Spread the love
  • Peace Still Remote in Ukraine
  • The Troubled Indo-American Relationship

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

Ukraine: Neither A Ceasefire Nor A Peace Settlement Looks Any Closer

According to the Trump administration, the frantic diplomatic activity of recent days – both in Alaska and Washington – have produced breakthrough after breakthrough.

Among the many achievements:

  • President Vladimir Putin of Russia was supposedly ready for an immanent meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
  • The Kremlin had purportedly accepted Western security guarantees for Ukraine effectively as strong NATO protection.
  • Ukraine was said to be willing to give up huge swaths of its own territory, at least for now, to end the war.

But more than a week after what Trump hailed as a groundbreaking US-Russia summit in Alaska, none of these things have actually happened.

The problem of ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine looks no less intractable.

Neither a ceasefire nor a peace settlement looks any closer.

And above all, Russia continues to pound Ukraine and its hapless citizens with fierce barrages of missiles and drones.

Both sides may be considering concessions behind closed doors that they are not yet ready to acknowledge in public (Steven Erlanger/Anton Toianovski: The New York Times/NYT, Aug. 23-24).

European leaders believe that they have Trump’s ear after their unusual group visit to the White House last week Monday and his commitment to some sort of post-settlement security assurances for Ukraine.

[Unfortunately, they did pay homage to the Emperor (without any clothes), but it is highly unlikely that they can sway him in any way].

Zelensky did survive another White House meeting without humiliation, and he sounded guardedly upbeat about the direction of the talks.

However, the gulf between Moscow and Kyiv’s positions remain immense, and that reality is crashing into the expectations set by the White House for an imminent peace.

Key issues that separate Russia & Ukraine

Territory

Before meeting with Putin in Alaska, Trump said a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia would involve “some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.”

It quickly became clear that Putin, convinced that he was winning the war, was demanding a swap tilted sharply in his favour.

He wants Ukraine to give up the more than 6,500 square kilometres of territory it still controls in the part of eastern Ukraine known as the Donbas, the region where Putin claims, falsely, that Ukraine was conducting a “genocide” of Russian speakers.

Zelensky has not ruled out territorial exchanges, but he has also not specified what those could be (NYT).

 Security Guarantees

There is considerable debate about what such guarantees – really assurances – might involve, and whether Russia would have a veto over Western plans as part of its demands for a final settlement.

But the decision here, as ever, will lie with Putin, if the negotiators get that far enough.

Some leaders have suggested an “NATO Article 5-like” commitment, a reference to NATO’s principle that an attack against one is an attack against all.

But analysts consider than ambiguous or even fanciful, given the difficulty of creating binding ties from scratch.

After all, NATO’s commitment to collective defence has been backed up by 70 years of joint exercises and deployments, intelligence sharing, joint planning, contingency plans and, crucially, American power.

Summit Meetings

Trump has said that the next step in the process should be a meeting between Putin and Zelensky, followed perhaps by a meeting of all three leaders.

He has suggested that Putin has agreed to meet with Zelensky.

But the Kremlin has poured ice water on that idea, with Lavrov, the foreign minister, saying that such meetings should be carefully prepared, “step by step”, and that talks among more senior representatives might take place first.

The Alaska summit was called suddenly, without the months of lower-level negotiations that would typically precede an encounter between the leaders of two adversarial nations.

Ceasefire

Here Trump has changed his mind.

He had been pushing for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the killing from the very start.

After initial opposition from Zelensky because he believed it would benefit Russia, the Ukrainian leader embraced the idea, saying a ceasefire was necessary before any negotiations on territory.

But Putin has resisted, first demanding that the rest of the Donbas be ceded as a precondition.

At the Alaska summit, Putin persuaded Trump to go instead for a peace treaty first, before a ceasefire, allowing Russia to continue to bomb Ukraine and Russian troops to advance, slowly and with many casualties, toward the quarter of Donetsk, a region in the Donbas, they do not yet occupy.

Zelensky, along with European leaders, is signalling that he still wants a ceasefire during any negotiations, but Trump remains unconvinced [or has now fully embraced the Russian position].

Can India and the U.S. Repair Their Troubled Relationship?  

Foreign Policy analyst Rudra Chaudhuri is of the opinion that Trump’s 50 % percent tariffs don’t need to burn the bridge. 

On July 30, U.S. President Donald Trump had announced a baseline tariff of 25 % percent on Indian exports, along with a “penalty” for buying oil and military equipment from Russia.

If India continues to purchase Russian oil, the tariff stays and may be increased.

If it starts to diversify away from buying Russian oil, then it could be reduced or removed.

Reactions in India have been severe.

The Indian Ministry of External Affairs condemned both the baseline tariff and the additional penalty as unfair, unjustified, and unreasonable.

In a statement, it pointed out that, in 2024, the European Union maintained a bilateral trade of 67.5 billion Euros in goods with Russia.

The United States, meanwhile, continued to import uranium hexafluoride, palladium, fertilizers, and chemicals from Russia for its industries.

Pundits of the U.S.- India relationship have argued that Trump “risks tanking twenty-five years of U.S-India relations.

Evan Feigenbaum pointed out that the tariff announcement is a sure route to a “slow motion catastrophe.”

Richard Rossow, an American analyst who has worked on the US-India account for decades, warned that “Washington might be missing the broader benefits of the India-U.S. relationship.”

However, no pundit or expert – including Chaudhuri – has been able to put forward plausible arguments from saving the crucial relationship, i.e. saving the US-India bridge from burning.

The writer can be reached at:

shashimalla125@gmail.com