The peace talks that everyone wants and nobody believes

The first serious moves toward ending the war in Europe arrived in the second week of February, and the moves had the shape that the year had been promising since January: the new American administration announced that negotiations with the Russian leadership would begin, the European capitals reacted with the mixture of hope and alarm that the announcement deserved, and the Ukrainian government, the party with the most at stake, responded with the careful language of a country that has learned to wait for the details. The talks are wanted by everyone and believed by almost no one, and the gap between the wanting and the believing is the honest measure of how far the war has to go.

The American announcement was the part of the week that changed the arithmetic of the conflict. The administration that had promised, during the campaign, to end the war quickly had moved with the speed that the promise implied, and the announcement of the negotiations, with the date of a possible meeting attached, reset the expectations of every capital involved. The reset was welcomed by the publics that are tired of the war and viewed with alarm by the governments that fear the terms, and the two reactions are the poles between which the negotiations will run. The American role has shifted from the supporter of the defence to the manager of the peace, and the shift, whichever way it goes, is the year’s largest geopolitical event so far.

The European reaction to the announcement was the part that the coverage described with the word ‘anxiety’, and the anxiety was specific. The capitals that have spent three years funding the defence and sheltering the refugees now face the prospect that the negotiations will be conducted between the two powers that have the most influence, with the European governments informed rather than included, and the anxiety is the fear of being present at the settlement without a seat at the table. The emergency meetings that the week produced, the summits and the phone calls, were the diplomatic form of the same reaction, and the meetings produced the standard communiques about the coordination and the red lines, with the red lines, the diplomats privately noted, shifting with every statement.

The Ukrainian position is the part of the story that the negotiations cannot ignore and the negotiators may be tempted to. The country that has fought for three years, that has lost the territory and the people and the infrastructure, insists, with the consistency that the war has built, that the peace must be a just one, and the insistence is not a slogan but a requirement of the country’s politics and its survival. The negotiations will test the insistence against the realities that the mediators bring, and the test will be conducted in the language that the mediators choose, which is the language of the possible. The Ukrainians know the language; they have been learning it for three years.

The talks, when they begin, will be the most consequential of the decade, and the consequence will not be visible in the first sessions. The negotiations over the ceasefire will be followed by the negotiations over the security guarantees, the sanctions, the reconstruction, the membership questions, and the sequence will take longer than the optimists hope and shorter than the pessimists fear. The week of February that announced the talks will be remembered, whichever way the war ends, as the week the end became imaginable; the imagining is the fragile part, and the fragility is the reason the talks are wanted by everyone and believed by almost no one, and the reason that the believing will have to be earned, one session at a time.