on any terms other than capitulation. [Americans convinced – or naively hopeful - of this ignore just about everything Putin has said and presented to the United States and the West – think the proposed “treaties” he presented in December 2021 the signing of which he demanded lest he invade Ukraine.  RAM]

As former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Richard Shirreff recently told the BBC’s Ukrainecast, “What Russia is about is removing Ukraine from the map as a sovereign state. … Because that’s deep in the Russian DNA. And I think any American negotiator who doesn’t understand that and thinks there can be a durable, lasting solution with a sovereign Ukraine, and that Russia will accept that, is deluding themselves.” Russian official statements since last month’s talks in Saudi Arabia have validated Shirreff’s judgments. Putin’s representatives have and continue to indicate they will not make any concessions that allow the continued existence of an independent Ukraine tied to the West and have stressed that any settlement must resolve the alleged “root causes” of the conflict (code for preventing a sovereign Ukraine from choosing its own geopolitical orientation). They specifically demanded an explicit reversal of the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit Declaration welcoming Georgia and Ukraine’s aspirations to join the alliance at some future date. As a result, short of a total surrender to Putin’s position—something no American president or Ukrainian president or NATO ally should accept—the prospects for a lasting, negotiated peace, are quite remote, as President Zelensky recently noted.

If Moscow really does want peace, as Trump claims, it faces two substantial challenges—to actually negotiate in good faith and to abide by what is eventually agreed to. Russia’s lamentable history of noncompliance shows that either one, let alone both, might be impossible for Vladimir Putin.

Eric S. Edelman

Eric S. Edelman is counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and is a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Finland, and under secretary of defense for policy.

Franklin C. Miller

Franklin C. Miller served for three decades as a senior nuclear policy and arms control official in the Pentagon and on the National Security Council staff. He is a principal at the Scowcroft Group.

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ROBERT MCCONNELL
Co-Founder, U.S.-Ukraine Foundation
Director of External Affairs, Friends of Ukraine Network

The introduction and parenthetical comments are Mr. McConnell’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation or the Friends of Ukraine Network (FOUN).