Russia and the USA: talks without much hope – opinion
Talks between Russia and the US about European security cannot be imagined as a therapy session. First of all, there is no neutral authority that can point the direction of the exchange. Second, one should still assume that both sides prepared the meeting with great analytical precision and created scenarios for its outcome.
Both the US and Russia have two goals, one of which has already been achieved. The Biden government – taken by surprise by the force of the Russian conditions and Moscow’s dealings with its European partners – initially wanted to escape the defensive and regain control of the arguments. She succeeded in doing this thanks to a clever communication policy between Secretary of State Tony Blinken and the White House. The negotiable and non-negotiable terms have been fixed, the price has been named, and above all the imbalance has been directed towards Europe.
Even if the European governments are not at the table in Geneva – they were involved beforehand and will then learn in NATO. The OSCE is a player, and the actual Ukraine negotiating team with Germany and France was in Moscow. Vladimir Putin did not succeed in separating the Europeans from the USA, nobody negotiates over and over again.
Russia can also achieve success. For the first time in almost 20 years, Putin’s military-backed diplomacy attack brought the relevance of Russia back to the United States. Neither the late George W. Bush nor Barack Obama accepted Putin as a serious opponent on the world stage. For Putin, Donald Trump was a mixture of compliant drip and unpredictable detonator. The Ukraine threat has now turned into a diplomatic effort again. Of course, it is not the first since the end of the Cold War – all attempts so far have ended in disappointment.
A test of the ruler’s sense of reality in the Kremlin
This time, after the talks began in Geneva, the world was spared disappointment. Both sides dealt ruthlessly with their substantive ideas, die – if one is generous – have a common goal: the security of Europe. Of course, the interests are as far apart as the Atlantic and the Urals, and the accompanying rhetoric remained uncompromising.
Nonetheless, it is important that the talks have not collapsed. If Russia had wanted to show the US off, this would have been the opportunity. If the USA had declared the Russian negotiator to be insane, rapprochement would have taken place. So the good news is that what is spoken WILL and die the prelude to an exchange on trust and possibly arms control.
Only Vladimir Putin can answer the real question: Will Russia turn off its blackmailing tone and accept other states’ right to self-determination? The Geneva conversation did not bring any clarity here, and so the test of the sense of reality of the ruler in the Kremlin, who has long lived in the uniformed world of Soviet tsarism, has not been tested. In the end, the most effective means of disillusionment was still the unity of the West and the credibility of its counter-threat. As is well known, insight and rationality are not something that can be negotiated.