View from London: “Ceasefire deal in Black Sea will be victory for Putin”

The first ceasefire deal brokered by the US during talks in Saudi Arabia, will have a limited impact on the grinding war and seems to reward Moscow without extracting any notable concessions to Kyiv, notes ‘The Times’.

Ceasefire deal in Black Sea will be victory for Putin. It also appears that Russia will gain far more than Ukraine from the announcement of a maritime ceasefire and a possible ban on strikes on energy facilities.

In return for the Black Sea ceasefire, Moscow has demanded sanctions relief for Rosselkhozbank, Russia’s main bank for agricultural transactions, as well as other financial institutions involved in the trade of food and fertilisers. It also said they should be reconnected to Swift, the global payments system.

If Russia wins such concessions now it will be seen as a major victory for President Putin, and could set a precedent for the subsequent lifting of further sanctions. The White House said that it would “enhance” Russia’s access to international payment systems but did not mention Swift by name.

Understandably, Ukraine is worried about a weakening of Western resolve towards Russia.

Russian delegation in Riyadh.
Photo: RIA Novosti

The talks in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, were focused on technical aspects of monitoring a 30-day ceasefire halting attacks on energy infrastructure, after each side accused the other of breaches and following a U.S. effort to broaden the deal to include Black Sea navigation, ‘The Washington’ writes.

Witkoff told Fox News that he expected “some real progress, particularly as it affects a Black Sea ceasefire on ships between both countries. And from that, you’ll naturally gravitate into a full-on shooting ceasefire.”

But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov raised Russia’s complex demands around the 2022-2023 Black Sea initiative to allow the safe passage of Ukrainian grain shipments, a further sign that Moscow’s tactic may be to carefully slow the talks without outright rejecting them, while maintaining its hard-line conditions for a full ceasefire.

“In general, of course, there are many, many different aspects of the settlement to be worked out,” Peskov said. He said the Black Sea initiative “in its past form implied the fulfillment of a number of obligations to the Russian Federation, but they were not fulfilled.”

During 2023 talks on the grain initiative, Russia claimed that its agricultural exports were being blocked by the West, despite not being under sanction.

Russian Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent foreign policy analyst, reflected the Kremlin’s satisfaction over the Trump administration’s handling of the talks, writing on Telegram that “everything is going according to the Russian scenario.”

He said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s success in deflecting Trump’s demand for a full ceasefire was part of Russia’s tactics to slow the peace talks.

“The Kremlin has blunted the White House’s momentum generated by the Jeddah talks and has turned the discussion into a lingering one,” he wrote, referring to a meeting this month where Ukraine accepted the U.S. proposal for a full ceasefire. “Moscow believes that [this] is in its own interests right now,” he wrote, adding that the initiative on the battlefield is “on Russia’s side.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also played down hopes of swift progress. “It is necessary not so much to wait for breakthroughs but to understand that work is going on a number of directions. This is one of them,” she told Russian media Monday.

Also on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underscored Moscow’s continued hard-line stance, saying Russia will pay “constant attention [to] the solution to the problem of denazification of the state that remains under the control of the Kyiv regime.”

The U.S. delegation at Monday’s talks was led by Andrew Peek, a senior director at the White House National Security Council, and Michael Anton, a senior State Department official, Reuters reported.

A member of Russia’s team gave away little in comments to the media during a break in Monday’s talks. Grigory Karasin, a Russian senator who spent decades in the Foreign Ministry and was in charge of the Ukraine portfolio, said the negotiations were “going on creatively.” He said that “an interesting discussion on quite pressing subjects is going on.”

Asked about the possibility of an agreement in Monday’s talks, Karasin said: “Not all negotiations necessarily yield some major documents and agreements. It’s important to maintain contact all the time and understand each other’s standpoint. That’s what we’ve managed to do.”

Witkoff in Sunday’s Fox News interview sparked controversy when he repeated Putin’s false claim that parts of eastern and southern Ukraine are Russian because of referendums held there in 2022. “There’s a view within the country of Russia that these are Russian territories, that there are referendums within these territories that justify these actions,” Witkoff said. “This is not me taking sides.”

A senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, told The Washington Post the comment revealed that Zelensky had learned little from his Oval Office dustup with Trump and Vice President JD Vance, which resulted in the U.S. withdrawing military and intelligence support for Ukraine.

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