How to broker a deal between Russia and Ukraine

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: How to broker a deal between Russia and Ukraine

John Paul Rathbone
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m John Paul Rathbone, security and defence correspondent for the Financial Times, standing in for Gideon Rachman. In this week’s edition, we’re looking at if a peace deal or ceasefire could ever be brokered between Ukraine and Russia. My guest today is Sergio Jaramillo, whose experience brokering peace deals began in his native Colombia. As Colombia’s high commissioner for peace, Jaramillo led the negotiations between the Marxist Farc guerrillas and the government.

News clip
The agreement is now being signed by the president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos.

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The peace deal between Colombia’s government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, is within reach.

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John Paul Rathbone
This deal successfully put an end to 52 years of armed civil conflict. Yet immediately before that, he was also vice minister of defence, actually helping co-ordinate attacks on the Farc. I first met Jaramillo in Bogotá a decade ago. As you will hear, he is a lucid and unsentimental analyst of both war and peace. Nowadays, he is based in Brussels with the European Institute of Peace, where he is a senior adviser. So with Ukraine and Russia hard at war, is pursuing talks a viable path to ending the conflict or is it a fool’s errand?

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Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, people have wondered whether compromise will be the only way to bring the fighting to an end. This has often been met with howls of protest from Kyiv for fears that its Western allies might cut a deal with Russia behind his back.

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Ukraine is rejecting a suggestion from French President Emmanuel Macron that Russia must not be humiliated by the West.

John Paul Rathbone
Yet even President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has said ultimately this war will only definitively end through diplomacy. But how might that diplomacy pan out? Or can it even? Only last week, the UN and Turkey brokered a deal between Moscow and Kyiv, one that would allow Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea. Even so, the head of the United Nations said he was doubtful that it would lead to anything more substantial.

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At the present moment, I see no conditions for a true peace process. This is clear. Not even for a global ceasefire. I don’t think we are close to that. I hope this agreement could.

John Paul Rathbone
All of this is being closely watched by my guest this week, Sergio Jaramillo, who I caught up with down the line from Brussels. I started our conversation by asking him how his experience negotiating peace deals could be relevant to Ukraine and Russia today.

Sergio Jaramillo
Well, the main thing for me is to understand that it’s all one war and not to think about the fighting and the use of force on the one hand and negotiations on the other as something different that is done by diplomats who are jokes. If you’re trying to solve a conflict, then you can do it by force, but sometimes you can also do it by negotiations. And of course, the trick is to know when to use which, which is what President Santos did particularly well in the case of Colombia.

John Paul Rathbone
So here in Ukraine, we’ve got two sides that seem to have absolutely no desire to talk to each other. And last week, we had perhaps a deal that will allow Ukraine to continue exporting grain. Is that a sign of how a peace deal might work out in the future?

Sergio Jaramillo
Perhaps. But let’s first take a step back and understand the nature of the war in Ukraine and of Russia’s invasion. In my view, what’s happening in the Ukraine is not primarily a territorial war, although it may look like that. But that’s actually Putin’s fallback position. What’s happening is a war about Ukrainian sovereignty. Putin wants to disrupt, to curtail, to control Ukraine’s sovereignty because he, I think, can’t stand the thought of Ukraine as a sovereign and free country that holds up a mirror to his own regime. And he actually said as much recently in St Petersburg and the economic forum. He said, openly, that the 2014 what he calls “coup”,  the Maidan, is what got everything going, which is an extraordinary recognition that an internal situation unleashed a foreign invasion. So in this sense, we’re actually not facing a limited war at all. It’s an existential war for Ukraine, for the preservation of its own state and form of life and now it’s become an existential war for Putin as well, who can’t afford to lose. So in that sense, I don’t think there is a proper peace deal to be made between Russia and the Ukraine so long as Putin is in power. But it doesn’t mean that there are no deals to be made at some stage because no hot war lasts forever. And when the conditions are right, when the Ukrainians judge the conditions to be right, then I think we need to think about how to turn this military struggle into a political and economic struggle. Because a struggle it will remain. There will be no peace between Ukraine and Russia so long as Putin is in power, I think.

John Paul Rathbone
So you have to start thinking about how to structure deals, even though the two sides are basically irreconcilable. How do you wrap your head around that? How should Kyiv think about that? How should the west think about that?

Sergio Jaramillo
Well, the first thing you need to do is to actually prepare very seriously. We actually prepared meticulously for every single meeting we had over a five-year negotiation with the Farc. Six months of secret talks and four-plus of public talks. Because the negotiation is no less serious than a military operation. You wouldn’t go into battle without a plan; why would you do that with a negotiation? And if you do, which is a little bit what you saw recently in Afghanistan with the US — spent a trillion dollars and untold number of casualties. And yet when negotiation time came, it was almost all-out improvisation. And they signed what I actually regard as being probably the worst agreement they’ve ever signed, which is the Doha agreement. You saw that also as well in February 15 with Minsk II, which has been rightly called by commentators a hasty and contradictory agreement into which, so far as I can tell, the Ukrainians were sort of bullied into signing. So this can’t happen again. You actually have to think through these things and you have to think through some of the technical problems you’re inevitably going to find and start working on the solution.

John Paul Rathbone
So negotiations in this way of thinking about them are a parallel process to what is going on in the battlefield, rather than a sequential one. But even so, how can you ever be sure that you could do a deal with someone who seems as untrustworthy as Vladimir Putin?

Sergio Jaramillo
Well, a cardinal rule of negotiations for me is that you never go into a negotiation trusting the other side or even intending to build trust with the other side. You go into negotiation with the strategy, and if it works, that is what you trust. You trust the process, not the people. Now, you mentioned the grain agreement. We will see if the grain agreement actually works over the next 120 days that you agreed to, then you will trust that. If it doesn’t, then you don’t. But you don’t need to trust the other person. And that is why it’s so important to actually think hard for the various mechanisms you can use to create a robust process.

John Paul Rathbone
And what might some of those mechanisms be? You mentioned the Minsk process, and that was monitored by the OSCE, but to no end. And whenever Russia seems to do a deal, it’s only to break it. How do you get around that? How do you build up a mechanism that will lead to good verification of a country that is also a member of the UN Security Council?

Sergio Jaramillo
This is a very good example. Verification means that you actually have protocols as to how the ceasefire should work, that a third party can adjudicate and say whether you are complying with them or not. In our case, I actually started going up to New York to speak to the Security Council, the P5, two and a half years before the Farc first agreed to give the UN a role in some form of verification and actually three and a half before they signed up to it. And during that time, what we did with President Santos was to talk to the Security Council, talk to the secretariat, design the kind of mission that we thought would work so that when the time came, we were ready. Everything was ready. Contrast that to what happened in Minsk II, where the OSCE was given a very, very weak mandate without any clarity about how to adjudicate violations of the so-called package. And, you know, clearly the ceasefire wasn’t holding and the OSCE couldn’t do anything about it and nobody cared very much for what it said. So you actually have to learn from your mistakes. Now, you are actually facing a very, very difficult situation because Ukraine has been invaded by a P5 member, by Russia, by which I mean one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. So how do you get your head around that? How do you actually come up with a revocation mechanism if you want UN support when it’s a P5 member who actually is one of the warring parties? That’s actually a very hard problem.

John Paul Rathbone
So essentially, you continue prosecuting the war, whilst at the same time making preparations, if not for peace, at least ways in which a peace deal could eventually be struck should the moment come.

Sergio Jaramillo
Yes, although I’m actually weary of using the expression “peace agreement” because it’s really very, very hard to think how a substantive true peace agreement would be possible with Putin’s Russia. But you could have a robust ceasefire agreements later on, which gives Ukraine the chance to start rebuilding its economy, bring its people back and actually strengthening its own position. And to do that, you have to think about all these mechanisms ahead.

John Paul Rathbone
Do you think that a precondition for Putin to enter into any kind of negotiations requires some kind of defeat or setback on the battlefield?

Sergio Jaramillo
Obviously what happens in the battlefield matters immensely and helps set up conditions for possible future talks. But I would emphasise that I think it’s a mistake to concentrate only on what happens on the battlefield. I don’t think it’s an intelligence strategy to say that the outcome of the current battle between Russian artillery and US-supplied Himars is actually what’s going to decide the future of Ukraine and the decisions in Moscow. I think you need to think about this again comprehensively. So, yes, the battlefield matters, but it also matters hugely what happens economically in Russia. It matters hugely what happens diplomatically. And this is why the West needs to wake up and really have something to say to the rest of the world why this matters. And I don’t frankly understand why they have done such a terrible job at it, because the explanation is very simple. Would you like to have your neighbour invade you and disrupt your sovereignty? No. Then why should you tolerate the Ukraine? This is the kind of thing that they should be saying more lively, I think.

John Paul Rathbone
And indulging in a bit of blue sky thinking, what kind of deal might be possible? Are you thinking about one whereby territory is ceded for peace, which of course is the kind of discussion that gets Kyiv very upset?

Sergio Jaramillo
I’m actually not keen to speculate on that because I really think it’s for the Ukrainians to think about it. What I would say is that I would start by saying that the most important thing from the Ukrainian point of view is to preserve the integrity of the Ukrainian state. And in that sense, the Ukrainians already have a pretty big win, because that was obviously the objective of the original operation. The original operation wasn’t a proper military operation, in my view. It was an operation to compel the Ukrainians to give up and to give up their sovereignty. And they didn’t. So in that sense, they’ve actually done very well. But again, I do think it makes sense to think ahead of what would it look like to turn what I’m calling a military struggle into a political and economic struggle. I think that should be the goal for Ukraine.

John Paul Rathbone
Is there a risk that just even working on this future struggle undermines the military struggle because it suggests to western partners that this is a fight that’s going to run its course, appetite is running out, and look, they’re already preparing for peace?

Sergio Jaramillo
You have to be extraordinarily careful on three fronts. I don’t want to pretend that we, Colombians did everything brilliantly, because we didn’t. But I do think that on this count, President Santos did a brilliant job, which was to keep the trust of the military and to keep the military fighting. This is your first source of concern. You cannot affect the military’s morale. So you have to be super careful with whatever it is you do. Secondly, you have to start developing a narrative and you have to prepare the public for this road. And that’s, again, a very hard thing to do. And at the moment, from what we know about Ukraine, it’s going to take a great amount of work for the public to think that a certain stage this may be useful if that time ever comes. And then there’s a third element, which you mentioned, which are your international partners. And in the case of Ukraine, it’s far more important than it was for us to make sure that this support remains. I think the more everyone sees that you have a comprehensive, coherent strategy, the more they will be willing to keep supporting you in the long run.

John Paul Rathbone
So this way of thinking about constructing a deal is focused more on the process than on the ultimate goal, but all within the framework of the strategy, is that right?

Sergio Jaramillo
I think so. I think so. And you have to let time do its work and you have to turn time in your favour. To me it’s pretty obvious, as to many other people, that the basis of Putin’s strategy is to use time against Ukraine. He calculates, and not necessarily wrongly, that people will tire, that Europeans will tire of their electricity bills. My own electricity bills has multiplied by three or four. So I know what it looks like. But at the same time, we’ve had some very positive developments. I think the European Commission has shown real leadership and these are the kind of things we need. But we need everyone to be on a proper war footing. Understanding that what matters is not just what happens in the battlefield, but that you need a comprehensive strategy where economic support and where things like opening a door to EU membership, as was done, may be just as important as a battle. If not more, actually more.

John Paul Rathbone
Why is it important for the European Commission to keep this door open? What role does it actually usefully play for Ukraine?

Sergio Jaramillo
I think this is hugely, hugely important because again, what we’re seeing is a struggle around Ukrainian sovereignty, in my view, and Ukrainians need to see a path to a better future and they need to see that Europe really supports them. And even if it may take some time, at least there is a path. I think it’s a mistake from some European leaders to start pointing out the difficulties. No, the message should be the kind of message that Draghi gave in ‘12, and while it was about the euro, is that Europe will do whatever it takes to get Ukraine in. Of course, observing all the protocols and rules. But that this is actually what’s going to happen. That and the possibility of starting reconstruction and bringing investment will be as important to Ukraine as everything else they do on the defence side of things.

John Paul Rathbone
There’s also the element of the war crimes and that is going to make it harder for Ukrainians to accept any kind of deal. And it may also make it harder, ironically, for western allies to accept any kind of deal. How can you strike a deal with someone who has committed what putatively looks like horrendous war crimes? And I think this was a problem you faced in Colombia. How did you address that?

Sergio Jaramillo
We did, and we have done so successfully. It was the hardest thing to negotiate with the Farc, but we actually got them to, and this was the first time this ever happened. We got the Farc to stand before a tribunal, which they’ve already done, to acknowledge the commission of war crimes, which they’ve already done. And in return for that, to get what you would call a ‘light sentence’ with emphasis on reparations and restoring relationships. That’s what happened in Colombia. But that model, it’s hardly applicable in the case of Ukraine, because you are talking about an international war. It is very, very different. And so, I think we want to be careful about how much can be done in the short term. I think it makes sense to collect evidence. Certainly, it makes sense to investigate exactly when things are fresh, what happened. But we don’t want to overpromise what can happen on the war crimes tribunal front, because you may end up disappointing large numbers of victims. This is not something that is likely to happen any time soon.

John Paul Rathbone
Peering into the future and a future that is very uncertain and that seems to be premised on Russia being defeated, at least in some aspect of its strategy or its war. How can you press various soft spots in Russia’s overall approach, or rather Putin’s overall approach to this war and winkle out room there for potential negotiations?

Sergio Jaramillo
I think you want to be careful with that approach. I’m actually not in favour of this language of off-ramps and of “Okay, what we need to find is an off-ramp for Putin” or a face-saving solution for Putin. Putin at the moment is not interested at all in off-ramps. He wants to win and he actually probably truly thinks he’s winning. What we want to do is create a situation where reality pushes them in the direction. Where actually makes sense for him to behave in a way which is different from what he’s doing now. As, for example, what happened with the grain agreement. Nobody knows why the Russians agreed to this. You can speculate. I should think probably they don’t want to feel as isolated and that was a major reason. But what’s more important is what kind of things can you do with a comprehensive strategy to get them to change their behaviour? That’s I think what you need to concentrate on rather than offering them upfront.

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John Paul Rathbone
That was Sergio Jaramillo of the European Institute of Peace. I’m John Paul Rathbone, security and defence correspondent for the Financial Times. Tune in next week for another episode of the Rachman Review.

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