‘We Don’t Want Yalta 2’ – US, Ukraine Diplomats Lay Grounds for Peace Talks

A day before representatives from Ukraine and the United States met at the Munich Security Conference, the two top diplomats from those countries exchanged ideas in separate interviews about what a lasting peace might look like once the Russians are invited to the table to end the now three-year full-scale war.

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha expressed Ukrainian fears that negotiations between two oligarchic strongmen, Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump, could replay the Yalta Conference of early February 1945, exactly 80 years ago.

At that historic meeting near the conclusion of World War II, leaders from Moscow, London, and Washington divided much of Europe between Western powers and the Soviet Union.

“We want no Yalta 2,” Sybiha told reporters in Paris this week, warning that the Kremlin was attempting to divide the world, without Ukrainian input.

“The Russians are trying to prolong the post-Yalta mentality, with a few people sitting around the table and dividing the world,” Sybiha said.

Meanwhile, his American counterpart, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has focused mostly on what the US would get in return for the tens of billions of military aid Washington has sent to date. On Thursday, he said he expects to reach a deal for Ukraine’s mineral wealth that will help compensate for that aid.

“That should be anchored in an ongoing economic interest,” Rubio told a conservative radio show on Thursday when asked about a peace deal.

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There are many historical and geographic ironies or coincidences here. The Yalta conference was held, of course, in the then-Soviet resort city in Crimea, which in 2014 was the first part of Ukraine that Putin invaded and annexed. Also, the choice of Munich as the venue for preliminary peace talks reminded many of the appeasement of Adolf Hitler in 1938, when then British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to the Nazi leader’s retreat in Bavaria, and essentially allowed him to invade Eastern Europe.

“We need to fasten our diplomatic seat belts in such geopolitical turbulence,” Sybiha added.

(Speaking of which, on his way to Munich on Thursday night, Rubio’s plane abruptly turned back toward Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, according to an AFP reporter with him. “The plane on which Secretary Rubio is flying experienced a mechanical issue,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said. “The plane has turned around and is returning to Joint Base Andrews. The Secretary intends to continue his travel to Germany and the Middle East on a separate aircraft.”)

A day after Trump’s bilateral talk with Putin and the insistence that Ukraine would have to cede territory in any such peace talks, Rubio stressed that the United States has a “stake in Ukraine’s long-term independence.”

“Hopefully we’ll have some news here soon on that: the ability to partner with Ukraine, a joint venture, or something like that, or their mineral rights, all the natural resources they have,” Rubio said. 

“Some of that money will go to pay back the US taxpayer for the billions of dollars that’s been spent there,” he added. “Part of it is going to be reinvested back into Ukraine to rebuild (from) all the destruction that’s happened there.”

On Thursday, Rubio also spoke by telephone with Sybiha, saying they had discussed “bold diplomacy to end the war in a negotiated manner leading to a sustainable peace,” a State Department spokesperson said.

One of the Trump administration’s primary talking points has been that the European members of NATO have not contributed as much per capita for their defense budgets as has the United States. Rubio addressed those issues on a conservative talk show this week.

“When you ask those guys, why can’t you spend more on national security, their argument is because it would require us to make cuts to welfare programs, to unemployment benefits, to being able to retire at 59 and all these other things,” Rubio told former right-wing Fox News host, Megyn Kelly on her radio show. “That’s a choice they made,” Rubio said. “But we are subsidizing that?”

A new East Germany?

According to an analysis by CNN’s Stephen Collinson published Thursday, “Trump seems to have no objection to Russia retaining the spoils of its unprovoked invasion.”

Instead, his administration has tasked Rubio to look at the negotiations as a balance sheet for the US government, even if “winning” means dividing Ukrainian territory to make a deal.

“The US position on Ukraine as articulated today should surprise no one in Europe. It’s just what European insiders have been saying to me off the record, in back channels, behind the scenes for two years,” said Nicholas Dungan, founder and CEO of CogitoPraxis, a strategic consultancy in the Hague. “West Ukraine and East Ukraine, like West Germany and East Germany, but in this case – EU Yes, NATO No,”

“Such a solution would conjure a cruel historical irony,” Collinson wrote. “Putin, who watched in despair from his post as a KGB officer in Dresden as the Soviet Union dissolved, may be on the verge of creating a new East Germany in 21st century Europe with America’s help.”