How to end the war in Ukraine

 President Vladimir Putin said the other day that both sides have been guilty of transgressing the cease-fire.



Today Nato members, not least the US, don’t make it crystal clear that  this is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. Even such Cold  War Warriors as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski argue that  President Barack Obama should speak with clarity on this subject.   “Ukraine should not join Nato”, says Kissinger.



Both the Russians on one side and the US and Nato on the other have been playing with fire with their support of the two sides. And who suffers?- the ordinary inhabitants of the eastern provinces. However pro-Russian they were before all the fighting began they are now largely convinced the rebels killing in their name no longer represent them. The businesses they work for or own are working at half power or less. Unemployment has soared. Homes have been decimated. Pensions are unpaid. Hospitals find it increasingly hard, struggling to deal with extra patients and a curtailed drug supply.

In Moscow, among thinking people, it has become clear that Russia should have no interest in taking over large swathes of Ukrainian territory that would be just an economic albatross around its neck.  Putin is said to think like that, although he might be glad if the rebels, including a good number of Russian soldiers, captured the port city of Mariupol, making it easier for Russia to integrate Crimea.

We now wait anxiously until the end of the year. The agreement made in Minsk in February by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and President Putin determined that the separatists do not have to hand control of 450 km of the Ukrainian-Russian border back to the central Ukrainian government until the end of the year.

That step was made conditional on Ukraine devolving powers to its regions and passing a law granting “special status” to the eastern areas. The regions will be allowed to create their own police forces and appoint prosecutors and judges.

Telling the rebels to lay down their arms will not be as easy for Putin as Western observers often suggest. On one occasion Putin confessed that only 30% of his decisions get implemented. If one reads “The Russia Hand” by Strobe Talbott, President Bill Clinton’s chief of Russian affairs, there are innumerable examples during the time of President Boris Yeltsin when senior members of the bureaucracy, including the top ranks of the military, simply went their own way until Clinton and Talbott drew attention to what they were doing and Yeltsin angrily told them, in front of Clinton, to carry out his decisions and orders. In Moscow, at the end of last year, one well-informed observer, close to Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev, told me how to get the rebels to quit was “the million dollar question”. They have their own impetus, their own agenda and are not easy to control.