China has a 12-point plan. Brazil offered to lead a “peace club.” The Vatican dispatched a papal trouble shooter.
Sixteen months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the number of peace plans, initiatives and offers of mediation from third parties is proliferating. What doesn’t appear to be expanding is Ukraine’s appetite to consider them.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his closest advisers have repeatedly said that while Ukraine is open to input from others, it doesn’t need intermediaries for peace negotiations.
This is because Ukraine has ruled out compromises over its territory and sovereignty and Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown no signs he’s prepared to abandon his goal of completely dominating Ukraine.
“What’s toxic about all these proposals is that as a prerequisite to start peace negotiations Ukraine should somehow have to give up some of its territory, whether that’s in Crimea and/or its eastern parts,” said Peter Beyer, a German lawmaker who is a senior member of that country’s foreign relations committee.
Beyer spoke to USA TODAY from Brazil, where he’s traveled to press this very point with senior officials in that country’s government. “On the contrary,” Beyer added, amid Ukraine’s successes on the battlefield and the confusion unleashed by an apparently failed insurrection against Russia’s armed forces, “we should be much more motivated now to help bring Ukraine to an even stronger negotiation position.”
Who’s got a peace plan for Ukraine?
Ukraine: Zelenskyy outlined a 10-point plan in November last year. It called for restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Russia affirming that as part of a United Nations charter. It also called for various security guarantees connected to nuclear safety, food exports, protection of the environment and major utilities, the release of all war prisoners and deportees, and the prosecution of alleged Russian war criminals, a demand that would currently extend to Putin. Ukraine is trying to convene a peace summit later this year with the U.S. and other G-7 countries, the European Union, Brazil, India, Turkey and others. It’s not clear if Russia would be invited.
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Russia: Not so much.
China: Beijing unveiled a 12-point plan in late February on the war’s one-year anniversary. It called for a ceasefire, protections for civilians and peace talks. It urged all parties to “avoid fanning the flames and aggravating tensions” to prevent the “crisis from further aggravating or even getting out of control.” The plan said the “sovereignty of all countries” needed to be respected and that a “Cold War mentality” should be abandoned, an apparent reference to NATO’s eastward expansion and billions of dollars of weapons sent to Ukraine by the West. The plan did not recognize that Russia has been the aggressor in this war; that its invasion was unprovoked.
Brazil: In April, Lula, Brazil’s leader, proposed convening a group of countries who would be “respected at the negotiating table” but considered impartial mediators between Ukraine and Russia. He described this as a “peace club” and named India, Indonesia and China as possible participants, along with Latin American countries. One common factor uniting these countries is they have not contributed weapons to Ukraine’s defense. And Lula ruffled diplomatic feathers when he suggested that both Ukraine and Russia were responsible for the conflict.
African leaders: Presidents and senior officials from Comoros, Egypt, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, and Zambia descended on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv in mid-June as part of a peace delegation. They arrived to air raids as Russia targeted the city with missile strikes. There were few details released about what the African delegation proposed, though it was reported to include a series of “confidence building measures” such as the release of prisoners of war, greater humanitarian support and a mutual recognition of Ukraine and Russia’s sovereignty.
After Kyiv, the delegation traveled to Moscow where it met with Putin. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the proposals would be “very difficult to implement.” Catherine Nzuki, an expert on Africa at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that the “strategic nonalignment of many African countries makes them well positioned to be neutral peace brokers to the war in Ukraine, but they are constrained by their limited leverage.”
The Vatican: Pope Francis has tasked Cardinal Matteo Zuppi with conducting a “mission” aimed at finding “paths of peace” for Ukraine and Russia. Zuppi, the Archbishop of Bologna, visited Kyiv in early June when he met with Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian and church officials. In late June he then traveled to Moscow. “The main purpose of the initiative is to encourage gestures of humanity, which can contribute to foster a solution to the current tragic situation and find ways to achieve a just peace,” the Vatican said as Zuppi arrived in Russia’s capital. No further details were provided. Zuppi previously participated in a Vatican peace mission to Mozambique, where he played a role in negotiating an end to a 17-year civil war. Zelenskyy visited the pope in Rome in May, when he told Italian television: “With all respect for His Holiness, we do not need mediators, we need a just peace.”
Indonesia: Prabowo Subianto, the Southeast Asian country’s defense minister − and an aspiring presidential candidate in Indonesia’s 2024 election − appeared to catch everyone off guard, including his own government, when he used a speech in Singapore in early June to unveil a peace plan. Subianto proposed a ceasefire, with Ukrainian and Russian forces separated by a 10-mile demilitarized zone. He suggested that the United Nations hold a vote on which side should be entitled to disputed territory. Ukraine was not impressed. Oleksii Rezkinov, Ukraine’s defense minister, said it sounded “like a Russian plan, not an Indonesian plan.” He called it “strange.”
Turkey and the Middle East: The leaders of Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have all fashioned themselves as peacemakers and met with Zelenskyy and Putin in various settings over the last 16 months. While none of these countries have made concrete headway in terms of sowing for a larger peace, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in particular has emerged as a pivotal mediator in prisoner swaps and brokering a deal that has enabled Ukraine to export grain − easing a global food crisis − from its Black Sea ports.
We need to talk about Ukraine-Russia. Or do we?
Putin has claimed that peace in Ukraine can be achieved if the U.S. and NATO stop supplying Kyiv with weapons.
“If they want to see a negotiated solution to the conflict, it’s enough for them to stop weapons supplies,” Russia’s leader said in mid-June during a meeting with Russian military correspondents and war bloggers.
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It’s not clear whether a subsequent short-lived insurgency by the Wagner private military organization has shifted Putin’s thinking on this, or if he actually meant or even believed what he said in the first place.
Dmitri Trenin, a former Russian military intelligence officer and now a political scientist at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said that Putin “reacts positively to the ideas put forward by China and other non-western countries” and blames a lack of peace talks on Ukraine for refusing to negotiate.
Yet Kyiv may have good reason to be cautious.
Dozens of Ukrainian civil society organizations released an appeal in May cautioning that any attempt to arrange a cease-fire before substantive disagreements had been resolved would allow Russia to lock-in territorial gains.
“These calls for negotiation with Putin without resistance are in reality calls to surrender our sovereignty and territorial integrity,” these groups said in a joint statement.
Trenin agrees.
“A cease-fire would not end the conflict. It will be just a pause after which the fighting will resume, at even a higher intensity,” he said, adding that he believes the Wagner revolt has strengthened, not weakened, Putin; the opposite of what many U.S. and European officials and foreign policy experts have concluded from the episode. “Putin is in a stronger position now compared to where he was when the bitter feud was raging between the people loyal to him personally,” he said, referring to the tensions between Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and senior officials in Russia’s defense ministry that apparently led to the mutiny.
“If he wants to strengthen his authority, rotate his subordinates, promote or demote them, he can do this more easily than before.”
Still, retired peace studies professor David Cortright said that it’s time for Ukraine and Russia to do more talking about how to end the war even if they don’t trust each other, or the mediators involved.
“There’s no reason to fear diplomacy. You don’t have to give in or surrender to your adversary. We know from other peace processes that the armed conflict tends to continue even as the diplomacy starts.”
Cortright added, for example, that despite justified skepticism from Ukraine and its allies over China’s peace plan he thinks it’s in Ukraine’s best interest to work with Beijing because of China’s economic leverage over Russia.
“That doesn’t mean Ukraine has to compromise over its just demands for Russia to withdraw all its troops from Ukraine’s territory − all the places that Russia has annexed,” he said.
Richard Caplan, a professor at Oxford University who has done extensive research on how wars end and the conditions that sustain peace, raised a sobering thought: He said about a quarter of wars since 1946 have ended in less than a month, and another quarter in less than a year. The rest have on average extended over a decade.
(Armed conflict in eastern Ukraine technically first erupted in 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. However, Russia did not launch its full-scale invasion of Ukraine until February 24, 2022.)
“Ultimately Ukraine has to decide what is acceptable to them,” said Caplan.
“But there’s a difference between an outcome this is envisioned and one that is achieved.”