Episode 14: Russia-Ukraine Peace Talks

Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine are on the table. To understand what’s at stake, we need to look not just at today’s negotiations but also at the long and tangled history behind these two countries. New America’s Candace Rondeaux and Ben Dalton explain how we got here and what it means for the talks unfolding now.

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. To dive deeper, order Candace Rondeaux’s new book, Putin’s Sledgehammer.

Transcript

Candace Rondeaux: There is a problem with the ceasefire proposal. I mean, this is a little bit of heresy to say this out loud because I think a lot of people kind of see what’s been offered, ceasefire first, then real negotiations, has been the kind of formula that the Europeans and the Ukrainians have been really pressing for. The reality is the United States, despite the fact that it is really the main guarantor of security on the European continent for the West, just doesn’t want to be in front anymore.

Shannon Lynch: Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine are once again in motion. To truly grasp the stakes, we must examine not only the current negotiations but also the complex history that has shaped this conflict. Why and how have Russia and Ukraine become such fierce adversaries? Where do the peace talks stand today? And what role does the United States actually play in all of this?

Welcome to Democracy Deciphered, where we explore the past, present, and future of American democracy. I’m your host, Shannon Lynch. Today, I’m joined by two leading voices on the Russia-Ukraine talks, Candice Rondeaux and Ben Dalton.

Candice Rondeaux is a global expert on international security and irregular warfare. Her book, Putin’s Sledgehammer, explores how mercenaries and oligarchs became central to Kremlin power. She directs the Future Frontlines program at New America, and leads its Planetary Politics initiative, while also serving as a professor of practice at Arizona State University. A former Washington Post bureau chief in South Asia and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, she has reported from conflict zones worldwide and advised the U.S. Institute of Peace and International Crisis Group. Her analysis appears regularly in outlets like the New York Times, Financial Times, and Lawfare. Candice holds a BA in Russian area studies from Sarah Lawrence College, an MA in journalism from NYU, and an MPP from Princeton University.

Also with us today is Ben Dalton. Ben is a program manager for Future Frontlines at New America, where he helps lead research on how emerging technologies and social shifts will shape the future of security. Before joining New America, he worked as a journalist, communications officer, and producer for BuzzFeed News, World Learning, and International Crisis Group. His reporting and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, The Daily Beast, PBS NewsHour, Al Jazeera, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has also produced media and podcasts for several national political campaigns and reported from global hotspots, including Ukraine, Georgia, Libya, and Cambodia. Ben holds a dual MA in Russian and Slavic studies and Journalism from New York University and a BA in international relations from Brown University.

Candice, Ben, thank you so much for joining me.

Candace Rondeaux: Good to be here.

Ben Dalton: Happy to.

Shannon Lynch So, for listeners who might be new to this topic, can you explain what peace talks between Russia and Ukraine actually mean in practical terms?

Candace Rondeaux: Well, to talk about peace, you got to talk about war too, right? Like, what’s the origin of this conflict? Where does it come from, a little bit? So I just want to back up and maybe provide a little context for how it is that we arrive at this moment where Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, you know, these three heads of state for Russia, Ukraine, the United States are all trying to triangulate and figure out a way forward and not to mention Europe, we can get into that later.

The origin story of the war in Ukraine depends on who’s talking, right? It’s always like that with a war. It’s really important to understand that for Vladimir Putin, who is a former KGB agent who spent most of his life spying on people in Eastern Germany, spying on people at home, and kind of edged his way up to the top of the Kremlin’s power pyramid at a time of really dramatic change in Russia’s history. From his perspective, the war is about a promise that wasn’t kept by the West, which was not to expand NATO and to ensure that Russia’s spheres of influence would be respected. Those are the two big, as he likes to say, root causes. There are other historical causes that go all the way back to the 1780s and Catherine the Great. But those are kind of arcane.

But the other big piece of the war that’s kind of unspoken but is implicit in the strategy that Putin has adopted over the last three years since he’s been in power is concern about Russia’s ability to reach markets beyond its borders. It’s a big country, 11 time zones, and one of the biggest things it exports is energy, resources like gas and oil, and also critical minerals of all kinds. It’s a big gold exporter, and the corridor runs through Ukraine as far as Putin is concerned. So those things have always been kind of on the table. There are other things about clashes over Ukrainian culture versus Russian culture and language, but that’s always, the center of it has been how Russia can get access to these territories that lie on its Western border. Particularly Crimea, which lies also on the pathway to the Black Sea, which is absolutely critical because it’s the only warm water port that Russia has access to.

So that’s kind of the origin story, I think, and I think Ben is probably going to be really good at unpacking, you know, from like 2014 forward, how did we get here?

Ben Dalton: Yeah, right. So, we think of this current state of the war as starting in 2022, but really, Russia and Ukraine have been at war with each other since 2014, when Russia essentially seized the Crimean Peninsula, all the while denying that it was doing so, orchestrated a pretty patently non-legitimate referendum on the peninsula that basically annexed it outright, which led into nearly a decade of, you can’t really say a frozen conflict because there was just constant exchange of just fighting along the line of contact that resulted in quite a number of deaths.

I think there’s many reasons and many arguments for why Putin decided in 2022 that he was no longer happy with the status quo and pushed forward with the full-scale invasion. But one of them was that he essentially felt as though he was losing in slow motion over a long period of time. And decided to proceed with this full-scale invasion that had the immediate goal of toppling the government in Kiev and really turning Ukraine into a client state along the same lines as what you see today in Belarus.

Your question was about the talks initially, and the two sides really started talking right from the start. They had direct communication. This is not at the level of president-to-president, but on the level of official-to-official. To establish things like humanitarian corridors. And after those initial weeks, it really turned into pretty low-level talks centered around exchanges of prisoners’ bodies from those who were killed in action. And it’s only really in the last couple of months, beginning of the summer, that the two sides have more formally sat down in a series of talks that have been organized in Istanbul. Again, these are not president-to-president level or anything nearly that high up. It’s more on the level of, you know, officials, essentially.

But so far, they’ve not made much progress because the two sides are pretty far apart in their demands. And then lastly, there’s been efforts on the part of European leaders, American leaders to conduct a kind of like shuttle diplomacy, which is really what you’re seeing Trump doing right now, where he’s obviously met recently with Vladimir Putin, then subsequently met with Zelenskyy and a number of European leaders here in Washington, DC. And this is preliminary to any kind of summit that would involve everybody at a high level. That is his attempt, as he sees it, to get people closer to being on the same page, such that those kinds of talks might maybe be productive.

Candace Rondeaux: Yeah, if I could maybe just add some color to like why it’s just been official-to-official. You know, one of the points that we’re seeing come out of the European conversation with Trump right at the White House is this idea of a trilateral meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin and Trump, which has been talked about, but almost kind of as a fantasy. And one reason that there is a barrier to doing something like that, why we haven’t more high level official engagement over the last, let’s say, four years since this war really began is because of just extreme levels of distrust between the two leaders, between Putin and Zelenskyy.

Those Istanbul talks that Ben referenced that started in early 2022 were also overshadowed by multiple attempts by Russia to assassinate Zelenskyy. And in fact, if I remember correctly, one of the first meetings that happened in Istanbul, there are allegations that there was an attempt to poison the delegation, a Russian attempt to poison, the delegation that arrived in Istanbul to negotiate. So there’s not a lot of love lost between these two leaders. There’s a lot of distrust. And then the distrust also extends to the relationship between Trump and Zelenskyy.

We have to remember that in 2019, the relationship between Ukraine and the United States, when Trump was president the first time, was also a really sticky point. And that infamous phone call that happened where Trump essentially seemed to press Zelenskyy for a favor, as you said, to dig into the Hunter Biden case and allegations of corruption in the Biden administration during his time as vice president under Obama. That became just a huge scandal, of course, led to the impeachment trial that really blew up Trump’s presidency that first time around. So there’s a lot of distrust and bitter feelings between all three of these guys.

Shannon Lynch: Thanks for that additional context, Candice. So yeah, just like a bit of a follow-up question, all of this historical background is really, really helpful in understanding this, but I’m wondering for either one of you, if there’s anything you want to add, if we go even further back pre-Trump, pre-Putin in the history between Ukraine and Russia in the previous century that might’ve fed into this happening now.

Candace Rondeaux: Yeah, I mean, the geography is really storied, right? We mentioned the Crimean Peninsula. Russia has fought three wars over the control of the peninsula, and every single time, it’s kind of come up short, basically.

In fact, you know, interesting little tidbit is the war that Russia fought in Crimea, for control of Crimea, back in the 1860s with the British resulted in bankrupting the empire at the time, right, and that bankruptcy was the thing that forced, or at least influenced, the czar’s decision, it was Alexander II, to sell a big chunk of its territory, we now know it as Alaska, to the United States for basically pennies on the dollar. So that kind of adds a little layer to the summit that we just saw in Alaska is this kind of history that goes all the way back to Russia’s attempts to constantly battle really two big rivals in Russian history. First one is always the British Empire, and then the second one later became the United States. And those tensions have played out over so many years.

I think a lot of people know the history of the Cold War. But if you fast forward to 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed, there’s another story that started to unfold, which was the breakup of the Soviet Union meant all of these different territories and divisions and borders that had been basically penned by Lenin and then later Stalin, started to be erased, started to be erased by treaties and also by just sort of democratic action. And Ukraine, as early as 1954, had gained a degree of autonomy and independence through a deal that Stalin made. But then in 1991, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine declared its independence. And it’s at that moment that we start to see the emergence of these extreme ultra-nationalist forces inside Russia. I’ve written a lot about these people. I spent a lot of time thinking about them, studying them. These are people who were in the military, who suddenly found themselves on the outs, and they were part of this big divorce that happened with all these Soviet territories in terms of military bases, and especially Ukraine. And the divisions that kind of came out of that resulted in a number of different big events. In 1993, there was a putsch, an attempt to overthrow Boris Yeltsin. And then fast forward just a little bit further, there were all these different sort of conflicts in Georgia, neighboring Georgia, for independence.

But the moment that everybody, of course, remembers is the 2004 Orange Revolution, which basically pitted democratic forces inside of Ukraine against the Kremlin, which had sort of stuck its hand in the election process and put its thumb on the scale of its favorite candidate, which of course was Viktor Yanukovych. And that was the beginning, I think, for many people, especially of a certain generation. People who are now, let’s say, in their 50s in Ukraine have a very distinct memory of that moment because they would have been in their 20s or early 30s, and it would have been the moment of their flowering as kind of political beings while democracy is unfolding. So these color revolutions, this Orange Revolution, was a huge spark for the conflict between the Kremlin and Putin in particular and Ukraine.

Shannon Lynch: Ben, was there anything you wanted to add there?

Ben Dalton: Just, you know, in terms of the history here, I think one thing that it’s always useful to bear in mind is that this is fundamentally about empire and it’s about Putin’s attempt to protect and expand and reconstitute what is fundamentally Russian imperial power. And there’s any number of historical points you could go back to. Putin himself is a huge history buff, so he is extremely conscious of all of these angles, but, you know, towards the top of this conversation, Candice mentioned Catherine the Great in the 18th century seized Crimea, which is one of those pivotal historical moments you can point to where, you know Russia, it was already an empire at this point, but sort of really asserted itself as a major European imperial power. And the symbolism, the power of that symbolism has never gone away to a certain elite class of Russian thinkers, which I think very much includes Vladimir Putin. And it’s what animates these ultra-nationalist groups that Candice was also referring to. But there’s the symbolism of it, and then there’s reality on the ground. And these things can often differ significantly.

So, just to pick one example, I believe there was a poll that was done in Crimea 2013, so the year before it was essentially seized by Russia, and it literally asked, what percentage of you believe that Crimea should be detached and fully annexed by Russia, and the number of people who said that yes, that is the future that they wanted was in the 20s, 20 percent or so. So this was very far from like a majority position, very far from what people who actually lived there wanted, but again, there’s often a disconnect between sort of the power of imperial symbolism and the reality on the ground.

Shannon Lynch: Yeah, thank you for that historical context. That’s really interesting. So where are we right now? And I know, you know, we’re recording this on Wednesday, August 20. And things are very much a work in progress. So by the time this comes out, some of this might change a little bit. But as of today, where do things stand right now in terms of negotiation? And then you kind of mentioned the difference between the symbolism of everything and the reality on the ground. So, I would love to also hear in speaking about what is happening right now, you know, what is theater, and what is actually substantial change that we are seeing right now. Or is there none?

Candace Rondeaux: Well, I mean, look, we’ve talked a lot about the Russian perspective so far and like the Russian historical picture, but it’s important to also talk about the Ukrainian perspective, which, you know, for the vast majority of Ukrainians, say before 2022, there was broad consensus that some of the bargains that they had made during the Soviet collapse, for instance, giving up their nuclear weapons, were all about trying to be able to join the rest of the world. And two things Ukraine has always wanted in this war, in the outcomes, one was to get their assurance that they could join the EU free and clear, become part of both that culture and that union, but also, of course, become part of the trade association and to join one of the largest markets in the world, one of the largest economies in the world, whereby, of course, Ukraine would kind of pull itself up by its bootstraps. That’s been a really big bone of contention with Russia, and it remains a demand. But interestingly, unlike where we were at the beginning of the war in early 2022, nobody’s actually talking about the EU as a sticking point anymore, like joining the EU as a sticking point.

And what’s the real sticking point from both the Russian, Ukrainian, and American point of view is joining NATO. And that’s the part that’s not theater, right? There’s a lot of posturing around NATO and all these conversations about what we call security guarantees. But the reality is Ukraine fully understands it will be very difficult to defend itself if it doesn’t have the backing of a very large alliance like NATO. And this has been this idea of an Article Five, all for one, one for all defense is what Ukraine has been after for a long time, it’s part of its constitution. So that’s not theater, but Trump has kind of treated it as theater in both times in his presidency. And interestingly, Europe has responded by kind of like leaning into the pageantry of that.

There are other things that are a mix of both theater and real, but at this stage in the war, unlike 2014, where there was a lot of sort of shadow war going on, the destruction that’s taking place in Ukraine you’ve seen on the front line almost 500,000 soldiers on the Ukrainian side and almost a million soldiers on the Russian side. That’s a lot of just military casualties. Nobody even knows the real number of civilian casualties. The civilian casualties, the strikes on critical infrastructure like electric grids, gas, all of those things are actually really serious sticking points. And I think reparations and reconstruction will be very big sticking points in the negotiations. They haven’t come up in any of the headlines because Trump has, I think, to his great detriment, and the detriment of the position of the United States, has really swallowed some of the talking points from Putin and kept the focus on these territorial exchanges that Putin has demanded. But that’s not the whole of the war and certainly not from the Ukrainian perspective.

Ben Dalton: Yeah, and what’s also, you know, bears mentioning here as being quite real, shaping this entire sort of new broaching of potential talks, is just the battlefield reality, which is that, you know for quite some time now, Russia has been advancing slowly and at tremendous human cost, you now, massive casualties as Candice just mentioned, but still nonetheless advancing. And it, at this point, you know, I’ll say that I’m not a military expert, but it seems unlikely that Ukraine has the capacity to pull off something like you saw with the counteroffensive a couple of years ago where they were able to retake vast amounts of territory that had been seized by Russia. So I think, you now, Putin feels as though he has the upper hand and that time is playing to his benefit. Which helps to account for why there’s such a gap between the two sides in terms of the need for an immediate ceasefire, which Ukraine has been pushing for quite heavily.

But at the same time, another thing that’s quite real that he has to contend with is he has created a fully mobilized wartime economy that has so far managed to prop up the Russian economy, I think, much more so than quite a few experts predicted a couple of years ago. But that economy is showing signs of wobbling. There’s predictions that the Russian war machine can continue running for maybe 12 more months or so before it starts to hit some very severe constraints, some of which are downstream of the economic sanctions imposed on Russia, which sort of accrue over time. And also, some wobbles to just how hot the economy is running. So I think Putin is attempting to lock in what he sees as an advantageous position while he still can.

Candace Rondeaux: I would just add, like, the thing that’s really interesting about this moment for Russia and its position is actually the United States has never been in a better position to have more leverage in terms of sanctions and imposing even more pain on Russia. You know, there’s been the talk about tertiary sanctions on India and China for buying Russian oil, and we’ve seen a few Indian refineries have been sanctioned and put on the list. And so there’s already been effectively some action. I think that certainly was a big motivator for Putin, is just seeing that actually what Trump said actually may be executed on.

But what’s interesting to me is a couple of years ago, there were a lot of specialists who paid attention to like the Russian economy and look at the central bank and how it’s operating. And I remember talking to one in particular who’s pretty astute. And she predicted that this would be the moment, 2025, when Russia would feel the most pain from sanctions that we’ve already imposed from the United States and from the EU. And I have to wonder a little bit out loud if whether or not all of those prognostications that economists were doing, their calculations, really frankly, both on the American side and the Russian side, haven’t spooked the Kremlin a little, the level of accuracy in terms of the timing, because you can almost start to do some calculations on what it would look like if Trump were to go through with, you know, any kind of turning up the pressure on India or China for buying oil, I mean, that would precipitate almost imminent collapse, basically, because right now, oil prices are so low that Russia isn’t able to really profit in the same way.

And we’ve even seen at the edges of Russia’s kind of grand power projection, particularly like in Africa, a remaking of a bunch of deals where Russia was supposed to be kind of providing security assistance in exchange for extractives access to mines and gold and so forth, in places like Mali. And very recently, there’s been some reporting that Russia’s changed its tune. Instead of gold now, they want straight-up cash, and I think that’s pretty telling about where Russia is right now.

Shannon Lynch: So, before we get to what the future might look like, I would love it if, briefly, one of you could just explain what has happened in the past week. For maybe our listeners that have just seen headlines and they saw Putin was in Alaska and something was happening in DC, right? Can you just briefly explain what has been happening within the past week in the progress of these talks?

Candace Rondeaux: We’ve seen a super fluid situation. That’s the most remarkable part, I think, and that’s why it’s so hard to even talk about what happened, where we’re going next, because every day there’s like a new development, sometimes hour by hour.

And the very first thing I think that kicked things off was, first of all, those sanctions that I mentioned on a couple of Indian refineries, Trump, after threatening on Truth Social to start imposing these third-party sanctions against India and China for buying Russian oil, he apparently moved on it. That seemed to move the needle in terms of Russia having a little bit more appetite for conversation.

And very quickly, like within 24, 48 hours, we heard then that Trump was sending his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, back to Moscow for yet another conversation with Putin and his retinue in Moscow. And there, what was interesting, you know, notable for people who are geeks and who about Russia, was that Witkoff met not just with Putin, but also with a guy named Dmitriev, who is essentially like the head of their sovereign wealth fund and kind of the equivalent of our Secretary of Treasury. So clearly there was even just his presence there was a pretty strong signal that sanctions was the number one priority topic for that conversation and then whatever else was kind of secondary. And then we saw that Steve Witkoff kind of got the terms garbled, he came back, and there were like three or four different versions of what Putin actually said he was going to do, lots of retractions, adjustments. And then there was this idea that maybe Trump and Putin would meet in Dubai, or at least in the UAE, in the Emirates, which would have been probably more logical.

And then the surprise, which was actually, you know, scratch that, we’re going to go to Alaska. And I think actually for most of Washington, especially foreign policy watchers and people who are involved and kind of trying to understand what’s going on with the US-Russia relations, that was a huge shock. Because let’s just point out here that Putin is somebody who hasn’t visited the United States since 2007, but also is a war criminal. At least he has been accused by the International Criminal Court of several counts of being involved in war crimes. And he’s not even actually been able to travel very much outside of the country.

So his appearance in Alaska was a big show, red carpet, a big flyover by B-2 stealth bomber right as he was arriving, a ride in the beast. There’s a lot of pageantry and a lot of plans and a lots of posturing, but the meeting lasted all of like 90 minutes maximum. The lunch was scrubbed and Trump said it, you don’t have a deal until there’s a deal. And he came up basically empty-handed.

And so where we landed with that was then, I think Europe, in particular, France, Germany, Finland, they realized that what was probably next was another potential debacle in the White House where Zelenskyy and Trump would meet. And in order to kind of avoid that, they really pulled out all the stops and showed a unified force and showed up on the doorstep of the White House with Zelenskyy in a suit, notably, and actually had a rather civil conversation with the President of the United States. And I note that JD Vance, who had been a little bit of an attack dog in the last meeting between Zelenskyy and Trump in February, was sitting on the back bench at the kiddie table. So I think there was a lot of intentionality about trying not to repeat the same mistakes on both sides.

Ben Dalton: It has been interesting to see the sort of little maneuvers that Trump seems to be making as part of all of this process. And, you know, the caveat here is, of course, it’s Trump. He’s famously unpredictable. So, you know, who can say what of this will actually remain a commitment going forward.

But you know in the wake of his conversation with Putin, he appeared to move significantly towards the Russian position supporting this idea of so-called like land swaps, which, it is important to know what that euphemism actually refers to, which is basically Russia is demanding that Ukraine cede to it a big chunk of territory, mostly in the Donetsk Oblast, that it does not control, that is still in Ukrainian hands, essentially surrendering a big chunk of Ukrainian territory, which Zelenskyy has repeatedly said that he is unwilling to do. This has all kinds of pretty serious effects if it were to actually happen, everything from, you know, ceding a really important defensive line that would be part of Ukraine’s long-term defense to, you know, obviously consigning hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to sort of Russian control, which in other territories has resulted in interrogations, torture, deaths, mass imprisonment, filtration camps, everything else. Obviously, there’s the sort of symbolic nature of ceding land that has been defended at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives as well. So, you know, Trump did seem to make some significant movement towards at least, you know, saying that something like a so-called land swap might be acceptable.

And then following the talk or the meeting in the White House with Zelenskyy and the European leaders, he initially sort of hemmed and hawed at this question of whether U.S. troops themselves could potentially be part of some kind of peacekeeping force in Ukraine and then later ruled that out. And said that maybe the U.S. could play a role in terms of air power. So, the important thing to note there, I think, is that he does seem to be taking seriously on some level the idea that the U.S. Would have a role to play in some kind of security guarantee to Ukraine, which I think is going to be absolutely essential to any kind of deal that might eventually get put together.

Candace Rondeaux: Yeah, but I mean, like all of that, to be honest, is very much motivated by the usual bottom line, which is what’s in it for the U.S. And one thing that came out of these discussions between Trump, the European delegation, and Zelenskyy was an offer by Ukraine to purchase American weapons through the Europeans, using them as the, kind of, go between to the tune of 90 billion to 100 billion dollars. That is a lot of money. I don’t know exactly where Ukraine would get that money, although I’m sure there are some discussions on the sideline about what could be done, for instance, with the existing interest from assets that now are in European banks that belong to Russia. So there’s kind of a cash flow prospect there.

But you know, the other thing that’s interesting about Trump’s kind wiggling on whether the U.S. would provide a security guarantee, I think we all mostly understand that he’s not the president who’s going to be boots on the ground. He’s never going to be that president. But you know, air cover, air defense, intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, those are things that frankly the Europeans just can’t provide at the level that the United States does. And there’s money in it, actually. At the end of the day, the more the U.S. provides in terms of kind of that kind of gear, the more it assures its own defense industrial base keeps ticking. And Europe is a really important client. And maybe there’s some understanding of that now that wasn’t there with Trump before, but what he doesn’t seem to get is that the closer Russia is able to come to the borders of Poland, the harder it’s going to be to defend Europe. And maybe implicit in some of the thinking is that we don’t care or shrug. We didn’t really have any intention of honoring the Article Five call for collective defense anyway, so be it. But I actually don’t think that’s a position that is tenable even in today’s United States where there is so much tension between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party over U.S.-Russia relations.

Shannon Lynch: So, let’s say we’re talking optimistically here. If peace talks were to move forward successfully, what would the first tangible signs of progress look like for both Ukraine and the broader international community?

Candace Rondeaux: Maybe some agreements on navigation of the Black Sea would be, I think, a pretty important priority for both sides. That’s actually strangely low-hanging fruit because both Russia and Ukraine really need to have free access to the Black Sea in order to export their goods. For Ukraine, obviously, some of the biggest exports are grain and agricultural products, and so forth. For Russia, it’s arms, some agricultural products, some energy products, and so forth. So for both sides if we start to see anything that kind of broaches that, because that’s actually a really substantive part of the disagreements over how that division on the territorial line will take place if we see any movement there any kind of guarantee, for instance, that Ukraine will refrain from striking the Kerch bridge, which is this bridge that goes runs from Russia across into Crimea and allows the transport of goods and services basically across this land bridge that Russia has been so keen to secure. If Ukraine would maybe refrain from striking the bridge in certain parts of the territory, maybe Russia would allow a little bit more free passage and give up for now its attacks on Odesa, which is another port city on the Black Sea that’s been kind of under a lot of pressure. So I would be looking for that. I think that would be like a super substantive sign of real genuine change in the negotiating process, I wonder what Ben would think.

Ben Dalton: Yeah, I think the very encouraging sign would be any period of ceasefire that was actually observed and recognized by both sides, even if it’s not a permanent one. You know, you’ve had things like Russia has unilaterally declared that because of this holiday or that holiday, they’re going to temporarily declare a ceasefire, but even these very limited, essentially symbolic ceasefires were not really honored. I mentioned earlier that Putin believes that time is more on his side than it is on the Ukrainian side, which helps to explain why there’s such a gap between the two sides in terms of how important an immediate ceasefire along the current line of contact is or would be. I think that if you saw Putin and the Russian side agree to a ceasefire of truly any length of time that was then actually honored, it would be indicative of what they see as, you know, a bit of a concession, which would then maybe point towards a willingness to engage. And I won’t say good faith, but better faith than we’ve seen so far.

Candace Rondeaux: But there is a problem with the ceasefire proposal. I mean, this is a little bit of heresy to say this out loud because I think a lot of people kind of see what’s been offered, you know, ceasefire first, then real negotiations, has been the kind of formula that the Europeans and the Ukrainians have been really pressing for. The reality is it didn’t work for Minsk I, which was this negotiating process over the incursion in 2014, that led to a ceasefire that was very shaky that collapsed within roughly a year or less than a year, actually, and resulted in huge clashes and lots of casualties. And then there was Minsk II, another agreement. And in both of those instances, a lot of people had a lot different reasons for why it went wrong.

But one reason was the United States was not a guarantor of those agreements. It was more in the background. The Obama administration didn’t really want to be in the center of that. And this has been a perennial problem in the United States. Despite the fact that it is really the main guarantor of security on the European continent for the West, just doesn’t want to be in front anymore. And that puts the Europeans in a really difficult position. It puts Ukraine in a very difficult position, and I think Putin is not wrong to say, well, if there’s nobody in the background like a heavyweight like the U.S. to ensure that there’ll be consequences if a ceasefire is breached, then why should we bother, right? It’s a little cynical, but it’s really true that there have always been problems with monitoring ceasefires. You would need something like a North Korea, South Korea-level arrangement, and nobody, not a single party to this conflict, is prepared to go there yet.

Shannon Lynch: Well, we’ll be watching closely, and I can imagine that the three of us may meet again to talk about updates. But for now, Ben, Candice, I really appreciate you explaining these really complex topics, and thanks so much for joining me today.

Candace Rondeaux: Thank you.

Ben Dalton: My pleasure.

Trent Cokley: This was a New America production. Our executive producer and host is Shannon Lynch. Our producers are Joe Wilkes, David Lanham, Joel Reinstra, and Trenton Cokley. Social media by Maika Moulite. Visuals by Alex Briñas. Media outreach by Heidi Lewis. Please rate, review, and subscribe to Democracy Deciphered wherever you like to listen.