Unhappy in Paris: Kerry, Lavrov and the First Partition of Ukraine

Rome, 31^st March 2014

Given the gulf between their countries’ positions, it’s not surprising that US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had little to show for their meeting in Paris on Sunday.

Yet a couple of things suggest that a ‘diplomatic solution’ to the crisis in Ukraine might now be more than just a bland form of words.

For the moment at least Russia seems to be stepping back from an invasion: Mr Lavrov has said publicly that Russia has ‘no intention’ of carrying one out. This might be a tactic to buy time and goodwill in those NATO capitals less disposed to Washington’s tough line. But the threat of war could resurface any time Moscow wants to apply more pressure.

America’s concession was agreeing to talk at all about anything other than sanctions—an approach unlikely to have achieved much other than Russia’s even deeper embitterment.

It’s now clear, though, that Putin is asking the West to partition Ukraine with him. He’s even getting Ukrainians to make his case. Thus, in the lead-up to Sunday’s talks, Russian media reported that in an address to the Ukrainian people, ex-president Yanukovich (in Moscow’s eyes still Ukraine’s only legitimate leader) called for a ‘referendum to determine the status of every one of Ukraine’s regions’.

And the federalized constitution Mr Lavrov argued for in Paris—enshrining Russian an official language and outlawing Ukraine’s membership of international ‘blocs’—is the same strategy the Kremlin has pursued all along: divide the country along its regional and linguistic fault lines and so prevent a disunited Ukraine gravitating into the West’s nefarious orbit, whether in the form of NATO or the EU.

The only real change is that Putin apparently now sees the ballot box as at least as effective an instrument for partitioning Ukraine as the rolling of tanks—and possibly a better one if he can win the West’s consent to it.

That Mr Kerry returned to Washington still fulminating about the ‘illegality’ of Russia’s fait accompli in Crimea and without plans to meet again with his Russian counterpart shows how tough it will be for the West to agree to such a hard-nosed, ‘Bismarckian’ solution. The problem is that it’s probably the only diplomatic outcome that will entice Russia to rule war out.

A diplomatic solution remains possible, but it doesn’t mean Mr Kerry—whose pained face on Sunday said it all—will, or even should, enjoy making it.