With pro-Russian separatists refusing to leave captured buildings in eastern Ukraine on Friday, it is already clear that Thursday’s Geneva agreement has done little to reduce tensions on the ground – or the threat of a Russian invasion.
That the US, EU, Russia and Ukraine managed to agree on any document and concrete steps at all in Geneva was positive and unexpected. But some of those steps are already proving difficult to implement and provide no guarantee the situation in eastern Ukraine could not escalate further.
Most importantly, there was no commitment by Russia to pull back the tens of thousands of troops it has massed on Ukraine’s border, which Washington and Brussels have both been pressing for.
Indeed, it cost Russia very little to agree to the points in the document. Two of them – disarming illegal armed groups, and constitutional reforms to devolve more power to Ukraine’s regions – are things Moscow has been demanding for weeks.
But the illegal armed groups that must actually agree to hand over their weapons and leave occupied buildings were not represented at the meeting.
Ukraine’s interim government has struggled, with limited success, for weeks to get radical protesters prominent in the final stages of the ousting of former president Viktor Yanukovich, such as the controversial Right Sector, to disarm and leave buildings in central Kiev. There are even questions over whether Right Sector’s leaders have full control over all the group’s members.
Moscow, meanwhile, claims to have no influence over the much more heavily armed separatist groups in eastern Ukraine – though Kiev’s government and western capitals dispute this.
Eastern groups are already saying they will not disarm before Right Sector and others do in Kiev, at the very least. Denis Pushilin, self-styled leader of the “Donetsk Republic”, has gone further and said they will not leave buildings they have seized until the Kiev interim government resigns.
The agreement in Geneva to step up the presence of monitors from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe in eastern Ukraine could potentially be helpful in the medium term. But the presence of OSCE monitors in Georgia’s separatist region of South Ossetia in 2008 did not prevent a Russian invasion.
Over the longer-term, the move to decentralise power in Ukraine and give regions more autonomy is set to be fraught with difficulties and disagreements. Russia will continue to press for a maximalist approach involving “federalisation” of Ukraine – anathema to Kiev, and something that could greatly hinder the government’s hopes of securing agreement on closer integration with western Europe.
All this means the danger has barely receded that in coming days either an accidental or deliberately staged incident in which Russian-speaking Ukrainians are killed could be used as a pretext by Moscow for Russian military intervention.
It has become clear in recent weeks that Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, who took part in the Geneva talks, does not make foreign policy. That role belongs to president Vladimir Putin – and hours before the Geneva talks finished, Mr Putin made some worrying statements in an annual televised question-and-answer show.
While he “hoped” it would not be necessary to use the powers given to him last month by Russia’s Federation Council to use Russia’s army in Ukraine, Mr Putin left this option open. He repeated what he claimed was Russia’s responsibility to “protect” Russians and Russian-speakers in Ukraine.
Mr Putin also used the historical term of “Novorossiya”, or “New Russia”, for Ukraine’s southern and south-eastern regions bordering the Black Sea – noting that in tsarist times they had not been part of Ukraine.
“These are all territories which in the [1920s] were handed over by the Soviet government. Only God knows why they did this,” he added.
Having already annexed Crimea, if Russia’s president decides he wants to go further and right what he apparently sees as another historical wrong, the Geneva agreement is unlikely to present any obstacle.
by Neil Buckley
http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2014/04/geneva-deal-wont-counter-russian-resolve/
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