❈ ❈ ❈

Lavrov Is on Blinken’s List of People to Call

July 28, 2022: The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a press availability at the State Department on Wednesday made the dramatic announcement that he intends to speak to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov “in the coming days … for the first time since the war began” in Ukraine on February 24.

Interestingly, he gave an alibi that harks back to the Soviet era — prisoner exchange.

The US is offering a swap of a Russian entrepreneur Viktor Bout, who was arrested in Thailand in 2008 on a US warrant and later convicted to 25 years in prison on charges of weapons trafficking, in exchange for Brittney Griner, a basketball star who has been detained at Moscow airport on drug charges and, importantly, Paul Whelan, an ex-US Marine, who was arrested in Russia in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years in prison two years later on charges of espionage.

Whelan surely was a prize catch for the Russians. The American ambassador in Moscow had been visiting him in prison.

Blinken also added a second topic he’d like to discuss with Lavrov —implementation of the recent “grain deal”. Washington played no role in negotiating the deal and is presumably hoping to make a lateral entry into the matrix now. Blinken claimed he is “seeing and hearing around the world a desperate need for food, a desperate need for prices to decrease. And if we can help through our direct diplomacy encourage the Russians to make good on the commitments they’ve made, that will help people around the world, and I’m determined to do it.”

Interestingly, in a veiled reference to the US, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavuсoglu stated Wednesday on broadcaster Tv100 that there were countries who “wanted to block” the grain deal between Russia and Turkey, who want the Ukraine conflict “to prolong”, as they think the longer Moscow’s special military operation continues, “the weaker Russia will be.”

Fair enough. Blinken then came to the real purpose of his forthcoming call with Lavrov — “the plans that Russia now has to pursue the annexation of Ukrainian territory.”

Blinken repeated the hyperbole that sanctions are having “a powerful and also growing effect” and has “weakened Russia profoundly” and the Biden administration will do all that it can “to strengthen Ukraine’s position on the battlefield so it has the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

However, what comes through is the growing disquiet in Washington that to its utter disbelief, the Russian stance has only hardened lately. Blinken said it is “causing alarms.” In particular, he noted Lavrov’s remark last week that the Kremlin’s goals in Ukraine had expanded. “Now they seek to claim more Ukrainian territory, beyond the Donbas,” he commented.

Indeed, the war has spun out of US algorithm. As Hungarian PM Orban pointed out last week, anti-Russian sanctions “have not shaken Moscow,” but Europe has already lost four governments and is in an economic and political crisis.

Russia is paying back to the US and NATO in the same coin that the latter did when they dismembered Yugoslavia. The NATO’s war in Yugoslavia came at a time when Russia was weak and it helplessly watched the West carving up a fellow Slavic country.

Russia will not be deterred now, as it is already past the mid-stream. Blinken noted frantically, “I think it’s very important now that we see what Russia’s next plan is – that is, the annexation of more Ukrainian territory – that the Russians, Foreign Minister Lavrov, hear directly from me on behalf of the United States that we see what they’re doing, we know what they’re doing, and we will never accept it. It will never be legitimised. There will always be consequences if that’s what they do and that’s what they try to sustain.”

However, the paradox is, the initiative still lies with the US. Russian army will move deeper into Ukraine in proportion to the US’ supply of advanced weapons with long reach into Russian territory. But Moscow is interested only so that Russian territory is safe from any attack from Ukraine.

It is the Biden administration’s choice to extend the duration of the war or escalate the scope of the Russian operation. Washington made a catastrophic mistake to torpedo the Russian-Ukrainian deal stuck in April in Istanbul when Kiev agreed to settle for the modest Russian demands.

But those were halcyon days when US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin quipped — with Blinken by his side — after a quick trip to Kiev that the US wanted to see Russia “weakened to the degree that it cannot do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Austin boasted that Russia had “already lost a lot of military capability” and “a lot of its troops. We want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

Hearing Austin’s battle cry, Blinken chipped in: “The strategy that we’ve put in place, the massive support for Ukraine, the massive pressure against Russia, in solidarity with more than 30 countries engaged in these efforts, is having real results. And we’re seeing that when it comes to Russian war aims.”

“Russia is failing. Ukraine is succeeding,” Blinken claimed. Now, that triumphalism was no there in Blinken’s performance yesterday.

A great beauty about press conferences is that some journalists make it lively and revealing. So, one American journalist asked Blinken, “you have been talking about how Russia is isolated internationally, and yet we see Foreign Minister Lavrov jetting off around Africa and the Middle East and President Putin going to Tehran… They make the case that they’re not isolated, and now you’re about to have this conversation with them. So what does that say about the administration’s efforts to isolate Russia when you are actually now reaching out to them to talk about the issues?”

Blinken’s explanation: “Matt, in terms of some of the travels that the foreign minister, for example, is engaged in, what I see is a desperate game of defence to try somehow to justify to the world the actions that Russia has taken…”

Yet, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell bitterly complained yesterday, “Lavrov visits to try to convince Africans that European sanctions are to blame for everything that is happening … and the entire western press repeats this. When I’m going to Africa to say the opposite, that sanctions have nothing to do with it, no one picks it up!”

The spectre of the collapse of EU economies is rattling the Biden Administration. A CNN report yesterday was titled US officials say ‘biggest fear’ has come true as Russia cuts gas supplies to Europe. It said the Biden administration “is working furiously behind the scenes to keep European allies united” as the blowback from the sanctions against Russia hits them and the “impact on Europe could boomerang back onto the US, spiking natural gas and electricity prices.”

The report quoted an unnamed US official saying Russia’s retaliation for western sanctions has put the West in “unchartered territory.” Suffice to say, Blinken’s call underscores the desperate urgency in Washington to open a line of communication to Moscow at the political level.

How this volte-face plays out in European capitals, especially Kiev remains to be seen. Blinken led the western boycott of Lavrov at the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Bali as recently as July 7-8. President Biden extended a glamorous welcome to Zelensky’s wife Olena Zelenska to the White House who was on a high-profile visit last week, even as Blinken was preparing his stunning announcement.

❈ ❈ ❈

Shouldn’t Biden be Talking Directly to Putin?

July 30, 2022: No sooner than Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov returned to Moscow after the SCO ministerial in Tashkent, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s pending request for a conversation was scheduled late Friday evening. This has been their first conversation since the war began in Ukraine in February.

The Russian readout touches on Russia’s special military operations. Lavrov emphasised the inevitability that the “goals and tasks will be fully achieved.” Second, Lavrov told Blinken that the US’ continued arming of Ukraine with weapons “is only prolonging the agony of the Kiev regime by dragging out the conflict and increasing the number of victims.”

Lavrov also said Russia will continue its “consistent efforts to restore peaceful life on the territories that it is liberating.” It implies that the integration of Kherson, Zoporozhia, Kharkiv, etc. is an inexorable process.

Fourth, Lavrov focused on global food security issues and the grain deal and regretted that US is yet to deliver on “promises to make exemptions for Russian food shipments,” and the West is “exploiting the problem to advance its geopolitical interests, which is unacceptable.”

Finally, on prisoner exchange, Lavrov “strongly advised” Blinken that this is not an amateurish issue and “dubious media leaks” should be avoided.

For a conversation after several months, it was icy. Blinken is taking his time to issue a readout. But he was evasive on the issue of prisoner exchange, adding, “I’m not going to characterise his (Lavrov’s) response, and I can’t give you an assessment of whether I think things are any more or less likely.”

Equally, on the grain deal, Blinken made no reference to the reciprocal lifting of restrictions on Russia’s export of grains and fertiliser. His interest was only on Russia making good on loosening its naval blockade and allowing grain shipments to leave Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.

There is a hump appearing here, for sure. Zelensky’s trip to the Black Sea port of Chernomorsk near Odessa accompanied by G7 ambassadors suggests that Washington is switching back to the propaganda mode that Russia is impeding Ukraine’s exports.

The New York Times has noted, “Even if grain ships do get underway, danger, uncertainty and deep mistrust will hang over the effort, and major obstacles to carrying out the agreement remain.”

Such conversations as yesterday’s suffer from being totally opaque. Blinken can’t even articulate the substantive issues bothering Biden — the cracks in the western unity.

Curiously, the Biden faces two crisis situations with explosive potential at the moment — in Ukraine and over Taiwan. Indeed, it is crystal clear that both have been precipitated by Washington. Yet, the manner in which Biden is handling them couldn’t be anymore dissimilar.

In the case of Taiwan, Biden didn’t hesitate to call up Chinese President Xi Jinping to calm the tensions. But he has chosen a different path to communicate with President Vladimir Putin.

For sure, into the six month of the conflict in Ukraine, Biden has finally decided to bite the bullet and resume high-level contact with Moscow. But he opted to get through to Putin through his state secretary!

The problem here is, although US-China relations are tense, Biden never took it to a personal level. He never used derogatory language to spite Xi Jinping, as he did to Putin repeatedly.

But Blinken too faces a similar predicament. On July 7-8, he avoided shaking hands with Lavrov at the G20 ministerial at Bali and skipped the official banquet because Lavrov was there. But after such churlish behaviour, here he was yesterday seeking out Lavrov!

The State Department reportedly sent out a circular recently to American embassies directing diplomats to dissuade foreign leaders from being photographed with Lavrov, so that Washington’s project to “isolate” Russia gained traction! Lavrov apparently learnt about it from his hosts!

Unsurprisngly, Blinken had to first call a press conference to rationalise publicly his need to talk with someone whom he treated as a “pariah” only 3 weeks ago. Blinken is an intelligent man and senses that Biden is desperate to open a communication channel to the Kremlin. (Whether a Biden-Putin conversation figured in yesterday’s discussion we do not know.)

The point is, after five months of conflict in Ukraine, Russian economy has not collapsed but is adjusting to a “new normal” in the geopolitical conditions. Russian currency is doing splendidly well. And there has been no insurrection in Russia. Above all, Russia is winning the war in Ukraine and is gearing up to dictate the terms of peace.

Lavrov must be well aware of the real reasons behind Blinken’s call. First, there is a catastrophic situation that may crack western unity, as the spectre of cutoff in Russian gas supplies threatens European countries. Four European governments have fallen so far.

Everyone understands that it is much more than an energy crisis. As economies start crashing, social and political unrest will follow. There is pervasive disquiet in European capitals. The blame game has begun.

Washington may not be able to salvage the job of European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen much longer. The European leaders realise that Ursula played them with her personal crusade to punish Russia.

There is a lot of pent-up resentment about Germany, too. Europeans don’t shed tears over Germany’s plight. Berlin’s imposition of harsh austerity programme on its southern neighbours is still painful memory.

Therefore, Ursula’s latest hare-brained scheme to impose a 15% reduction in gas consumption on all EU countries (to bail out Berlin) faces resistance. Truly, there is no alternative to Russian gas and Washington has forgotten its promise to find replacement.

Biden only brought this calamity down on the Europeans. Barack Obama’s private doubt is now public wisdom for Europeans — “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f… things up.”

Lavrov also knows the second reason why Blinken wants to re-engage. The Russian special military operations are making good progress and all indications are that the Zelensky regime is crumbling. Thus, preparations have begun for holding referendums in Kherson and Zoporozhia regions to ascertain the wishes of the people.

Russia has invited applications for citizenship from the residents of Kharkov as well, and ruble currency is being introduced. Putin just approved a 3-year master plan to rebuild Mariupol. The ancient city will soon have bridges, roads and schools that put Washington to shame.

Most important, Biden must be worrying that even if he multiplies by a hundred times Washington’s carve-up of Kosovo as a nation state in 2008, it still wouldn’t match what is steadily unfolding in Ukraine. And Europeans are watching all this — speechless, in disbelief — as territorial boundaries get redrawn in their manicured continent.

There are new facts on the ground since March when Russia and Kiev reached an agreement in Istanbul (which the hawkish Biden team promptly torpedoed by promising the moon to Zelensky.) So much water has flown down the Dnieper since then.

(M.K. Bhadrakumar is a former Indian diplomat. Both articles, courtesy: Indian Punchline, Bhadrakumar’s blog.)