The mainstream media continuously points out that while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has expressed readiness to accept the Trump administration’s proposed thirty-day ceasefire without preconditions, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said only that he supports the idea of a ceasefire while attaching preconditions that render it unworkable.
Neither claim is true. Zelensky has attached preconditions, and Putin’s preconditions are not a priori designed to render a ceasefire unworkable.
Zelensky has said, not that he has no preconditions, but that “We do not set conditions that complicate anything.” Though largely omitted from the mainstream narrative, Zelensky has agreed to negotiations with certain key preconditions. According to reporting by The Independent, Kiev stipulates that negotiations must guarantee the return of children abducted by Russia and of Ukrainian civilians illegally held by Russia. Two key red lines are that no territory beyond that already occupied by Russia be ceded and that adequate security guarantees be given. Those security guarantees, Zelensky has previously made clear, must be NATO membership or must be international forces that include the United States.
Though those two key red lines have escaped criticism, they are not categorically different from Putin’s key preconditions. Putin, too, has made territorial demands to address Ukraine’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements and to protect the rights and lives of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. And Putin, too, has made security demands to address NATO’s failure to implement its promise not to expand east, a broken promise that has made its way all the way to Ukraine and threatened Russia’s security. The Kremlin has recently called this its own “ironclad” security guarantee, and the Russian readout of the conversation between Trump and Putin refers to “the root causes of the crisis” and “Russia’s legitimate interests in the field of security.”
Putin has been criticized for delaying negotiations by insisting on a number of points, including ensuring effective control and monitoring of the ceasefire along the entire line of combat and controlling the rearming of the Ukrainian armed forced during the ceasefire. But the first is essential in any implementation of a ceasefire, and the second is not wholly unreasonable given the reality on the battlefield.
The New York Times has led the charge in ridiculing Putin and dismissing his willingness to negotiate. In a March 19 piece, The Times insists that “[a]lthough much of what Vladimir V. Putin agreed to during his call with President Trump was spun as a concession,” Putin was actually “dig[ing] in” with “his maximalist” demands.
The Times article claims that, though “[m]uch of what Mr. Putin agreed to during the call – including a limited 30-day halt on energy infrastructure strikes by both sides [and], a prisoner exchange… was spun as a concession to Mr. Trump in the respective summaries of the conversation released by Moscow and Washington,” those were both, in fact, goals that “the Kremlin has pursued and seen as advantageous in the past.”
The Times article conveniently ignores two historical facts. The first is that Ukraine had asked for the prisoner exchange when they met with Trump team members in Saudi Arabia. In addition to the 175 prisoners that Russia agreed to exchange, they also transferred an additional 23 seriously wounded Ukrainian soldiers.
The second is that although “Russia and Ukraine previously reached a tacit mutual agreement to refrain from energy infrastructure strikes,” those talks were cancelled by Russia as a response to Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region of Russia. The renewed willingness to agree to Trump’s proposal to mutually refrain from strikes on energy infrastructure for thirty days is a concession.
Furthermore, though The Times says that energy infrastructure strikes “have caused pain for both Moscow and Kyiv,” they have caused far greater pain in Ukraine where nonnuclear power has been reduced by about 70% and where the strikes have had a much greater impact on the ability to wage war.
The Times then mocks Putin for two further comments. Putin, they say, “claimed that the Ukrainians had sabotaged and violated agreements in the past.” The Kremlin’s readout of the conversation says that “Serious risks associated with the inability to negotiate of the Kyiv regime, which has repeatedly sabotaged and violated the agreements reached, were also noted.”
Though Zelensky and the Western mainstream media consistently level this charge against Putin, the historical record is not on their side, and The Times is on shaky journalistic ground with the implied mockery and disbelief.
Ukraine has repeatedly violated agreements that had been reached with Russia. It is now beyond dispute that the historical record testifies that Ukraine and its Western partners used the Minsk Accords as 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.
And this was not the only time. After the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Donbas voted in favor of sovereignty, then president Pyotr Poroshenko negotiated a peaceful settlement with rebel leaders in the Donbas. When a formula for peacefully keeping Donbas in Ukraine had been found, the Russian parliament rescinded the authority to use troops abroad. But instead of honoring the formula and pursuing the peace, Kiev decided that Putin’s decision to withdraw troops put the Ukrainian military in a new advantage, and Poroshenko ordered the launch of attacks to recapture Donbas militarily.
Because of these violations of agreements, The Times is being disingenuous with the completely unsupported quotation that “In Russian diplomatic functioning, negotiations often are just tools of winning time and depriving the adversary of its balance.”
The Times is correct in criticizing Putin’s demand that, as the Kremlin readout says, a “key condition for preventing the escalation of the conflict and working towards its resolution by political and diplomatic means should be a complete cessation of foreign military aid and the provision of intelligence information to Kyiv.” Putin will likely have to make concessions on his demand to demilitarize Ukraine. But, given the experience of the Minsk Accords, it is not unreasonable for Putin to demand that Ukraine not be rearmed during the ceasefire. And given the experience of the broken NATO promise, it is not unreasonable for Putin to demand no NATO in Ukraine.
The Times is being further disingenuous and is engaging in historical revisionism when it says that “After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Washington’s power in Europe grew significantly, with many of the countries that once answered to Moscow joining NATO and ultimately the West. Mr. Putin has never accepted that outcome, making him eager to hold broader discussions on European security with the Trump administration.”
It leaves out the not insignificant caveat that Putin never accepted that outcome because the U.S. and NATO promised that NATO would never expand east to the countries “that once answered to Moscow.” He has been “eager to hold broader discussions on European security,” as was Gorbachev before him, because that broader security architecture is the only way to bring lasting peace to Europe. The American rejection of Gorbachev’s vision left Europe with a security arrangement that left Russia on the outside feeling threatened as NATO encroached on its borders. The broader European security structure that Putin seeks could bring peace to Europe in a way that NATO membership for Ukraine or American troops in Ukraine never could.
The Times is also being uncharitable when it quotes an expert opinion that “There is a lot of incentive for the Russians to participate, to play along and look for every opportunity to use this construct to their maximum advantage.” The claim that Russia is playing along is unsupported. And what country wouldn’t use negotiations to maximize their advantage?
The same expert says that “The best outcome for Putin is one where he accomplishes his aims in Ukraine and can normalize relations with the U.S.” Of course! From this, the expert claims, again with no evidence, that it follows that “Putin wants to string Trump along to give him just enough to see if he can accomplish that.” It does not follow from Putin’s desire to keep Ukraine out of NATO while normalizing relations with the U.S. that Putin is “string[ing] Trump along.”
It is unfortunate that, at a time when a negotiated peace might finally be possible, and when Ukrainian soldiers can stop dying and Ukrainian citizens can stop suffering, that The New York Times has chosen to cherry pick its criticisms of preconditions on negotiations, to ignore or revise history and to rely on testimony without evidence to undercut, if not public confidence in, then at least public hope for, those negotiations.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.
