With the world braced for war, Russian President Vladimir Putin has personally demanded that the Ukrainian government negotiate directly with separatist leaders in the occupied areas of eastern Ukraine. In the absence of such discussions, he said, implementing the Minsk peace accords is “impossible.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has declared that direct talks with the so-called People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk are a “red line” that his government will not cross, calling the separatists “terrorists.” Instead, Zelenskiy has pushed to meet directly with Putin, a request that Russian officials rebuffed as “pointless.”
A scan of the leadership in the occupied territories explains Zelenskiy’s reluctance.
Many of them are now citizens of the Russian Federation, and make frequent public statements indicating they have no interest in living in Ukraine or restoring the Kyiv government’s authority and territorial integrity.
In early December, the top two separatist leaders — Denis Pushilin of Donetsk and Leonid Pasechnik of Luhansk — traveled to Moscow for the annual congress of Putin’s United Russia political party and officially joined as members. Former Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev personally presented them with their membership cards.
At a nearly two-hour-long news conference on Friday, Pushilin said that many ethnic Russian residents of Donbass have been trying for more than 30 years to restore severed ancestral ties with Moscow, and suggested Ukraine is not a real country — a view that also prevails in the Kremlin.
“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, millions of Russians found themselves outside of their historic homeland by becoming citizens of an artificially created state,” Pushilin said. “In the beginning of the 90s, as soon as Ukraine appeared, the inhabitants of Donbass had to fight for their rights due to the active policy of Ukrainianization.”
Party membership cards aren’t the separatist leaders’ only Moscow-issued IDs. Many now also possess Russian passports, which Russia has been issuing in the occupied areas to anyone who requests one.
The senior officials who now have Russian nationality include the top separatist representatives who have participated in discussions of the Trilateral Contact Group, which is responsible for negotiating the detailed implementation of the Minsk accords: Natalia Nikonorova, the foreign minister in Donetsk; and her Luhansk counterpart, Vladislav Deinego.
At a meeting of the Trilateral Contract Group in May 2020, Oleksiy Reznikov, who was then Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for the reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories and is now defense minister, held up a copy of Deinego’s Russian passport, which was issued in December 2019.
Putin’s complaints
Russia insists that the war in Donbass is an internal Ukrainian conflict, despite Moscow’s role in organizing, financing, and arming the separatist forces and leadership. Putin reiterated his point again on Tuesday during a visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to the Kremlin.
In his public remarks, Putin complained about Kyiv’s refusal to talk to the separatist leaders. “The opportunities to peacefully restore the country’s territorial integrity through direct dialogue with Donetsk and Luhansk are still being ignored,” Putin said during a news conference with Scholz. “In Ukraine, human rights are massively and systematically violated, discrimination against the Russian-speaking population is fixed at the legislative level.”
Later, escalating his rhetoric, Putin said: “Let me just add that, according to our estimates, what is happening in the Donbass today is genocide.” (International monitors of the conflict have not reported any indication of genocide.)
While Putin and other Russian officials signalled that some Russian troops are being pulled back from the border, Western intelligence officials say they do not yet see signs of retreat, and that even if some Russian forces withdraw, there is a high risk of further military action in the occupied areas — potentially in response to a fabricated provocation.
On Tuesday, Russia’s parliament, the State Duma, voted to urge Putin to grant formal recognition to the two separatist “republics.” Such a move, hinting at eventual annexation, would potentially derail the Minsk talks.
Sergiy Harmash, a journalist originally from Donetsk who represents Ukraine in the Trilateral Contact Group, said it was inaccurate even to label the leaders of the two breakaway areas as “separatists.”
“They cannot be called separatists because they declare adherence to the Minsk agreements, and the Minsk agreements provide for the return of these territories to the control of the Ukrainian government,” Harmash told POLITICO. “They are collaborators of the Russian occupation administrations — collaborators.”
Harmash said only Russia should negotiate the implementation of the peace deal. “It is not logical to negotiate the return of occupied territories to Ukrainian sovereignty not with the occupier, but with his puppets,” he said.
Zelenskiy, Reznikov and other senior Ukrainian officials insist that there is no point working with the separatist authorities given they are controlled by Moscow and the Kremlin makes the key decisions about what happens in the territories. Officials in Kyiv say the separatist authorities have no intention of restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity and instead want to follow Crimea and to be absorbed as part of Russia.
Harmash, echoing the point, noted that the central figures in the conflict in Donbass have been Russian citizens from the start. They included Alexander Borodai, the first prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic who is now a member of the Russian State Duma; and Igor Gerkin, a former Russian officer of the Federal Security Service (FSB) known as “Strelkov” who had a role in the invasion and annexation of Crimea as well as in the war in Donbass.
“The ‘republics’ are completely directed from Moscow,” Harmash said. “Today, all of the leaders, security officers and employees of the ‘administrations’ in the DNR also have Russian passports. All of them constantly and openly declare joining Russia as their goal. This completely contradicts the goals of the Minsk agreements.”
Entangled with Russia
Russia in recent years has taken numerous steps toward a soft annexation of the occupied areas. The Russian ruble is widely accepted as currency and schools are using the Russian curriculum and following Russian regulations.
Even just searching for the official online biographies of the separatist authorities reveals how entangled they are with Russia, with the government entities using either the Russian .ru or old Soviet .su domains for their websites.
Nikonorova, the Donetsk foreign minister, in a speech last spring to Russia’s premier diplomatic university, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, blamed Kyiv for sabotaging the Minsk peace accords.
“Ukraine, using any pointless and even absurd pretexts, is delaying negotiating process, avoiding practical use of the Minsk agreements for final conflict settlement,” she said, according to a press release issued by her office. “As a result, the negotiations in the Contact group are paralyzed, so there is almost no possibility for real settlement in Donbass.”
In the same speech, Nikonorova praised the increase in “cross-border cooperation” with Russia.
“The most important landmark in this direction was the decision of the President of Russia to grant the Republics’ citizens the right to obtain Russian citizenship in a simplified manner,” she said. “This step by the Russian authorities has become a truly significant stage in the rapprochement of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Russian Federation.”
Nikonorova insisted that this was “an extremely necessarily humanitarian step” because Ukrainian authorities have blocked residents of the occupied areas from renewing their documents.
In fact, the Kyiv government has allowed citizens of the occupied areas to continue collecting pensions and other benefits and has worked to create citizen service centers near crossing points of the line of contact. The separatist authorities shut down many of those crossing areas two years ago citing the coronavirus pandemic and have refused to reopen them.
In December 2020, Nikoronova delivered a report to the United Nations Security Council detailing the separatists’ allegations that the Ukrainian government was refusing to implement the Minsk accords, including requirements to grant “special status” to the occupied areas and to hold local elections.
Ukraine insists that Russia has refused to put in place preconditions necessary for moving forward with the Minsk accords, including the restoration of Kyiv’s authority so that local elections can be carried out in compliance with international standards.
Officials and diplomats who have worked closely on the Minsk process say a key problem is that Russia, at Moscow’s insistence, was designated as a guarantor of the agreement, essentially a referee along with France and Germany, rather than as a party to the conflict.
Meanwhile, the Trilateral Contact Group charged with negotiating details of the peace accords is comprised of Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Ukraine has appointed some representatives of the occupied areas as part of its negotiating team, but the separatist officials technically have no standing.
Russian officials say that Putin’s point about negotiating directly is a broad one, intended to make clear that Kyiv must be ready and willing to implement the Minsk accords, including provisions that would grant special status, and some political autonomy, to the occupied areas.
A Russian diplomatic official said that Ukraine was not willing to uphold its end of the agreement. “The psychology of the approach is very close to what Trump did with the Iran nuclear deal,” the diplomatic official said, referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally quit in 2017.
The official pointed to comments by Zelenskiy insisting that residents of the occupied areas who feel Russian should “seek a place in Russia” as evidence that Kyiv wanted to be rid of the people of Donbass. “If they want Donbass back, it’s not only the territories but the people as well,” the official said. “They want those people out … It’s an existential thing. They will never change those people in Donbass.”
Despite palpable fears of war, especially if the Minsk process collapses, the official said that questions about precisely with whom Zelenskiy should negotiate missed the point. “It’s not about details,” the official said.
But for officials and diplomats who have worked within the Minsk format, the details are precisely the problem — especially the fact that separatist officials cannot take decisions without instructions from Moscow.
Many of the separatist leaders who were in charge at the start of the conflict in 2014 and 2015 are no longer alive. Several were killed, and their murders have not been solved, including the first head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, who died in an explosion in a café in 2018.
The former head of the Luhansk People’s Republic, Igor Plotnitsky, survived a car bombing in 2016 and resigned a little more than a year later. Separatists blamed Kyiv for the killings and assassination attempts, while Ukraine has pointed to infighting, or to Moscow.
Those attacks may explain why the current separatist leaders are keen to have Russian passports, or even second homes. Ukrainian news sites have published documents, for example, showing that Pushilin and Nikonorova are registered at the same address in an apartment in St. Petersburg.
At his news conference on Friday, Pushilin, the current Donetsk leader, reiterated the charge that Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution of 2013-2014 was a “coup d’état” and that Ukrainian nationalists had illegally seized power in Kyiv, a charge Putin has also echoed in recent days.
In fact, thousands of Ukrainians participated in generally peaceful protests for three months in response to then-President Viktor Yanukovych reversing a public promise to sign political and economic agreements with the EU. Yanukovych fled the country in late February 2014 after the protests briefly turned violent with far more casualties among protesters. In all, 18 riot police officers and more than 100 demonstrators were killed.
During the news conference, Pushilin detailed a long list of alleged atrocities committed by the Ukrainian government during the war in Donbass, and recounted specific numbers of civilian casualties. He also blamed the “crash” of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on a “monstrous provocation on the part of Ukrainian authorities.”
International investigators have concluded the airliner was shot down by separatists using a Russian-provided anti-aircraft missile, killing all 283 passengers.
Turning to the Minsk accords, Pushilin said that Kyiv seemed to be trying to impose its interpretation of the agreements as if it had won the war.
“I will remind you that Ukraine did not win,” he said. “When the Minsk agreements were signed, Ukraine was losing.”
“Only good will then on the Russian side,” led to “these notorious Minsk agreements,” Pushilin said, adding: “Ukraine is not a winner.”
Harmash, who represents Ukraine in the Trilateral Contact Group, said the peace process might succeed if only Russia would admit its true role and stop insisting on an overly expansive interpretation of the Minsk accords that reaches far beyond topics clearly specified as matters for negotiation — local elections, details of local self-government in the occupied areas and amnesty for potential crimes committed during the war.
“There is no indication there to discuss security, humanitarian or economic issues,” Harmash said. “If it complied with the Minsk agreements, if Russia recognized itself as a party to the conflict, and if only those topics stipulated by Minsk were discussed with the representatives, the dialogue would be much more productive.”