A few weeks ago, President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke on the phone for over two hours. The “very productive” conversation led to plans for a meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov, to be followed by a meeting between Trump and Putin in Budapest. Hopes ran high.
But soon, the White House placed massive sanctions on Russian oil, and the promised Trump–Putin meeting was off.
What happened? According to reporting by the Financial Times, the phone call between Rubio and Lavrov was “tense.” Days later, Russia’s foreign ministry sent a memo to the U.S. that held to Moscow’s original demand to address the root causes of the war, including a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO. Rubio told Trump that Russia was firm on its “maximalist” demands and showed “no willingness to negotiate.”
But that’s not quite right. To be sure, Putin has made clear since before the war began, including in the security proposal that Russia sent both the U.S. and NATO in December 2021, that the preconditions for not invading Ukraine included barring it from NATO and protecting the ethnic Russians of the eastern Donbas region. Moscow views the military and cultural attack on the Donbas as an existential threat to the ethnic Russians living in Ukraine and the expansion of NATO to Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia. Both are seen as matters of survival, and neither is negotiable; hence, the intransigence.
From Russia’s perspective, however, the demands are not “maximalist” but simply the demands to have Western promises that were already made finally implemented.
Two promises were made. The most recent was meant to address the crisis in the Donbas. The U.S.-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 ushered in a monist, ethno-nationalist version of Ukraine that trampled on the pluralist version of the nation that ethnic Russians had hoped for. The Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015, brokered by Germany and France and agreed to by Ukraine and Russia, were meant to give Ukraine the opportunity to keep the Donbas and the Donbas the opportunity for peace and the pluralism they desired by peacefully returning the Donbas to Ukraine while granting it a level of autonomy.
The Minsk agreements promised a diplomatic solution and protection of the cultural rights of ethnic Russian Ukrainians. But the Minsk agreement was never implemented, because it was never meant to be implemented. Each of Putin’s partners in the Minsk process have now admitted that the agreements were a deceptive soporific designed to lull Russia into a ceasefire with the promise of a peaceful settlement while actually buying Ukraine the time it needed to build up an armed forces capable of achieving a military solution.
Then-German chancellor Angela Merkel said that the Minsk agreements were “able to buy the time Ukraine needed to better fend off the Russian attack.” She has admitted that the goal of the negotiations was not a peaceful solution but the enabling of a military one: “[T]he 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time” and Kiev “used this time to get stronger, as you can see today.”
When France’s François Hollande was asked if he "believe[s] that the negotiations in Minsk were intended to delay Russian advances in Ukraine,” he responded, “Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point.” He added that “Ukraine has strengthened its military posture” and that “it is the merit of the Minsk agreements to have given the Ukrainian army this opportunity.”
Petro Poroshenko, President of Ukraine at the time of the negotiations, has completed the confession, saying that the “great diplomatic achievement” of the Minsk agreement was that “we kept Russia… away from a full-sized war.” Poroshenko told the Ukrainian media and other news outlets, “We had achieved everything we wanted. Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war—to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.”
Instead of diplomacy and peace, the people of the Donbas were threatened both militarily and culturally. In the weeks before the Russian invasion, Ukraine intensified its military attacks on Donbas. As early as February 2021, “plans [had been] drawn up” and troops were “preparing” for “offensive operations in urban areas” of Donbas. Ruslan Khomchak, then the commander-in-chief of Ukrainian armed forces, said in an interview that Ukraine was “ready today” “for an offensive” in Donbas.
By 2022, preceding the Russian buildup on its own western border with Donbas, Ukraine had massed almost 60,000 elite troops, accompanied by drones, along that border. There was “genuine alarm,” Richard Sakwa says, that Ukraine was about to escalate the seven year old civil war and invade the largely ethnic Russian Donbas region. At around this time, in February of 2022, the alarm was heightened by dramatically increased Ukrainian artillery shelling into the Donbas that was observed by the Border Observer Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
As mentioned, the attack was not only military, but cultural. The ethnic Russians of Donbas would suffer attacks on their language, their culture, their religion, their media, their rights, and their property.
Zelensky has banned political parties who defended the cultural rights of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians. He has restricted and censored media and violated the constitution by restricting religious organizations linked to the ethnic Russians of Ukraine. He has advanced a monist vision that leaves no room for anything ethnically Russian. Russian culture has been largely forced out of the public sphere. The Russian language, spoken by so many in Donbas, has been excluded from the service sector and targeted in media, books, films, and music, though the Ukrainian constitution guarantees, “[In Ukraine] the free development, use and protection of Russian, and other languages of national minorities of Ukraine, is guaranteed.”
Fearing for their culture and their safety, in May 2014 referendums, 89.7 percent of the Donbas voted for self rule, and 96.2 percent of Lugansk voted for independence. Moscow did not recognize the results but said that the will of the people should be respected. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 98 percent of Luhansk and 99 percent of Donetsk voted to join Russia. Though the accuracy and legitimacy of the referendums can be questioned, the results approximately reflect the historical and contemporary mood of the region.
The people of the Donbas have long sought Russia’s protection, and Russia has long sought to provide it. The U.S. and its Western partners have criticized the referendums and Russia’s response by citing the United Nation Charter’s principle of the territorial integrity of existing states. But Russia has responded by citing the Charter’s equally binding principle of people’s right of self-determination. And, as Lavrov has argued on more than one occasion, the 1970 UN Declaration “seals the duty of states to respect the territorial integrity of states” on the condition that they are “conducting themselves in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples… and thus possessed of a government representing the whole people belonging to the territory.”
The second promise that was made was that NATO would not expand to Ukraine and Russia’s borders. This promise had two parts. The first, as is now clear from declassified documents, is that NATO promised Gorbachev that the military alliance would not expand east beyond Germany. The promise may even have risen to the level of a deal, stating that if Russia allows a united Germany to remain in NATO, then NATO will not expand east.
The promise was made not only by NATO, but by Ukraine. Article IX of the 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, “External and Internal Security,” says that Ukraine “solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs. . ..” That promise was later enshrined in Ukraine’s constitution, which committed Ukraine to neutrality and prohibited it from joining any military alliance.
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In 2019, Ukraine amended the constitution, with neither vote nor referendum, to include a mandate for all future governments to seek membership in NATO.
Lavrov has said that Russia “recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine back in 1991, on the basis of the Declaration of Independence, which Ukraine adopted when it withdrew from the Soviet Union.” He then pointed out that “one of the main points for [Russia] in the declaration was that Ukraine would be a non-bloc, non-alliance country; it would not join any military alliances.” In an interview last week, Lavrov again said that “we recognized Ukraine on the basis of its own Declaration of Independence and its Constitution.”
The U.S. and the West have accused Putin of being unwilling to compromise Moscow’s maximalist demands. But from Russia’s perspective, such demands are not maximalist or unreasonable, but amount only to the demand that past promises be implemented. And they are unwilling to negotiate those promises because, from Russia’s perspective, the Minsk promise is existential for the ethnic Russians of Donbas, and the NATO promise is existential for Russia. Negotiations will go no further until the West recognizes that Russia will not stop fighting nor negotiate away such Western promises.
