Ukraine rejects Orbán's ceasefire plan while Russia rebuffs Erdogan's mediation offer
Ukraine rejects Orbán's ceasefire plan while Russia rebuffs Erdogan's mediation offer
But a range of global security deals provide a glimpse at a potentially winning strategy for Kyiv.
In the margins of the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Astana, Kazakhstan 3-4 July 2024, Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, offered his mediation services to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in an effort to bring the war in Ukraine to a negotiated end. This offer was promptly rejected by Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, at a subsequent press conference.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has firmly ruled out any compromises in its war with Russia, according to a senior aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky. Andriy Yermak, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, said that while Kyiv welcomed advice on how to reach a “just peace”, Ukraine is “not ready to go to the compromise for the very important things and values … independence, freedom, democracy, territorial integrity, sovereignty”.
In a nutshell, it seems, nothing much has changed in the positions of either Kyiv or Moscow, since both sides explicitly restated their ‘terms’ in the context of the recent Swiss-hosted “Summit on Peace in Ukraine”. However, the timing of these offers, and the responses to them, are interesting.
Yermak’s and Peskov’s comments came a day after Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister suggested that Kyiv should agree a ceasefire with Moscow. Orbán, who is known to be close to Vladimir Putin and who has just taken over the rotating presidency of the European Council, raised the idea during his first wartime visit to Kyiv on July 2.
Orbán has been the most sceptical of the EU leaders when it comes to European financial and military support for Ukraine. He was instrumental in delaying the agreement of a €50 billion (£42 billion) aid package for several months earlier this year.
But, despite Orbán’s reticence, the EU recently agreed a bilateral security pact with Zelensky while he visited Brussels on June 27. Under the terms of the deal, “the European Union and its Member States will contribute, for the long term and together with partners, to security commitments to Ukraine, which will help Ukraine to defend itself, resist destabilisation efforts and deter acts of aggression in the future”.
The deal with the EU is the twentieth such agreement Ukraine has recently concluded with its western allies. The first of them, with the United Kingdom, was signed on January 12, 2024, followed by Germany and France a month later, both on February 16, 2024. Since then, agreements have also been signed with Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Italy, Iceland, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United States.
Further agreements are still being negotiated, including with Czechia, Greece, Ireland, Luxemburg, and Poland.
All of these agreements have their origin in the July 12, 2023, joint declaration by the leaders of the G7. Issued a day after the Nato summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, which postponed any "invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met", the G7 statement was meant to provide Kyiv with at least some assurances of continuing western support at a time when last summer's much anticipated Ukrainian ground offensive was already beginning to stall.
These agreements, thus, represent a show of support for Ukraine, but they fall short of providing actual security guarantees. None of Kyiv’s partners are willing to deploy troops for the country’s defence, primarily because this is seen as a pathway to escalation into a full-scale confrontation between Russia and Nato.
While none of these security agreements are therefore likely to deter Putin in his war of aggression, they are far from ineffective or useless. They provide ten-year commitments to train and equip Ukraine’s armed forces, to strengthen the country’s defence industrial base and to contribute to its economic recovery.
At the same time, they reiterate the need for Russian leaders to be held accountable and for sanctions against Moscow to be maintained, and if necessary extended. All of this sends a clear signal that Ukraine’s western partners are serious about their support.
Beyond the symbolism of the sheer number of agreements, they have also had positive practical consequences for Ukraine. Kyiv’s ground offensive last year may have failed to liberate much territory, but Ukraine’s forces have decimated the Russian Black Sea fleet which had to be relocated from its traditional base in Sevastopol to ports on the Russian mainland.
This has decreased the risk of any seaborne landing by Russian forces on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and has allowed Kyiv to establish a secure maritime trade corridor in the western Black Sea to enable its agricultural exports after Russia withdrew from the Black Sea grain deal. Similarly, Ukrainian drones have been able to reach deeper and deeper into Russian territory and attack military bases, supply routes and energy infrastructure there. Together with fewer restrictions on the use of advanced military systems against Russian territory, Ukraine has gradually improved its position on the ground. This indicates that for as long as western support is forthcoming, it is unlikely that Putin’s aggression against Ukraine will ultimately succeed.
At the same time, however, the prevailing narrative of Ukrainian resilience and western support can, and should, not detract from the fact that Russia has made gains in the land war, including around the strategic town of Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region, which lies ten kilometres (6 miles) west of Bakhmut which fell to Russia after a protracted and costly battle in May 2023. Ukraine continues to suffer high levels of casualties on the battlefield, while also being targeted by Russian airstrikes against its critical national infrastructure and urban population centres.
While effective in preventing the Putin from succeeding in the war and imposing his own vision of a settlement on Ukraine, the current western strategy does not yet create a clear pathway for a Ukrainian victory either. Russia’s economy remains resilient, Moscow continues to mobilise more troops than Kyiv, and its alliances with Iran, North Korea, and China are giving it valuable economic, military, and diplomatic cover. It is not clear how long Russia can maintain this position of at least relative strength. But neither is it certain that Ukraine’s situation will continue to improve.
A return of Donald Trump to the White House after the US presidential elections in November 2024 – at present looking increasingly likely – would bring with it a resurgence of Trump’s so-called “America-first” foreign policy. The US would then probably try to force Ukraine – and its other western partners – to accept Russian terms in a negotiated settlement.
Without any real, hard security guarantees for Ukraine in such a settlement, Kyiv would find itself back where it was a decade ago. Faced with Russian occupation of Crimea and large chunks of eastern Ukraine – and with lukewarm support from the west – it had to rely on a worthless “agreement” with Russia and no assurances against further Russian aggression which eventually happened in February 2022.
Such an outcome – a US-imposed settlement that favours Russia – is plausible, but it is not a foregone conclusion. Whatever the outcomes of November’s presidential election, the multiple security agreements that Ukraine has signed over the past few months also make an alternative future conceivable in which, with western help, Kyiv can demonstrate the futility of Russian aggression by regaining more territory and provide more effective air defences for its population and infrastructure. Western military aid, and the permission to strike at Russian military bases will help disrupt the supply lines that have enabled Russia’s battlefield victories.
In this case, Putin is unlikely to look like the kind of winner that Trump likes to back and may yet come to regret having rejected Erdoğan’s mediation offer at a time when Russia was in a stronger position. This calculation creates a window of opportunity, and necessity, for Ukraine’s western partners over the next six or so months to double down on, and accelerate, their support for Kyiv and future-proof what ultimately might turn out a winning strategy in a war of attrition after all.
This is an updated and expanded version of an article for The Conversation.
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