it’s possible an agreement to end the war. In recent days diplomatic movements and secret negotiations have taken flight.
This Thursday in the Turkish city of Antalya, for the first time since the invasion began on February 24, the talented Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan managed to get the foreign ministers of the protagonists of the tragedy to meet to negotiate under his auspices : the Russian Serguei Lavrov and the Ukrainian Dimitro Kuleba.
The meeting will have a third protagonistTurkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.
No one will arrive empty handed because the terms of the agreement They are already on the table as a possibility.
Orders to end the war. Photo: AP
Diplomacy, they say, is the art of leaving unsolvable problems unsolved. This cynical definition is nonetheless important in order to arrive realistically at an agreement to end the war.
Entry into NATO
The first argument looks like the thorniest and the trigger for the invasion, but instead it can be the least difficult to solve. It is a matter of establishing Ukraine’s international agreements that guarantee Russia his resignation from NATOthe western military alliance of 30 countries led by the US with the participation of numerous European nations, plus Canada and Turkey.
Russia proclaims that after the catastrophic dissolution of the Soviet Union, on January 1, 1992, also the Warsaw Pact was pulverized, the military agreement of the satellite nations of the USSR. Fourteen vassal countries of the former USSR joined NATO.
President Zelensky repeatedly evoked, without noticing the effect it had on the Russian soul of President Vladimir Putin, the threat to reinforce the historical feel of the siege which actually facilitated the expansion of the Empire through the centuries.
Russian soldiers on a road leading to Kiev. Photo: EFE
The development of ultrasonic atomic missileswhich reduce the journey from NATO borders to minutes, represent an unacceptable nightmare, according to the Russians.
Zelensky repeatedly insisted that Ukraine felt safe in NATO. Putin justified his decision to invade Ukraine by denouncing this danger.
The Ukrainian president now knows that the NATO option is unfeasible and proposes the solution of an international guarantee. “It is a guarantee for our country by the nations that must formulate it, including Russia, which is our neighbor,” says Zelensky.
One instrument would be bilateral agreements with the United States, France, Germany and neighboring Turkey, members of NATO. “These will be guarantees not only for Ukraine but also for Russia,” Zelensky said.
occupied territories
Actually, the most difficult issue is the independence of the occupied territories by the Russians with the annexation of Crimea, in 2014, and in the Donbas region, in eastern Ukraine, where a Russian-speaking majority announced secession in 2015.
It has been fought for eight years, with 14 thousand dead. With the support of Moscow, in the Donbas, a region very rich in minerals, Donetsk and Luhansk, that were incorporated as 23ma. and 24th. federal republics of Russia on February 21.
Crimea had been officially incorporated in 2015, after a referendum, as 22ma. autonomous republic of the Russian Federation.
Ukrainian President Zelensky accepts that it is necessary to “reach a compromise on Crimea”, whose sovereignty includes the gigantic Russian naval base of Sevastopol, on the Black Sea. Crimea was Russian and was “given away” to Ukraine, which was part of the USSR, in 1954 by then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
The Russians they will not negotiate their sovereignty over Crimea. The annexation was formally recognized by half a dozen countries, three of them Latin American: Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
It is difficult for them to make concessions on Donetsk and Lugansk. They are also likely to make territorial claims as the territory that allows to unite Crimea to the two separatist republics.
Zelensky warned that “We negotiated an agreement but not a capitulation.”
In Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Russia sees “progress” in negotiations with Ukraine. He also pointed out that Russia did not intend a permanent occupation from Ukraine “nor overthrow to the government” of President Zelensky.
Rome, correspondent
ap
