by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Kirill Dmitriev (lead image) is the Stanford and Harvard educated official appointed by President Vladimir Putin to persuade American businessmen to invest in the profits to be made from dismantling US economic sanctions against Russia.
Today at the Kremlin (April 11), he tried again in fresh talks with Putin and Stephen Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s negotiator.
Dmitriev was just fourteen years of age when he first arrived for schooling in California where neither he, nor anyone else, had ever heard of Vladimir Lenin’s 1904 booklet on the difference between revolutionaries and opportunists in politics; Lenin’s title had been “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.” All Russian adults schooled before Dmitriev know that phrase.
But on April 4 in Washington, when Dmitriev invited Russian reporters to ask whether he had made any steps forward in his talks with the Americans, he replied: “Yes, definitely. I would say that today and yesterday we made three steps forward on a large number of issues.” Either Dmitriev was making a mockery of Lenin’s three steps, or he was revealing his total ignorance of them.
At home in Moscow no one has dared to fault Putin’s emissary for transforming the direction of Lenin’s three steps. Nor has anyone asked Dmitriev to say concretely what his three steps are, or in what direction. The closest he came to that in his remarks in a Washington park were that he has been discussing “possible cooperation in the Arctic, in rare earth metals, in various other sectors where we can build constructive and positive relations…[and] active work on restoring air travel.” One of the “other sectors” Dmitriev mentioned is an Elon Musk project to fly to Mars.
That Dmitriev is proposing to open sectors of the Russian economy which are legally closed under national security control – at the same time as the US is escalating its military power projection from Greenland to Alaska – has been noted by the Russian Foreign Ministry, which has been trying to curb Dmitriev’s powers, as well as his tongue. Dmitriev has retreated, ingenuously telling the BBC: “first of all, I am focused on economics and investment, so I don’t comment on political issues.” Then he did just that. “There are already very good results. So the stop of the hitting the energy infrastructure is a major, major result. And frankly that is a good result for Ukraine.. for Russia, for the world.”
Dmitriev was referring to President Putin’s undertaking to President Trump during their telephone call of February 12 to halt Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy targets. This partial ceasefire by the Russian side has been ignored by the Ukrainians and their US and NATO advisors. Although the Kremlin notice warned that “in the event of a violation of the moratorium by either party, the other party has the right to consider itself free from obligations to comply with it”, there has been no Russian retaliation yet.
When Lenin had begun his three steps a century ago, he warned: “When a prolonged, stubborn and heated struggle is in progress, there usually begin to emerge after a time the central and fundamental points at issue, upon the decision of which the ultimate outcome of the campaign depends, and in comparison with which all the minor and petty episodes of the struggle recede more and more into the background.”
In the record which the Russian and American negotiators have been making since the presidents’ telephone call, the outcome to date is nothing but “minor and petty episodes”. Dmitriev is the only Russian official to say otherwise.
At the first round of talks in Saudi Arabia on February 18, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov disclaimed there had been agreement on anything but a programme of talks to follow at the sub-ministerial level on ceasefire measures in the Black Sea, and on the restoration of regular operations between the State Department and the Foreign Ministry. “We didn’t just listen”, Lavrov said in briefing the Russian press after the meeting, “but we also heard each other…This does not necessarily mean a convergence of positions.”
The subsequent talks which have followed have demonstrated almost no “convergence of positions.”
The negotiations between Andrew Peek and Michael Anton on the US side, Senator Grigory Karasin and Colonel-General Sergei Beseda on the Russian side, held in Riyadh on March 24 discussed Ukrainian proposals for a ceasefire on the Black Sea, including Odessa port, and the resumption of Ukrainian grain exports. The two sides failed to accept a joint communiqué of what they had agreed.
Instead, the Kremlin issued a detailed outline of agreement for the Black Sea with preconditions. These were “the removal of sanctions imposed on Rosselkhozbank (Russian Agricultural Bank) and other financial institutions involved in ensuring international food trade (including fish and fish products) and fertilisers, their reconnection to SWIFT, and opening of relevant correspondent accounts; the removal of restrictions imposed on trade finance operations; the removal of sanctions imposed on companies producing and exporting food (including fish and fish products) and fertilisers, as well as restrictions banning insurance companies from working with food cargoes (including fish and fish products) and fertilisers; the removal of restrictions on servicing ships in ports and sanctions against ships flying the flag of Russia, if they are involved in food trade (including fish and fish products) and fertilisers; the removal of restrictions on supplies to the Russian Federation of agricultural machinery and other goods used in the production of food (including fish and fish products) and fertilisers.”
In the US communiqué, the Russian sanctions terms were ignored.
Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov
Instead, the US said that in principle it would “help restore Russia’s access to the world market for agricultural and fertilizer exports, lower maritime insurance costs, and enhance access to ports and payment systems for such transactions. “ It said no more about the Ukrainian attacks on energy targets except that “the United States and Russia agreed to develop measures for implementing President Trump’s and President Putin’s agreement to ban strikes against energy facilities of Russia and Ukraine.” That was on March 25. In the interval of three weeks since then, the frequency of the Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian energy targets has increased.
The US and Russia then sent officials to Istanbul on April 10 for negotiations to implement the earlier Rubio-Lavrov agreement in Riyadh “to address irritants to our bilateral relationship with the objective of taking steps necessary to normalize the operation of our respective diplomatic missions.” Alexander Darchiev for the Russian Foreign Ministry (he is the new Russian Ambassador to Washington) and Sonata Coulter, a deputy assistant secretary of State, failed to agree on any of the issues on the agenda except for one: “the U.S. and Russian delegations exchanged notes to finalize an understanding to ensure the stability of diplomatic banking for Russian and U.S. bilateral missions.”
The return of Russian offices, residences and other property in the US, confiscated on White House order for several years, was the Russian priority. According to Darchiev, “the return of illegally seized diplomatic property to the Russian side… is of critical importance for the restoration of normalcy in the entire bilateral relationship.” Coulter refused, claiming the US priority is “the Russian Federation’s policy prohibiting the employment of local staff, which is the key impediment to maintaining for stable and sustainable staffing levels at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.”
This serial failure, dictated by the Trump subordinates, has now led to an afternoon meeting in St Petersburg between Putin, his foreign policy advisor Yury Ushakov, Dmitriev and Witkoff. Lavrov was not present. The meeting appears to have been arranged hastily on the US initiative. “The situation on the negotiation track of the United States and Ukraine is developing rapidly,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced. “There are a lot of developments in one day.”
Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/76675
For the time being neither the Kremlin nor the White House has claimed any result. RIA Novosti, headlining that the meeting with Witkoff lasted for four hours, reported no detail at all.
Several hours after Witkoff had left meeting with Putin, Trump implied that he is blaming the Russians for the failure of the talks so far, and is planning a new ultimatum. “Russia has to get moving”, Trump tweeted.
Source: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114319592702753512
A well-informed source in Moscow says that Trump and his subordinates have been surprised by the Russian terms for ending the war. “The Russians have told Americans they will have Odessa and a land corridor to Moldova. They have offered ports on Dnieper River for access to the sea for the Ukrainians. There has been no demand about Nord Stream. Money is being discussed on the sidelines but not in the main talks. In the main room [in Riyadh on February 18] Lavrov and Ushakov brought no papers and asked Americans [Rubio and Waltz] to dust off the December 2021 treaty draft. The Russian positions shocked the Americans. They were told the Ukraine will be demilitarized and its forces will be turned into paramilitary and police. The Americans were also surprised how little Russians cared about Zelensky or his British and Europeans backers. The Americans were told there will be no Ukrainian paramilitary force east of the Dnieper – only police. A new Russian demand was tabled for autonomy of eight Ukrainian oblasts, with Kiev army forces removed. In general, the Russians propose turning the Ukraine into a genuinely federal structure with provisions that Banderites can never take power in Kiev and that the central forces will be limited in their capabilities, supplementing the police if and when Banderites take to the streets. The main purpose of any such force will be de-nazification and keeping it that way. There are demands also about the Orthodox Church in Ukraine.”
Leave a Reply