Blinken wants Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements - notes on the US Secretary of State's visit to Kiev

January 19, 2022

Today US secretary of State Anthony Blinken arrived in Kiev to meet with the government. The main topic of discussions was the implementation of the Minsk Agreements for the regulation of the conflict in Donbass, particularly the political aspects of said agreements.

Blinken landing in Kiev today. Before visiting Zelensky, he visited the US embassy and thanked its staff for its ‘sacrifices’.

A source close to the president earlier told the Ukrainian news site strana.ua that Ukrainian leadership is worried by the intentions of the Americans for the following reason: they believe he is coming with the intent of forcing Kiev to carry out the political aspects of Minsk, despite their unpopularity within Ukraine, especially among the hyper-active nationalist minority. This has apparently got Zelensky’s team in ‘hysteria’ over Biden’s ‘hypocrisy’.

In today’s interview in Kiev on the Voice of America, Blinken responded to his Ukrainian interviewer’s question on whether the Minsk Agreements should be ‘renegotiated’ – a constant demand of Kiev – by saying that ‘there is no need to renegotiate the Minsk Agreements’. He said that ‘there are very clear steps which both the parties have to take’ – a clear riposte to the interviewer’s claim that ‘Russia and Ukraine have different interpretations of these agreements’, and an obvious demand for Ukraine to get going with the ‘steps’ it has not implemented.

Blinken also said that Ukraine has either ‘implemented or begun to implement’ the various aspects of the Minsk Agreements – it doesn’t seem amiss to assume that Ukraine has begun particularly forcefully ‘beginning to implement’ the agreements because of Blinken’s visit.  These steps which haven’t yet been implemented are the political aspects of the Minsk agreements, which the Ukrainian government officially considers to be inappropriate.

A note on the ‘political aspect of the Minsk Agreements: Russia likes these agreements, while Kiev does not, since they integrate the DNR/LNR (Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics) into Ukraine as autonomous regions, without political purges and with general amnesty, conserving the DNR/LNR police, and where the first elections would take place without Ukrainian military control.

In the past, Poroshenko was forced into signing the Minsk agreements in part due to successive military defeats in 2015, and also by strong US pressure. This pressure was exerted through the threat of withholding IMF credits, which was extremely important to Ukraine in 2015, given the extremely negative economic conditions at the time, where the currency had devaluated from 8 to the dollar (2013) to around 24 to the dollar, even reaching over 28 to the dollar in February 2015.

Without IMF credits, the hryvnia would have further devalued to yet more catastrophic levels. Nevertheless, Ukraine did not go ahead with implementing the political aspects of the Minsk agreements. There were 2 conditions of possibility for this reluctance - the relative stabilization and mild growth of the Ukrainian economy after 2016, and the continued hostility of the US towards Russia. However, the US is now trying to come to a deal with Russia over Ukraine, in the hopes of receiving some minimal assurances from Russia that it won't increase military cooperation with China, or at the very least come to an agreement with Russia so that the US can focus on concentrating its forces against China.

As such, the US has been engaging in high level dialogue with Russian leadership recently. Blinken constantly emphasized that diplomatic resolution of the conflict is preferable to the more hawkish questions his Ukrainian interviewer gave him. He also referred to recent talks with Russia quite positively, calling them ‘important engagements’ which are continuing. Naturally the US has not agreed with the Russian demand to forbid NATO entry to Ukraine, which would mean an immense display of weakness for the USA.

However, the fact that these talks have been accompanied by the State Department and Biden forcing a cancellation of all sanctions (against the wishes of many republican and some democrat senators) on the Russian gas pipeline North Stream 2, one wonders what was kept secret during these talks. The US is implementing no new sanctions on Russia, and over the past few days EU countries have announced that the much-heralded threat of ‘cutting Russia off from SWIFT’ only meant intensifying existing sanctions on specific Russian banks and companies. In Blinken’s interview, he refused to explain which sanctions exactly the US would implement if Russia invaded, but he put this as the first of 3 responses the US would make in case of Russian invasion of Ukraine, with direct military confrontation not among his options.

So why all the media fuss around the imminent ‘Russian invasion of Ukraine’?

First, globally, to justify US ‘appeasement’ of Russia – if such moves are merely ‘compromises’ to prevent certain invasion, then surely they are permissible.

Second, more concretely, it cannot be ignored that this media fuss has had quite negative effects for the Ukrainian economy. Foreigners, placing their trust in Western media, have been withdrawing their money from Ukraine at a rapid rate. At the beginning of November 2021, 1 US dollar was worth 26.1 Ukrainian hryvnias. Now it is worth 28.5 hryvnias. This has the effect of pushing the Ukrainian government to consider more seriously any measures possible which would reduce war fear. If Blinken cited implementation of the political aspect of the Minsk agreements as a priority for the Ukrainian government it is likely that IMF credits are also linked to this demand.

Zelensky has not remained silent about the visit, confirming our interpretation of the situation. He released a video address to the nation, with several important points:

-         He emphasized that the idea of a Russian invasion is a ‘rumor’. Since a rumor is always spread by someone, this is a clear critique of US media. According to Zelensky, ‘there are currently no attacks on Ukrainian land, but simply attacks on our nerves’.

-         The rumor of such an attack was noted by Zelensky as pressuring the hryvnia. He urged foreign investors to stay.

-         He explained the spreading of such rumors as a way to ‘weaken Ukraine by forcing it to make compromises, to create an atmosphere where our refusal sounds weaker’. This is about as obvious as critique of the US as it gets. Zelensky is repeating exactly what we have been saying – the media frenzy about the ‘Russian invasion’ is created by the US to weaken the Ukrainian economy and created a false threat to thereby justify the US in its desire to reach compromise with Russia.

-         Zelensky called ‘our international partners to be active in actions, not just words’.

Another noteworthy priority for Blinken was for Ukraine to make a ‘correct’ choice about the new head of the ‘Specialized Anti-corruption Prosecution’ organ, one of the apparatuses set up after 2014 whose function is to exercise US control over Ukrainian politicians and businessmen through opening ‘corruption probes’ which freeze the bank accounts of the given individual. IMF credits are often linked to the ‘correct choice’ of the leader of these organs, whose place within the Ukrainian constitutional juridical system is entirely unclear. The twitter account of the US embassy in Ukraine spends much of its time urging ‘correct choices’ for the leadership of these organs, by which they mean the choice of pro-US figures like Sytnik or Ryaboshapka, despite repeated corruption scandals surrounding these ‘brave fighters against corruption’.

As always, he urged the continuation of ‘court reform’, which refers to the replacement of ‘homo Sovieticus’ Ukrainian judges with pro-Western ones, who will not make inconvenient decisions as the Constitutional Court has done, such as ruling the anti-corruption organs and the privatization of agricultural land as unconstitutional.

Asked about the ongoing court proceedings against former president Petro Poroshenko, Blinken answered in characteristic self-contradicting American fashion, beginning by saying that he could not make any comment on court processes internal to Ukraine, and ending by stating his hope that Ukraine will unite in the face of ‘the threat that Russia is posing’. This echoes articles by the hawkish euroatlantic journal Atlantic Council, which has urged Zelensky to stop persecuting figures like Akhmetov or Poroshenko in the interests of a united front against Russia.

Finally, it’s nice to see that the Americans have a sense of humor. The interviewer asked Blinken what he thought of Ukraine’s progress in the ‘fight against corruption’ and ‘reform’, on which front apparently ‘many Ukrainians argue there is a sabotage of anti-corruption reform’ (it would be interesting to hear what the interviewer thinks she means by ‘many Ukrainians’). Following Blinken’s diplomatic response, stressing Zelensky’s commitment to reform, the camera turned to the interviewer, who duly smirked.