Donetsk and Luhansk must remain part of Ukraine, Lavrov says

The self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics are supposed to remain part of Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the rg.ru news site in an interview published on May 19. “They have presented their proposals for the constitution,” he said. “The language refers precisely to that status stipulated by the Minsk accords – the ‘republics’ will be a part of Ukraine and constitutional reforms will take place to fortify it on a permanent basis.”

Zenon Zawada: The Minsk accords make no mention of any autonomy for any republics within Ukraine’s territory. They do refer to constitutional reforms that call for some form of decentralization. They also create a special status for those districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that are separatist-controlled.

From the Ukrainian standpoint, these positions are designed to ensure their failure to self-govern and eventually return to a unitary, not federalized, Ukrainian state. Creating two new autonomous republics within the boundaries of Ukraine would legalize a permanent Russian military and political presence within Ukraine’s borders and undermine any attempts to integrate with Western institutions. That’s why that position is unacceptable to the West or the Ukrainian government.

After the initial failure of the Novorossiya project, which envisaged most of southeastern Ukraine joining the Donbas rebellion, the Russian government had to adopt an alternative strategy. That became using the armed conflict in Donbas as its anchor in Ukraine, aimed at draining its resources, discrediting its government and ultimately undermining its statehood. So far, the conflict has succeeded in undermining economic development and to some extent, Ukraine’s Western integration. So the last thing that Russia wants is to separate the terrorist-controlled territory from Ukraine.

We believe the Russian government is still holding out hope that other southeastern Ukrainian regions will launch separatist movements in the next few years. The thinking is that these residents will become so dissatisfied with the economic degradation that they will align with Russia (or the Novorossiya movement) to gain some economic relief in the form of cheap energy resources. Therefore, the geopolitical game being played out consists of whether the Ukrainian state will first collapse and disintegrate from Russian pressure, or whether the Putin regime will collapse from Western pressure.