“About us, without us”. Hearing this slogan, popularised across what was then Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1938 Munich agreement, it’s not hard to see why some commentators are reaching back to the eve of World War II to attack US President Donald Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the Ukraine conflict directly with Moscow. The Munich agreement, struck by the major European powers in 1938, ceded the country’s strategic Sudetenland to Nazi Germany to stave off the threat of war, in vain.
Kyiv, like Prague before it, has so far been left out of the talks taking place between negotiators from Russia and the US – talks that will quite literally determine the shape of Ukraine’s future. And while President Volodymyr Zelensky has not hidden his disappointment in being excluded from the first round of preliminary talks in Riyadh this week, Trump has been unsympathetic.
“I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” he told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday. “Well, you’ve been there for three years … You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
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But those sceptical of the prospects of such a deal being struck between the White House and the Kremlin don’t have to look as far back as the 1930s. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian troops have repeatedly occupied swathes of territory in former Soviet republics – and despite years of negotiations overseen by European powers, they still haven’t left.
In Moldova, Russian forces are still stationed in the breakaway region of Transnistria, which declared its – largely unrecognised – independence as the USSR fell in ruins around it. And a full fifth of Georgia’s territory is still occupied by Russian troops who routed Tbilisi’s forces following the Georgian government’s efforts to violently suppress secessionist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
In both cases, fierce fighting gave way to frozen conflicts as European powers pushed for negotiated ends to the bloodshed.
Anton Shekhovtsov, a visiting professor at the Central European University in Vienna and a researcher on European nationalist movements, spoke with FRANCE 24 about what the US could learn from these long-stalled efforts to bring about lasting peace in the former Soviet Union.
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Looking back at the 2008 crisis in Georgia, we seem to have a couple of competing narratives. Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy as the mediator put forward the idea that this was a successful de-escalation, a way of ensuring that Russia’s advance towards Tbilisi was stopped. Whereas other people, especially in the context of what later happened in Ukraine, look back at this moment as almost having given the green light for Putin to extend Russian influence into other former Soviet republics. In your view, what are some of the lessons we should be learning from how that conflict was handled in 2008?
Before 2008 there was another case, and that case is actually older than any of the things that we are discussing today – it’s the case of Transnistria and Moldova. Transnistria is Moldovan territory, and it’s been occupied by the Russians since the beginning of the 90s. And there were several meetings, several conferences throughout the period that followed the occupation of Transnistria, where Russia agreed to withdraw its military forces, its occupation forces from Moldova – and it failed every deadline. The forces are still there.
As to 2008, I understand why Sarkozy was bragging about that being the conclusion of the conflict, but it wasn’t. Even that agreement stipulated that Russia would withdraw its forces, and that did not happen.
What is the Ukrainians’ reaction to Trump blaming Ukraine for not ending the war?
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And this is a pattern that we are observing, as I said from the case of Moldova in the 90s. Russia always tries to reach an agreement which it necessarily breaks. It’s a pattern, it breaks the promises that it makes because it knows that nobody is going to enforce the agreements, nobody is going to hold Russia accountable for breaking its promises and agreements.
And this is the pattern that we are observing now with Ukraine – what Russia is trying to do at the moment is exactly the same thing as it did with Moldova and Georgia. And there is another pattern – every American administration, probably with the exception of Biden’s presidency, has these illusions that it can make a lasting peace with Russia. It failed every time.
After 2008, Obama came up with this idea of a reset in 2009 of the relations between the US and Russia, thinking that it will somehow make Russia more agreeable or more peaceful – it failed. And now, the second Trump presidency is trying to do another reset – they don’t call it a reset, but in the end, it is what it is, and the Russians will lie, they will try to fool, to cheat.
You’re painting quite a grim outlook on any attempt at a negotiated end to the conflict. What, in your mind, is the alternative to trying to establish that expectation of a normal relationship that Russia can have not just with its immediate neighbours but with the EU and the US?
This grim picture is based on observations, based on evidence, on what was happening. And I believe that, unfortunately, as long as Vladimir Putin is in power or has any relation to power in Russia, nothing will change with Russia with its relation to Europe, to the US, to Ukraine.
The only alternative today is to support Ukraine as long as possible. If Putin is still there, he will not abandon his maximalist plans regarding Ukraine, which are about the destruction of the Ukrainian state and nation. He has not changed his mind, he just wants to somehow fool the Western observers, especially in the US – I think Europeans are now very difficult to fool, Europeans know what Putin’s Russia is about – at least the mainstream elites know about that.
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Trump, he doesn’t care about Europe, he doesn’t care about Ukraine. He doesn’t even care about Russia, in fact, he cares about the media headlines. He’s a guy whose efforts are driven by the idea of getting a Nobel Prize for Peace, as Obama did – he cares about media visibility. But it doesn’t solve the very complex and deep problems with Ukraine or Russia.
And I think that the only alternative today is to continue supporting Ukraine – all those negotiations, yes, this is all fine – but I just don’t believe that Russia is serious about ending the conflict. It wants the conflict to end with the destruction of Ukraine, or making Ukraine lose its sovereignty. I’m not even talking about territorial Integrity – the restoration of Ukraine’s borders in the short or mid-term is unfortunately not going to happen. I mean making Ukraine basically a dysfunctional state – this is the aim. I don’t believe Putin, because there is no single piece of evidence from the past that would make Putin a trustworthy politician.
You mentioned this idea that a lot of the European leadership has now lost some of their illusions in the prospect of how far diplomacy will get them with Putin. Do you see that process of disillusionment happening throughout the course of the negotiations around the enforcement of the Minsk agreements? Angela Merkel especially has been quite defensive about her own legacy in terms of seeking a rapprochement between Germany – and the wider European Union – and Putin’s Russia.
It’s not only about the Minsk agreements. I think these Illusions have been shattered by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and by the atrocities that Russians have been committing in Ukraine during this full-scale invasion. That I think was the real understanding, this is when it came to the European leadership.
I don’t think anyone took the Minsk agreements seriously from any side. These agreements were basically dictated by Russia at gunpoint and this is not something that leads to peace. And for Ukraine the strategy was to somehow try to avoid those agreements because those were not the agreements that Ukraine wanted.
But it had to sign them. That was a forced decision. And I think morally, Ukraine has all the rights to avoid something that was imposed on the country. But now, Minsk III is off the table – Ukraine will not be fooled, and I’m sure Europe will not be fooled by those.
A lot of people reacted with some degree of shock, if not necessarily surprise, at how quickly President Trump reached out directly to President Putin and moved forward with this initial meeting in Riyadh – without a Ukrainian presence. You wrote recently about what you call the minimum requirements for victory for Ukraine that would have to emerge from any sort of negotiated end to this. What, in your mind, is the best framework that would give Ukraine the chance to obtain these minimum requirements?
So these minimum requirements, the first is about Ukraine being heavily armed – this is about giving Ukraine more advanced weapons, and in greater numbers. The second point is EU membership for Ukraine. And the third, the most important one and the most difficult one is, of course, security guarantees for Ukraine that a similar invasion will not happen at least in mid-term – nobody knows what’s going to happen in the long term, of course. Security guarantees are the issue that is being most hotly discussed today.
And there are many options. Now, what is being discussed, and I think misleadingly actually, is sending troops to Ukraine – having European boots on the ground. This is all very good, but it’s misleading in the way that if we’re talking about peacekeeping forces for Ukraine, we should not start with boots on the ground.
Yes, Ukraine may need additional military personnel but what Ukraine much more urgently needs is to secure its airspace – and for that you don’t really need boots on the ground, you need additional European air forces shooting down the rockets and drones that Russia is regularly sending to Ukraine. I’m not saying that those airspace peacekeeping forces should be functional today. But Europe could start with talking about this.
What happened in Israel when Iran attacked Israel with rockets and drones? You had Western forces just shooting down all those things. And in Ukraine, Russia continues to dominate the airspace. So, instead of trying to scare our domestic audiences about boots on the ground, these discussions would probably be better if they started with securing or pledges to secure Ukraine’s airspace.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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