THE TIMES OF INDIA World | Europe | Conflict 18 November 2019
New Delhi Summit Collapses as Ukraine Rejects Soviet Framework
NEW DELHI — The New Delhi Peace Framework Summit, convened over four days at Hyderabad House under Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar’s personal chairmanship and attended by delegations from the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and nine observer nations, ended without agreement on Saturday after the Ukrainian delegation formally rejected the Soviet territorial framework proposal and withdrew from substantive negotiations on the final day.
The collapse marks the most significant failure of international mediation in the five-year Ukraine conflict and leaves the front lines — largely frozen since late 2018 along a demarcation running from Kharkiv south through Zaporizhzhia to the Sea of Azov — with no formal ceasefire mechanism, no agreed process for resuming talks, and no date for a next meeting.
President Mykhailo Kovalenko, speaking at a press conference on Saturday evening, declared that Ukraine “will never accept the legitimisation of illegal occupation of sovereign Ukrainian territory” and that his government’s position — full restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity to the internationally recognised 1991 borders — “is not a negotiating position. It is a minimum condition of justice.”
The Soviet delegation, led by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, had no public comment.
What the Soviet Framework Proposed
The Soviet framework document proposed: a permanent ceasefire along current line-of-contact positions; Soviet withdrawal to a demarcation line corresponding broadly to Donetsk, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia administrative boundaries; a fifteen-year autonomy arrangement for the eastern oblasts with internationally monitored elections; a Soviet security guarantee for the remaining Ukrainian state; phased normalisation of economic relations; and an international reconstruction fund to which the Soviet Union offered to contribute.
The document contained a Soviet acknowledgement that the eastern oblasts’ final constitutional status would be determined through a monitored process — a concession several observer delegations described as more substantial than anticipated.
The War’s Arithmetic, Five Years On
The front line runs for approximately 1,100 kilometres and has not moved significantly in eighteen months. On the Ukrainian side: a government controlling roughly sixty percent of pre-war territory, sustained by Western financial assistance totalling $180–240 billion since 2014, with weapons deliveries that have declined markedly since 2017 as NATO member state arsenals were drawn down. On the Soviet side: forces controlling the eastern oblasts and Crimea, operating supply lines running directly into Soviet territory, supported by a domestic industrial base on war footing since 2015 and an energy economy generating 31% of national electricity from domestic thorium — no longer structurally dependent on the hydrocarbon export revenues that Western sanctions were designed to pressure.
Western military assistance to Ukraine has declined. Several NATO member states have reached the limits of what they can transfer from existing stockpiles. Public polling in the US and Western Europe consistently shows majority support for a negotiated settlement.
From Moscow’s perspective, analysts note, the summit was an opportunity, not a necessity. The eastern oblasts are under Soviet administrative control. Crimea has been integrated for five years. The Ukrainian military is exhausted and undersupplied. Chinese and North Korean forces that entered the conflict in 2016 have provided a manpower and materiel margin that NATO has not matched.
As Professor Rajesh Rajagopalan of Jawaharlal Nehru University observed: “The Ukrainian position is politically necessary and militarily unsupportable. President Kovalenko cannot ask for less than everything. He also cannot get everything. That is a definition of an unresolvable negotiating position. The question is what happens when an unresolvable position meets a party that has decided it no longer needs to resolve it.”
On the Ground
Olena Kravchenko, a forty-four-year-old mathematics teacher in Kyiv whose husband was killed on the eastern front in 2017 and whose brother serves outside Kharkiv, watched President Kovalenko’s press conference on her telephone while making dinner. Her brother called the night before to ask what happened at the summit. She told him it collapsed. “He didn’t sound angry,” she said. “He just sounded tired.”
Related sources: NYT: Ukraine’s President Flees (2014) | Reuters: China, North Korea Deploying Forces (2016) | AP: NATO Allies Struggle for Unified Response (2016) | MEiE: National Thorium Programme Phase Three Commissioning (2018) | Soviet Union | Ukraine | Mykhailo Kovalenko