The promise to end the Russian-Ukrainian war was among the key points in Donald Trump’s pre-election campaign. The Republican candidate declared that he was ready to end active combat in 24 hours.
As expected, Trump’s administration began negotiations with the Kremlin with haste. The US president held at least one phone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The officially confirmed phone call took place on February 12 and lasted 1.5 hours. According to Donald Trump, the conversation was “productive”, and the Russian president showed that “he wants peace as well”.
On February 18, the opening round of talks between high-ranking representatives of the United States and Russia took place in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh. This was the first face-to-face meeting between representatives of the two countries since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The analysis of Russian authorities’ post-talks rhetoric demonstrates a lack of changes in Moscow’s stance. The Kremlin’s “preparation” for the “productive” conversation between Trump and Putin on February 12th being an attack on Kyiv with ballistic missiles highlights this point.
To shed some light on the Kremlin’s true attitude towards the prospect of peace talks and the idea of ending the war, the Hybrid Warfare Analytical Group prepared a digest of the main narratives that Moscow’s propagandists spin around this topic.
Denial
A major part of the Kremlin’s minions was not happy about the prospect of a ceasefire and the beginning of peace talks. In their neo-imperial consciousness, all Ukrainian territories should belong to Russia. Therefore, the possibility of ending the war and withdrawing troops outrages the radical groups in the RF, seeing as this scenario does not correlate with their plan to destroy Ukraine as a country.
Appealing to a fake concept of “Ukraine historically being a part of Russia”, as well as reminding about the “losses” that Russia allegedly suffered in its so-called special military operation (SMO) is a common route within this narrative. Russian “patriots” are especially outraged by the rumor of Ukraine and the US’s possible deal about rare earth elements. For example, Zakhar Prilepin, one of the speakers of the radical political circles of the aggressor country, commented on the news about the White House and the Kremlin’s negotiations: “All of Ukraine is ours. All of Ukraine is Russian land. And Trump will devour the riches stored in our Russian land and get wealthy from them. And he will use them to make new weapons, which they will once again deliver to the next neighbor.” In the end, he summarizes – “we are all for peace and negotiations. But if the prospects described above are presented as unprecedented luck (for Russia), then this is not so. We continue to hope for other prospects.”
At the moment, Russian authorities are leniently watching the attempts of the “Z-patriots” to discredit the idea of agreements with the Trump administration. The Kremlin’s political strategists are hoping to use it as a “way out” in case their attempts to force Ukraine and Europe into an agreement beneficial for Moscow are unsuccessful. Seeing that even the most powerful supercomputer cannot predict the outcome of diplomatic maneuvers today, the Kremlin maintains the temperature of the ideological “fire.”
“What’s going on with Ukrainians?”
The next narrative is a part of a calming strategy the Kremlin has for its population. It is based on creating apocalyptic future scenarios for Ukraine and Europe, that make Russia’s geopolitical position look optimistic.
For example, a theory that Donald Trump’s purpose in negotiations is to collect so-called payment for all the previous help without giving any safety guarantees in return is a popular part of the narrative. Russia is building up a conspiracy where Washington is trying to build its own energy hub in Ukraine, which would work similarly to the Syrian previous scenario. Thanks to this, the US will supposedly control gas and oil supplies to Europe.
Conspiracy theories about Trump in reality being an ally to Putin are also common among the Kremlin’s propagandists. Some of Moscow’s political “experts” hurried to develop it into a narrative of how American allies betrayed Ukraine. As a continuation of this theory, a scenario was developed, where Trump forces Ukraine to give up a part of its territories to achieve fast peace and gain rare resource deposits.
However, Russian fantasies about “betrayals” and “shady deals” ignore the factor of Ukraine’s self-sufficiency, which was strengthened by the years of resisting Russian aggression. Thus, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused the initial version of the agreement on rare earth metals, the draft of which was sent to Kyiv from the Banks of the Potomac. Ukraine’s condition is to coordinate economic investments with security guarantees. Also, the Ukrainian official position, expressed by the president, is that the results of any negotiations between the US and the RF, at which Kyiv’s representatives were not present, would not be accepted.
Searching for an alternative way
Among the media strategies adopted by the Kremlin’s propagandists is searching for ways to ruin future agreements. Russian “opinion leaders” already started to contemplate possible “loopholes” that would allow Russia to avoid fulfilling the points of future agreements.
Trying to calculate the appropriate time frame that Moscow would need to start a new war is Among popular thought experiments. At the same time, there are calls for Russia to increase the number of weapons, and build up the economic and geopolitical influence of the BRICS to “seize the initiative” from Western countries.
Ukraine has many years of experience with Minsk agreements, which demonstrates Moscow’s inability to fulfill any sort of agreement. The Budapest Memorandum and numerous bilateral Ukrainian-Russian agreements, plundered by the Kremlin, have long been gathering dust in the wastepaper basket.
Another prominent example is the fate of the Republic of Ichkeria. After not being able to win the First Russian-Chechen War, Moscow signed a peace agreement. The Kremlin used the ceasefire to sow discord among Chechen leaders and modernize its army and, in the end, broke the agreement to start a new war in three years.
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Therefore, Russia, once again, projects different messages for international and domestic viewers. For international audiences, the Kremlin has chosen a careful stance, cultivating an illusion that Moscow is ready to consider the peace talks and a possible end of the war.
At the same time, Russian propagandists are feeding their domestic audience with ambitions to occupy all of the Ukrainian territories. Even more, Russia keeps scaling up the ideological feud it has against the Western countries.
Viktoriia Odusanvo, Volodymyr Solovian