Russia Details Preconditions To Ukraine For Ceasefire And Political Settlement: Military Terms

Executive Summary:

• On June 2, in Istanbul, Russia revealed the fine print of its terms for a ceasefire and political settlement with Ukraine. The stunningly successful Ukrainian Operation Spiderweb, hitting strategic airbases deep inside Russia with Ukrainian drones on June 1, overshadowed the Istanbul diplomatic meeting.
• Kyiv’s front-and-center diplomatic goal is an unconditional, comprehensive ceasefire agreement with Moscow for at least 30 days. The Kremlin is setting unacceptable military and political preconditions for formally consenting to such a ceasefire.
• Moscow aims to precipitate presidential and parliamentary elections in Ukraine within the context of ceasefire negotiations. Moscow hopes to throw Ukraine into chaos if elections are held during an official ceasefire, even as hostilities continue in the field and the air.

Russia has presented Ukraine with military and political preconditions for a ceasefire agreement and an eventual settlement of what Russia describes as “the Ukraine crisis,” as Moscow avoids the terms war and peace. Russian negotiators handed over both sets of preconditions to Ukrainian counterparts on June 2 in Istanbul, following up on the May 16 bilateral meeting also held there.

Moscow insisted on the Istanbul venue to signify a relaunch of the “Istanbul process,” from which Kyiv had left in May 2022 to avoid Russian-imposed terms of settlement. The new iteration of the Istanbul process, however, features even more draconian terms for Ukraine, spelled out in greater detail and a rigorous sequence of implementation steps.

Kyiv’s front-and-center goal for the June 2 meeting—pre-coordinated with the U.S. White House and Kyiv’s main European partners—was a ceasefire agreement with Moscow: unconditional, comprehensive (on land, in the air, at sea), for at least 30 days with potential rollovers (see EDM, June 2).

Given Moscow’s known, unacceptable preconditions for a ceasefire (see below), however, Kyiv proceeded with its pre-planned Operation Spiderweb on June 1, massively hitting strategic airbases deep inside Russia with Ukrainian drones (see EDM, June 2). Whether timed deliberately or fortuitously, this stunningly successful operation overshadowed the Istanbul meeting, diverting attention from the fine print of Russia’s military and political terms for a ceasefire and settlement presented there.

The set of Russian documents include a proposal for a quick ceasefire, a roadmap toward a ceasefire at some later time (both in Chapter II), a framework for a political settlement and a roadmap toward it (Chapters I and III, respectively) (TASS, June 2, released in Russian only).

Moscow is offering Kyiv two possible “Variants” for a ceasefire agreement. The first option is for a quick ceasefire, preconditioned, however, on a complete withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the entirety of four mainland provinces: Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia. Russia currently occupies the whole of the Luhansk oblast and about two thirds of the Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts each in terms of land area. Referencing the four provinces as “territories of the Russian Federation,” and their pre-2014 boundaries as “Russian Federation borders,” Moscow wants Ukraine to withdraw its forces even more deeply inside Ukraine, to a distance to be agreed upon in a bilateral ceasefire document. This would supposedly elicit Moscow’s consent to a quick ceasefire (Chapter II, Variant 1, TASS, June 2).

No provision is made for third-party monitoring of compliance with the ceasefire agreement. Instead, this issue is cast as a bilateral Russian-Ukrainian responsibility and awkwardly placed elsewhere in these documents. Moscow offers, at the outset, to negotiate local ceasefires in certain front sectors for two to three days, to collect the remains of fallen soldiers in the grey zones between the frontlines (Chapter III).

Moscow further proposes to create a joint Russian-Ukrainian ceasefire-monitoring center in Ukraine’s remaining territory (Chapter II, Variant 2, see below). Russia has practiced monitoring ceasefires “jointly” with Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine during the Russian-orchestrated “frozen” conflicts in those countries. This practice has allowed Russia to dominate and manipulate the monitoring while marginalizing or eliminating bona fide international monitoring of those ceasefires.

Moscow’s second “variant” entails a series of preconditions and other steps (“package proposal”) for Ukraine to fulfil in advance of Russia’s eventual consent to a ceasefire agreement. This requires Kyiv to accept the following unilateral restraints for the duration of negotiations toward a ceasefire agreement (Chapter II, Variant 2: Package Proposal, TASS, June 2):

• No repositioning of Ukrainian military formations other than relocating them farther away from the Russian Federation’s borders;
• The stop of the mobilization [of civilians] into the Ukrainian armed forces;
• The start of demobilizing Ukrainian forces;
• The cessation of the delivery of military equipment, other forms of military assistance, and intelligence sharing by Ukraine’s external partners;
• The ruling out of the military presence of third countries and foreign military advisers in Ukraine; and
• The abandonment of sabotage and subversion activities against Russia and its citizens.

The Kremlin has listed some of these preconditions to a ceasefire since March, dubbing them as “nuances” (see EDM, March 21, 28). Beyond those unilateral military restraints, the document demands that Ukraine take proactive political steps as prerequisites to a ceasefire agreement with Russia, namely:

• Grant amnesty to and release [unspecified] “political detainees,” military and civilian;
• Cancel the state of war in Ukraine;
• Set the dates for presidential and parliamentary elections in Ukraine, no later than 100 days after the expiry of the state of war; and
• Sign a follow-up agreement with Russia to implement Chapter I (parameters of the political settlement) within this set of documents.

The state of war has been in force in Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, and has been renewed at 90-day intervals by the parliament. The Ukrainian constitution and legislation prohibit holding presidential and parliamentary elections, as well as referendums, during a state of war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s and the parliament’s tenures have technically expired in October 2023 and May 2024, respectively.

Moscow hopes to throw Ukraine into chaos by precipitating presidential and parliamentary elections in Ukraine while the war is ongoing. To do that, it holds out ceasefire options conditional on Kyiv canceling the legal state of war and holding elections even as the actual war would still be raging.

That sequence also suggests that Moscow is prepared to negotiate the military and political terms of settlement with the incumbent Ukrainian leadership—Zelenskyy’s nominees or the president himself—but finalize and sign a treaty with newly elected leaders. Russia would undoubtedly intrude in its heavy-handed ways into Ukrainian elections if those were held as part of a political settlement negotiated with Moscow.