Former Russian President and incumbent Deputy Chair of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev listed three benefits on Telegram that his country expects to derive from next month’s Swiss “peace talks”. Russia isn’t invited to the meeting, which will only concern Zelensky’s so-called “peace formula” ultimatums. According to him, this spectacle will expose the hollowness of Ukraine’s plans, the impotence of the Western elite, and ultimately won’t stop his country’s on-the-ground gains.
These are all reasonable expectations. Beginning with the first, it was never realistic to imagine that Ukraine could coerce Russia into agreeing to Zelensky’s maximalist demands, which even include charging its own officials with war crimes. These were always just slogans for keeping Western and Ukrainian morale high, but they no longer serve that purpose after last summer’s failed counteroffensive. Continuing to chant them only further discredits those two’s cause in this proxy war.
The second point builds upon the first since the Western elite were unable to harness the resources required for Ukraine to inflict its envisaged strategic defeat on Russia. This was due to Russia beating NATO in their “race of logistics”/“war of attrition”. Extrapolating further, this outcome was completely predictable, thus meaning that the West never had a chance of achieving its maximum demands. Everything was dependent on the sanctions crushing the Russian economy, which was always unlikely.
As for the last point, “Ukraine’s Top Five Challenges Are Unsolvable”, and only suing for peace as soon as possible by unilaterally implementing a demilitarized buffer zone in the parts of Ukraine that are still under Kiev’s control east of the Dnieper could possibly get Russia to agree to freeze the conflict. That’s not being seriously considered, however, which is why the Ukrainian Intelligence Committee’s worst-case scenario of a Russian breakthrough coupled with a political uprising in Kiev is becoming more probable.
Viewed in this way, the upcoming Swiss peace talks will indeed backfire on Ukraine. Nobody seriously believes that they’ll convince Russia to withdraw from the territory that Kiev claims as its own, nor that they’ll reshape the military-strategic dynamics of this conflict in the West’s favor. They’re only going through with this spectacle for misguided soft power purposes that’ll further discredit their cause once they fail to amount to anything of tangible significance.
Even worse, the self-inflicted opportunity cost of devoting finite diplomatic resources to this doomed initiative is that the West will be even more poorly prepared than before for helping Ukraine negotiate the terms of its defeat once that moment inevitably arrives. That should be their diplomatic focus at present since it aligns with their objective interests instead of chasing the political fantasy of Russia’s defeat. This just goes to show how delusional Western diplomacy has become.
Russia might throw a wrench in the works though if it manages to achieve a military breakthrough before mid-June’s meeting, especially if this coincides with a political uprising in Kiev driven by Zelensky clinging to power on legally dubious pretexts after his term expires on May 21. In that event, the participants might be forced to seriously consider the terms of Ukraine’s negotiated defeat for the first time ever, after which the Istanbul peace process might soon resume in a new form to wrap it all up.
