As Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s maximalist demands forced US President Donald Trump to cancel the US-Russia summit, here we list and decode these demands that essentially seeks Ukraine’s surrender of sovereignty instead of reading middle ground to end the war.
In a sign of rising frustration in Washington DC, US President Donald Trump reportedly cancelled a planned summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin over the Russian leaders’ pursuit of maximalist demands and refusal to hold meaningful negotiations.
The Financial Times has reported that
Russia sent a memo to the Trump administration that listed Putin’s terms to end the war — terms that what Putin has long referred to as ‘root causes’, a euphemism for demands that essentially call for Ukraine’s surrender of sovereignty.
After receiving the memo, Secretary of Marco Rubio had a tense call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and assessed that Putin did not have any willingness to negotiate, according to FT.
After receiving the assessment, Trump cancelled the summit that he had previously announced after a call with Putin, the report stated.
Here are Putin’s demands that seek Ukraine’s surrender
For many years, Putin’s terms —dubbed as ‘root causes’— have largely stayed the same that essentially seek Ukraine’s surrender of sovereignty.
In talks mediated by Turkey,
Russia formally conveyed these demands to Ukraine in June — after stating these demands orally and in policy documents for years.
In his maximalist demands, Putin has not just sought the recognition of Ukrainian territories that Russia has occupied since 2014 but has also sought the surrender of all territories it has claimed but does not occupy at the moment.
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In addition to the occupation and recognition of Ukraine’s five provinces of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, Putin has sought the creation of a
buffer zone of an unspecified length on the Ukrainian side of the new border that would essentially further reduce Ukraine’s territory. While he has not specified the length, his top security adviser, former President Dmitry Medvedev, has published a map in which the buffer zone has included almost the entire country.
In conditions echoing the Treaty of Versailles concerning Germany after the World War I, Putin has sought restrictions on the size, deployment, and equipment of Ukrainian military after the end of the war.
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With Russia’s terms to Ukraine, Putin seeks surrender — not a peace deal
Besides ruling out Ukraine’s membership of Nato, Putin has also sought to stop Ukraine from hosting foreign troops on its soil.
With his terms, Putin has not just aimed at the surrender of Ukraine’s sovereignty, but has sought to effectively reshape the Ukrainian nation’s character in Russia’s image. His social demands would effectively kill Ukrainian nationhood.
As part of his agenda for Ukraine’s social transformation into Russia’s image, Putin has sought to insert the Russian language into formal business, restore the pro-Russia Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and ban what he calls “nationalist formations” in Ukraine.
With such terms, Putin has made it clear that he has been prolonging negotiations so that he could continue his massive attacks as long as possible to pressure Ukraine into acceptance, Kseniya Kirillova, a Russia analyst at Washington DC-based Jamestown Foundation, previously told Firstpost.
“Such conditions are unacceptable for Ukraine. Putin is deliberately setting impossible conditions to prolong the negotiations. He is hoping for a summer offensive to break the will of Ukrainian society. Ukraine can only hope that President Trump will lose patience with Putin sooner than that,” said Kirillova.
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