West should set its own red lines, not just accept Putin’s, argues veteran diplomat

KYIV — The West should spend less time fretting about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s red lines and set its own, says veteran German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger.

“Russia keeps saying, if you do this, if you cross this or that red line, we might escalate,” said the 78-year-old onetime chairman of the Munich Security Conference. “Why don’t we turn this thing around and say to them: ‘We have lines and if you bomb one more civilian building, then you shouldn’t be surprised if, say, we deliver Taurus cruise missiles or America allows Ukraine to strike military targets inside Russia’?”

 That way the onus will be on Moscow to decide whether to cross the red lines — or face the consequences.

Talking with POLITICO on the margins of  the recent annual Yalta European Strategy conference, a high-level gathering of Ukrainian and Western leaders and officials, Ischinger, added with a chuckle:  “Of course, as many of my friends remind me, the problem, is that if you paint a red line you’ve got to stick to it. You can’t do what Barack Obama did with his Syrian red line against the use of chemical weapons, which he then didn’t enforce.”

Ischinger is no warmonger. His thinking is also bent towards kick-starting peace negotiations and how to shape the circumstances for a resolution to the war which maintains Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty and advances its ambitions to join the European Union. He sees India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, as someone who can play a key role as an intermediary in a contact group, which would need to include the Europeans, the Chinese, the Saudis, Qataris and Turks.

Ischinger held a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier this month to discuss a follow-up peace summit to the one held in Switzerland in June. That summit involved a hundred countries and organizations but without Russian or Chinese participation. China refused to attend due to Russia’s absence and instead pitched an alternative peace plan.

Kyiv is planning to arrange a second global peace summit before the end of 2024 and hopes to develop a new joint peace plan based on Zelenskyy’s long-standing 10-point peace proposal.

‘Russians do respect strength’

Ischinger has deep experience in getting warring parties to talk, having been a German negotiator during the Balkans wars, working alongside the likes of America’s Richard Holbrooke in the 1990s. But he doesn’t underplay the importance of negotiating from a position of strength.

“We need to remind ourselves that Russia, because of its history, because of its own experience and because of its cultural behavior, it doesn’t respect concessions or weakness; but Russians do respect strength,” he said.

He argued that Washington and Moscow would have to set the overall framework for any talks. And that isn’t going to happen this side of the November elections in the U.S., he reckoned.

In the meantime, Ischinger added: “If we want to encourage  movement in that direction in Russian thinking, the right thing to do is to make sure the Ukrainians don’t lose more territory in the Donbas and to help them weather this winter.”

“If there is going to be a process, it will be first sketched out between Moscow and Washington,” he said. He doesn’t believe that Putin and his cronies will want to make arrangements with either German Chancellor Olaf Scholz or French President Emmanuel Macron.

“They regard Europeans as vassals of Washington,” he said.

But he could imagine that, after November, some tentative discussions could start, if there were not already some secret exchanges.

He saw some fundamental questions being examined in any U.S.-Russian conversations to shape a framework. “What about NATO membership for Ukraine? Is that negotiable or non-negotiable? What about territory and borders? How do we deal with those? And what about arms control? Could, at some second or third stage, some arms control talks emerge? But some discussions between Washington and Moscow will be the first step that I think will need to be taken,” Ischinger reckoned.

“What I learned when I was the German negotiator during the Balkan wars, you have to try to start with something that’s really easy, and you go from the very easy to the less easy to the very difficult. The diplomatic textbooks outline that approach but I learned it first hand. In other words, don’t talk about territory at the start. Talk about, for example, the nuclear plant at Zaporizhzhia and making it safe. If it goes up in flames it will kill as many Russians as Ukrainians. You talk about more POW exchanges and food transport in the Black Sea, these are the types of issues you can begin with and progress towards the more difficult questions,” he said.

And that’s where a contact group of intermediaries and facilitators will be needed — with China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and India all playing roles.

How would the U.S. election result change things? “It will make a difference, yes. It will make a difference whether it is [Kamala] Harris or [Donald] Trump. But if the latter, the risk I see is that Trump would think he can do it himself by just calling Vladimir,” he added.