WASHINGTON: Washington rarely shies away from seeking to wield its heft in a world crisis, but in the tense negotiations for a Ukraine ceasefire it has played a curiously behind-the-scenes role.

While US officials insist that from the get-go the Obama administration has been in lockstep with its European allies — and that’s certainly true when it comes to the US and EU sanctions slapped on Russia — it’s clear the diplomatic drive which sealed Thursday’s accord came from Berlin and Paris.

It was German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande who took on Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko during a 17-hour negotiating marathon in Belarus.

No US observers or negotiators were present.

“It would have actually been quite useful even if the EU was at the negotiation table. The absence of the Americans and the EU is actually quite startling and quite shocking,” said Judy Dempsey a senior associate with the Carnegie Europe think tank.

But such concerns were dismissed by US officials.

“All through the night we were getting reports from the Europeans and supporting their efforts, and obviously our role will be key in ensuring implementation,” a senior US administration official insisted to reporters on Thursday.

A second US official added: “From the perspective of Washington, and I can speak from the perspective of the White House, I think it would be inappropriate, or a misperception, to say that we have not been in the game.”

Washington is now working to shore up the road map aimed at ending the 10-month war between Ukraine and pro-Moscow rebels, perhaps by supplying more monitors, along with drones and sensors, to enforce implementation.

Obama ‘delegated’ to Merkel

Timing however, as with everything in the world of high-stakes diplomacy, is key.

Some observers point to the fact that after months of stalemate as fighting worsened on the ground, diplomatic moves gained impetus as calls to send US heavy weapons to the embattled Ukrainian military gained some traction in Washington.

The threat of more weapons being poured into the conflict could have alarmed both the anxious Europeans and Putin, who according to Western officials sent a nine-page peace plan in Russian to Merkel and Hollande a day before top US diplomat John Kerry left on Feb 4 for a high-profile visit to Kiev.

Landing in Kiev, Kerry found himself trumped by the arrival just a few hours later of Merkel and Hollande. And thus began the intense negotiations which culminated in Thursday’s deal.

On the sidelines of the Munich security conference, Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden held back-to-back meetings with European, Russian and Ukrainian leaders on the crisis. Merkel then flew to Washington for pre-scheduled talks to consult with US President Barack Obama.

“Obama delegated this to her, he didn’t want anything to do with Ukraine. In some ways he wanted it off his agenda,” said Dempsey.

Others say it was appropriate that the Europeans took the lead.

“It is a fact that the trigger for the conflict is indeed the blow-up in the relationship between Ukraine and Russia and the EU over the association agreement. So it makes a lot of sense that Europe should be at the forefront of this,” said Fiona Hill, director of the Brookings Center on the United States and Europe.

She cautioned that Thursday’s accord was only “an important interim step in what’s going to be a long drawn-out negotiation process. What’s happening here beyond the diplomacy is that an awful lot of people are getting killed. It’s been quite a carnage,” Hill said, warning “clearly we are on the verge of heading down into the Balkans in the 1990s here and that’s not where anybody wants it to be” referring to the break up of the former Yugoslavia.

US to keep up the pressure

Should this initiative fail, Washington still has the option to step in and take a more leading role in the diplomacy.

Meanwhile, the US administration is stressing sanctions will not be rolled back until all points of the deal — including a ceasefire, a withdrawal of heavy weapons and a closure of the Russian-Ukrainian border — are implemented.

Any more weapons transfers or violation of the deal “would cause us and our partners to have to impose more costs,” warned the first senior US administration official.

Asked if the debate on supplying US weapons would now die down, Eugene Rumer, director of the Russia programme for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, gave an emphatic: “No. The voices on the Hill in support of arming Ukraine are likely to grow louder and more assertive if as I fear ... this agreement does not deliver on what everybody wants it to deliver on.”—AFP

Published in Dawn, February 14th, 2015

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