“Minsk” behind the scenes. Confession of a non-diplomat. Part 7

The practice of hybrid negotiations on a

hybrid settlement of a hybrid conflict 

 

Kravchuk (continued)

If you read the interview with Leonid Kravchuk carefully, paying attention to the details, several conclusions can be drawn.
The first is that one cannot fail to notice the reverence with which Kravchuk spoke about Zelensky. Moreover, I saw his eyes, heard his voice — it was sincere: “But the main thing in Zelensky is that he is a good person, he is decent. After everything that we had… All the others, before him, did everything for themselves. Therefore, I emphasize: this (decency – ed.) is the basis. And then, if everyone was not afraid to tell the truth…”.

The second conclusion is that the highly experienced Kravchuk understood better than others Ukraine’s real diplomatic and military capabilities in resolving the problem of peace in Donbas (“Russia is taken into account. Ukraine is not”). He entered negotiations with a realistic vision of the process and was ready to take responsibility for unpopular political decisions: “My position is absolutely clear – no one will do anything for us. No detachments of blue helmets, the OSCE, they will not come and stand along 400 km to ensure a beautiful and free life for Ukrainians, laying themselves open to attack. More so that they (the West - ed.) are very attentive to Russia. This is the reality. Therefore, what I want to do, and that I agreed to this, imagining that there will be more difficulties than I imagine - I want to prove that we can do something without them too, without the West. We should learn to be strong, convincing and decisive”...
Kravchuk was ready for unpopular compromises because his life experience and knowledge — dating back to Soviet times — of the imperial mentality of russia allowed him to see the scale of the threat to the country, which others, including me, did not understand at the time.

Unpublished fragment of an interview with Kravchuk dated August 27, 2020: “I studied russia when I was studying in moscow, I calculated everything: starting from Kyivan Rus and up to the present day — russia has been at war for 150 years. Actual time! 150 years! A war elite has been created, military and security structures of war have been created. There are no other issues there. And a person in russia is worth nothing: ‘so long as the motherland exists, there are no other concerns’…”.

However, he could be “strong, convincing, and decisive” only if Zelensky had the will to do so. And apparently, he was initially promised that will. But all the promises quickly boiled down to the words of Yermak quoted above by me: “The Trilateral Contact Group does not make any decisions; it is a logistical platform for coordinating details and agreements reached by the leaders of the ‘Normandy Format’”…

In other words, the Office of the President never expected any decisions from the First President. The “effective managers”, with zero political experience, “handled” politics, diplomacy, and geopolitics “better” than he did. Kravchuk was needed by the Office of the President simply to keep russia in the Minsk process and prevent our delegation from making mistakes similar to those made under Kuchma, when the TCG effectively legitimized the puppets. But at that point, Kravchuk did not yet know this, and he was brimming with enthusiasm. Very quickly, that shine faded as a result of “teamwork” with the Office of the President, the self-serving nature of domestic Ukrainian politics, and the routine nature of “Minsk” itself, which, as I have already written, was designed not to solve the problem but to “stabilize” it. Moreover, this is a criticism directed not only at the Zelensky-Yermak Office…

Unpublished fragment of an interview with Kravchuk dated 27.08.20: “Today I told the ambassadors I met with — I will not name which ones, because this is not for the interview — exactly the same thing: help us put pressure on russia. Ukraine cannot handle this task on its own. Help us. Let us unite. I gave this example about Nord Stream 2. With a united front. Because today Ukraine is not putin’s final destination. This is what I mean — applying pressure — is right. By any means — is right. But even Ukraine does not know how to apply pressure as effectively as it could. We do not even have the necessary information base. Poroshenko, for instance, teaches us how Ukraine should live on his TV channels. But did he not know this himself before? In other words, we cannot even organize ourselves in Ukraine. And one of the ambassadors told me: set an example in Ukraine. Especially instead of expecting them to come and do it for us... My position is absolutely clear: no one will do this for us”…

___________

I have already written that the kremlin’s main tactical goal in the Minsk negotiations was to subjectivize the occupied CDDLO as a negotiating entity and a party to the conflict. That is precisely why we, the internally displaced persons, were included in the delegation — to prevent this. By officially naming us representatives of the CDDLO from Ukraine, we were, as it were, used to balance and neutralize the CDDLO representatives from the russian side. This idea belonged to Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Reznikov, and he began implementing it. But it was Kravchuk who actually made us visible in the negotiation process… Moreover, this happened at the very next TCG meeting after our emotional interview with him.

Facebook post dated 2.09.20 Today Kravchuk responded quite harshly to Gryzlov, both to his tirades criticizing the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and to his attempt to silence us, the internally displaced persons from the CDDLO. It turns out that he can be not only diplomatic, but also principled. The thing is that Leonid Kravchuk decided that since those CDDLO representatives participate in TCG meetings in all subgroups, we should not be limited to only the political subgroup either (as had been the case before him — ed.). The hysteria on the other side began already in the humanitarian subgroup, where they blocked the exchange of prisoners, citing the need to cancel the Verkhovna Rada’s well-known resolution on holding local elections. Dan Kazansky took the floor and began saying that this resolution had nothing whatsoever to do with the exchange and that one could not play politics when it came to people sitting in prisons, including THEIR people. Nikanorova and Deinego began simply shouting, and the latter even turned off the video connection. Before that, Nikanorova had always been restrained…

When I asked to speak during the political subgroup’s report, Gryzlov suddenly began interrupting and expressing outrage that only heads of delegations, not experts, should participate in the TCG. Then I asked which delegation THOSE “CDDLO” representatives were members of, and reminded him that they were merely invited by the russian side, while the CDDLO themselves were not a party to the Trilateral Contact Group. I was also outraged by the fact that Gryzlov repeatedly claimed that russia was not a party to the conflict, but a mediator. I said that I did not remember Ukraine giving russia consent to mediate in a conflict between Ukraine and russia. I am not sure whether he heard this, because we were speaking practically simultaneously, and then moscow switched off the video connection… It should be noted that it was Leonid Kravchuk who insisted that, despite Gryzlov’s shouting, I should nevertheless be given the opportunity to speak. He also stated that Ukraine itself would decide whom to include in its delegation and that all members of our delegation were equal. In general, I never thought that Gryzlov, who had always been so calm and detached, could throw such a tantrum. This is another subject for analysis — why they became so agitated by us…

The ball was not in our court for long on this issue. First, as I have already written, the russians brought their “civil society representatives” into the process, and then the OSCE, in order to revive the negotiations blocked by the appearance in them of “civil society expert” Maya Pirogova, who had been convicted of terrorism (and had previously received a sentence for apartment fraud), began putting pressure on our leadership.

Interestingly, Kravchuk initially resisted this. I still have his letter to the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office’s Special Representative, Ambassador Grau, dated March 12.

But a month later, everything changed. The words that “the best policy is a principled one” sound nice, but proved impractical in diplomacy. Russia simply outplayed us. I will tell how this happened later; for now, the subject is Kravchuk.

At the TCG meeting on April 14, I was asked not to sit next to him, as I often had, “so as not to aggravate the situation”. I understood the risks of the negotiations breaking down; the request was natural in that situation, so I did not attach any significance to it. But the TCG meeting had not yet ended when the “DNR” “Foreign Ministry” had already issued a statement saying that we had been removed from the negotiation process under “OSCE pressure”.

After the meeting, I waited for Kravchuk in the corridor of the Cabinet of Ministers to get a frank answer without witnesses as to whether such a decision had been made at the leadership level, since nothing of the sort had been said at the TCG, contrary to Nikanorova’s claims. He was surprised and replied that there was no such decision.

Relying on his assurances, I wrote on Facebook: “A lie and a provocation! The ‘DNR Foreign Ministry’ stated that today at the ‘Contact Group’, under ‘pressure’ from OSCE representatives, the Ukrainian side allegedly agreed to exclude ‘civil society representatives’ from the negotiation process. Apparently, this means that Kazansky, Goran, and I were traded for Maya Pirogova. ‘Apparently’, because I am not sure that this news is about us. Because, firstly, the Trilateral Contact Group was working today — what a ‘Contact Group’ is, I do not know. Secondly, there is no such negotiating entity as the ‘DNR Foreign Ministry’ in the TCG, just as there is no ‘DNR’ at all. And thirdly, Pirogova may be a ‘civil society representative’, but we are advisers to the delegation, officially included in the negotiation process by a note from the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry.

Moreover, I attended the entire TCG meeting and did not hear of any such agreement. I fully allow for ‘pressure from OSCE representatives’ aimed at excluding us from the negotiations, as reported by ‘DNR plenipotentiary’ Nikanorova, but I do not think it proved effective.

Yes, indeed, today we were not on camera during the TCG meeting so as not to provoke russia into putting Pirogova on camera in such a tense situation, which would have led to the TCG breaking down. But this was our initiative; no one asked us to do it. I think that now, after such insinuations by russian puppets, it will be a matter of honor and principle for the leadership of the Ukrainian delegation to have us on camera at the next TCG meeting.

Especially since, as we are the only legitimate representatives of the CDDLO representing one of the members of the TCG, while the russian ‘ministers’ from Donetsk and Luhansk, in violation of the Minsk agreements, officially represent no one, without us no TCG decisions will be legitimate. After all, the Minsk Package of Measures requires that issues concerning local elections and the specifics of local self-government in the CDDLO be coordinated with us…

However, if russia assumes responsibility and, by an official note from the russian Foreign Ministry, formally includes ‘representatives of the republics’ in its delegation, that would be worth it, and I would be ready to genuinely stay off camera”.

Nevertheless, until the next TCG meeting, that is, for another two weeks, the situation on this issue remained uncertain…

And the next meeting turned out to be interesting. During the report of the working groups at the TCG, a representative of Ukraine in that group, or their deputy, or one of the members, would always sit next to the head of the delegation. But this time, as luck would have it, there was no one from the political group except me. But the agreement not to put us on camera was already in place, although we had not been told about it. In other words, I could no longer sit next to the head of the delegation. But then they should have explained to me why the “established negotiation practice”, as Ambassador Morel liked to call it, was being broken. Leonid Kravchuk handled it theatrically. He stands in the center of Reznikov’s office, where everyone has already gathered (not in a private room), and calls someone, glancing at me: “What should I do? I’m alone. Kostin is not here, Merezhko is not here” (representatives of Ukraine in the working group). He says it deliberately loudly so that everyone can hear that the decision is not his. Then he nervously waves his hand and declares: “I’ll sit alone”. Curtain!

Later, Foreign Ministry employees accompanying the negotiations told me that there had been a conversation between Kravchuk and Grau (not the performance I described, but one that took place before the previous TCG meeting) — pressure was being applied on us to remove the “experts” altogether, both the russian ones and us. It turns out Kravchuk agreed. This can be understood: the damage from blocking the negotiation process could have outweighed our “principles”, but the theatricality with which it was done... I understand that Kravchuk was a politician, but such trickery simply did not fit his image or his age; it evoked pity…

“Kravchuk sometimes pisses me off. But the overall emotion is that, for some reason, you want to hug him and cheer him up”, - I wrote in my notes at the time.

Now, looking back, I assess that incident somewhat differently. After all, he could have simply given an instruction not to sit next to him instead of staging that scene. But he did not want to offend me or lower himself in my eyes. The act — that of a political animal, but the motive behind the act — purely human.

In the end, we remained in the delegation and even continued to attend TCG meetings, but from then on we were no longer shown on camera and were not given the opportunity to speak. Although this did not prevent us from influencing the domestic political situation related to Minsk and the delegation’s position.

Here it should be added that during the interview, Kravchuk and I agreed that I would prepare materials for him on the Minsk documents to substantiate our position in discussions with the OSCE and russia. The first such product was the “Briefing on the Parties to the Conflict According to the Minsk Documents”. Because the issue of the parties to the conflict was precisely the key to all this Minsk confusion.

To prepare this material, I specifically met with Pavlo Klimkin, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine precisely at the time when Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 were concluded. I wanted to find out from a firsthand witness what the role of the “ORDLO representatives” had been in preparing and signing the Minsk documents. This was important because Morel often referred to some previous agreements and negotiation practices that we could not have witnessed and, accordingly, could not challenge him on. And Klimkin was not merely a witness, but a direct participant in both Minsk agreements. Here is an almost verbatim transcript of his words on this issue.

“Representatives of the occupation administrations never took part in live, direct, or indirect negotiations. All negotiations were conducted with the russian side. There were two tracks of negotiations. The first was russian Ambassador Zurabov, who was russia’s representative in the Trilateral Contact Group. And the second was Surkov. These were, in fact, the two people who actually conducted the main negotiations on behalf of russia. Naturally, representatives of the occupation administrations were in no way involved in this.

If we take these second, now so well-known and heavily publicized Minsk negotiations, which lasted 18 hours, then not only were Zakharchenko and Plotnitsky not in the same room there — nobody saw them. Neither I, nor Merkel, nor Hollande, nor putin, by the way. They were not in this hotel. They were somewhere else, in a completely different part of Minsk. The text was finally coordinated at the level of the heads of state. In other words, there were three meetings attended only by the four heads of state — nobody else! There were not even foreign ministers or anyone else. And then, when it was simply necessary to obtain the signatures of Zakharchenko and Plotnitsky, putin sent Surkov and told him, ‘Go get the signatures’. Surkov went somewhere and returned about 20–25 minutes later with those signatures. That’s it, that’s how everything happened.

For russia, it was important to show that they were part of the process. This mantra, which they constantly repeat now, about a civil war, a civil conflict in Ukraine, was important to them. And, in general, to show that it was supposedly not only russia, but that there was allegedly someone else who existed there, with whom russia supposedly had to talk. So putin, repeatedly, during phone conversations in the Normandy format, pretended that the agreements still needed to be communicated to Donetsk and Luhansk. I remember him saying this two or three times. But then everything was communicated and implemented if putin wanted it, or not implemented if putin did not want it. And moreover — a point that few people remember, but it is very important to look at — the agreements of the Berlin summit. In the agreements of the Normandy Berlin summit, when in the end we finally pushed through what is called the roadmap idea. And it is clearly stated there, you can check it, that the roadmap was to be developed by the foreign ministers and diplomatic advisers to the leaders. There is absolutely no mention of any occupation administrations at all!”

This conversation took place on September 1, 2020. I do not remember whether I managed to prepare my briefing for Kravchuk before that TCG meeting on September 2, where he made the internally displaced persons visible at the TCG, but it is obvious that the availability of new information influenced his position and behavior during the negotiations.

Sometimes he definitely used my briefings. I even specifically prepared short, light versions for him and printed them in large type. True, since for some reason he avoided reading from the page and spoke from memory, he would mix up points, paragraphs, and document titles, which left our counterparts on the monitors bewildered. It was amusing to watch their faces as they tried to understand what he was talking about. I am not even sure whether this was senile forgetfulness or a diplomatic tactic to disorient the opponent.

For example, there was a case when I prepared a statement for him concerning the same confusion over the status of the CDDLO representatives from russia. Instead of the Package of Measures and its Article 13, he referred to the Minsk Protocol and an article that simply did not exist in it…

It should be noted that our exchange of knowledge was mutual. Kravchuk did not simply read my briefings and draft documents — the head of the delegation found time to edit and comment on them. And not demonstratively for the public, but, so to speak, in personal communication. In other words, he spent his time not on a politician or official, but simply on Serhii Harmash. This — the presence of feedback — is what I consider to be the main thing that today’s politicians lack. They all want loyalty and obedience, without caring about earning them or making them voluntary. None of them stoops to teaching or persuading; they think only about how to obtain or force. Kravchuk sought not obedience, but a like-minded person.

As with any person, Kravchuk had ups and downs in his work. Sometimes he amazed me with his capacity for work. I could not sit through 8, and sometimes even more, hours, listening to utter nonsense. And he did not simply sit through it, but did so with his back straight and no signs of fatigue on his face.

But there were also cases when Kravchuk literally fell asleep during the TCG. It should not be forgotten that he was already 87 (!) at the time. Health problems were making themselves felt more and more often, and sometimes the old man was brought to meetings literally from a hospital bed. And the Minsk process itself eventually came down to routine, so it was hardly invigorating

By the end of 2021, it seemed that the “TV series” had dragged on and run out of creative steam, and from all sides at that. Therefore, our attitude toward it also changed. At some point, the presence of our “Servants of the People” in the TCG (or rather, their increasingly frequent absence) made it clear that the Office of the President had lost interest in the process. Apparently, because of its obvious lack of prospects.

The incidents caused by Kravchuk’s health merely emphasized this “dying” of “Minsk”. Although at the time it seemed that they were also the reason for it. The increasingly frequent absence of Leonid Kravchuk left the question of replacing the head of the delegation hanging in the air. But apparently, due to its disappointment with the Minsk process, the Office of the President, which had stopped receiving domestic political dividends from Minsk, did not make the obviously necessary decision… The situation sometimes took on a comic character. The russian puppets from Donetsk and Luhansk were already openly allowing themselves to joke about the “sleeping” Kravchuk. I, too, looked at this “anabiosis” of the negotiation process with irony.

I remember one of the TCG meetings. It was practically just the two of us at the table. Kravchuk was on camera, I was sitting next to him, but on the monitor only my hands appeared when I handed him some papers, or my ear when he turned to me to say something. Everything was sluggish and tedious. The russian puppets were “defecating wit”, while Kravchuk did not react at all. I wanted to somehow liven him up. Behind us was a white backdrop and the Ukrainian flag. Kravchuk was without a jacket, wearing a white shirt. I slightly moved his chair away from the flag. Leonid Kravchuk, with his gray hair and white shirt, became indistinguishable against the white backdrop. He raised his hand to say something, but they simply could not see him, so they ignored him. His ego was offended, he became agitated and assumed a fighter’s stance — the negotiations gained some momentum… Yes, sometimes diplomacy can be like that.

Although, to be honest, my irony was not always appropriate. In autumn of 2021, Kravchuk suddenly felt unwell in the meeting room right before the TCG. Medical personnel were called. They took 5 minutes to come up from the first floor of the Cabinet of Ministers. Five minutes seemed unjustifiably long in such a situation. They stayed with Kravchuk for about 5 minutes as well and left. The deputy prime minister’s secretary, was outraged: why did everyone leave, why did nobody stay on duty until the end of the TCG?! I joked — the main thing is that the priest is here. “Now it’s clear why they invite you here — otherwise everyone keeps asking, ‘what do they do there?’” I said to Andrii from the UGCC. Everyone smiled. It seems this was the last time Leonid Kravchuk attended the TCG…

To close this chapter on Kravchuk as a person, I will mention one more fact, which, however, is unrelated to the negotiations. One day he approached me and suggested that we write a book together. That is, he would dictate it, and I would then shape and edit it. At first I was interested, but then I quickly cooled off when he said it would not be memoirs about the secrets of Ukrainian history, but a “political testament”. Not facts, but some political declarations, simply the thoughts of an old man, albeit a former president… At the time, I was genuinely overloaded: after all, I was the sitting editor-in-chief of a media outlet, working in the delegation, working with the public in connection with my work in the delegation, daily broadcasts, interviews, plus my own articles, with my own “brilliant” thoughts… In short, I said I needed to think about it, but in such a tone that it sounded like a refusal.

We never brought up the subject again. I only remembered it now, thinking: how many of today’s politicians think about what to tell their descendants? Most of them bring nothing into politics except themselves and their appetites, no ideas or vision of the future. They have nothing to say even today, let alone to the future. But here… This is what distinguishes a statesman from a politician — a vision of the future, a dialogue with those who will no longer be voting for you…

By Serhii Harmash, editor-in-chief of OstroV