Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing a cheating game with the West and Ukraine, not only hollowing out the Minsk armistice agreements (see EDM, January 22, 23, 27), but even shifting the agreed-upon demarcation line on the ground and on the map. Kyiv is alert to Putinâs con games, but it is forced to face a stronger Russia one-on-one, without Western assistance. Ukraineâs Western partners are slow, as usual, to notice Putinâs maneuvers, most recently at the January 21 âNormandy groupâ meeting in Berlin. There, Russiaâs Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov prevailed on his German and French counterparts to evenhandedly urge âall signatories of the Minsk agreements to meet in the coming days to implement the ceasefire and the withdrawal of heavy weapons in accordance with the Line of Contact as agreed in Minsk on September 19 [2014]â (Auswaertiges-amt.de, January 21).
But, which Line of Contact exactly? Lavrov brought Putinâs new version of the Line of Contact (demarcation line) to the Berlin meeting. The German and French ministers did not seem to object to the deceptive new version. And what does âsignatoryâ mean in Russiaâs case? Russia is a party to the conflict in every real sense, but only a party to the armistice in an official sense, rejecting its obligations as a signatory. Moscow is, instead, using its signatoryâs status to protect the Donetsk and Luhansk âpeopleâs republicsâ on the ground.
Putin first revealed his new version of the demarcation line in a January 15 letter to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The Kremlin released only bits of that document, with misleading follow-up comments on a daily basis. Citing Putinâs letter, Russia justified its proxiesâ attacks against Ukraine along the entire demarcation line. The Ukrainian government did not manage to explain the facts fully, even after a Kyiv journal did so on January 23 (see below). The Russian offensive operations persist, and Putinâs letter remains un-debunked outside the target country Ukraine.
The full text of Putinâs letter circulated inside Ukrainian government circles from January 16. The Russian president called on Ukraine and the Donetsk and Luhansk âpeopleâs republicsâ (dignified as âDPRâ and âLPR,â in the document) to withdraw their respective heavy artillery and missile systems by 15 kilometers on either side of the demarcation line, in accordance with the September 19, 2014, Minsk Memorandum (armistice document, still unimplemented). That document does stipulate this disengagement measure, referencing a then-existing demarcation line, with minor agreed-upon mutual adjustments.
Putinâs letter, however, shifts the demarcation line. He introduces the âde facto demarcation line, in existence as of January 13, 2015 [starting date of the latest Russian offensive].â This new de facto line incorporates at least 550 square kilometers of ground captured by Russiaâs proxies, westward of the Minsk demarcation line. It also incorporates a portion of the âdemilitarized zoneâ that the Minsk agreement had created on the approaches to Mariupil. Since then, however Russian and proxy forces have entered that zone (the January 13 missile strike at Volnovakha, opening shot in the latest Russian offensive, came from one part of that violated zone, as did the January 24 missile strike on Mariupil).
Maximizing the ambiguities, Putinâs letter called for the reciprocal disengagement of forces along âthe line of contact of September 19, 2014 and [sic] of January 13, 2015.â An accompanying map showed both lines, indirectly highlighting the shift in favor of the Russian side. Furthermore, âWe [Russia] together with the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] shall organize the monitoring over the execution of these measures.â