Putin requests to cancel Russian armed forces authorization in Ukraine

Russian President Putin submitted a request to Russian Federations Council Head Valentina Matviyenko on June 24 to cancel his March 1 appeal requesting the authorization of the use of Russian Armed Forces on Ukrainian territory. Putin made the request “with the goal of normalizing conditions and settling the situation in Ukraine’s eastern regions, as well as in relation to the start of trilateral negotiations in regards to the given issue,” said Dmitry Pyeskov, Putin’s press secretary.

 

The Federations Council will cancel the resolution at its June 25 meeting, said Andrei Klimov, a Russian MP, as reported by the Interfax news agency. The agreement to use armed forces “was related to the threat to the lives of Russian citizens on the territory of Crimea and Sevastopol, and the president turned to using our Armed Forces on Ukraine’s territory to normalize social-political conditions in this country.” He said Putin’s decision indicates that a period of normalization has begun in Ukraine.

 

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he considers Putin’s request to be the first practical step towards a peace settlement after official support from the Russian president for the Ukrainian peace plan to settle the conflict in Donbas, his press service reported.

 

British Ambassador to Ukraine Simon Smith lauded on June 24 the Putin’s appeal to the Federations Council but said more actions are needed from the Russian side to de-escalate the conflict. The Russian government needs to use its influence to have the separatists disarm themselves and to stop the flow of fighters and arms to Ukraine through the Russian border. “For is it’s obvious that many steps remain, which still need to be taken by Russia, in order to play a constructive and active role in resolving the problems, and not in creating them,” Smith said, as reported by the Ukrinform news agency.

 

Putin told a June 24 press conference in Vienna that his request to the Federations Council was based on the desire to create conditions for peaceful negotiations in Ukraine. Russia will always defend ethnic Russians in Ukraine and “that part of the Ukrainian population that feels its indissoluble ties – not only ethnic, but also cultural and linguistic – with Russia and feels a part of the wider Russian world,” he said. “And we, of course, not only are carefully watching but reacting in an appropriate way,” Putin said. “We hope that the Armed Forces won’t be needed for that.”

 

Putin said he supports Poroshenko’s proposal for ceasefire and the beginning of talks, but the Ukrainian side hasn’t done enough to settle the crisis. A week is not enough for a ceasefire, Putin said, as reported by the Interfax news agency. “The issue is supposed to be not only ceasing military actions,” he said. “The issue is supposed to be about concrete agreements between all sides of the conflict.”

 

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government’s demand for the pro-Russian fighters to disarm is “simply absurd,” Putin said, “moreover since radical forces such as the Right Sector and other radicals aren’t yet disarmed, though they spoke of this and promised this many times, that these illegal, in essence, formations will lay down their arms.” Putin said his government hasn’t set forth preconditions for the talks because Russia isn’t involved in the conflict, which he said is between the Kyiv government and eastern Ukraine. Discussions must be held on the future order of Ukraine itself, ensuring the legal rights and interests of those people who live in the country’s southeast.

 

Pro-Russian terrorists shot up roadblocks on June 24 near the embattled city of Sloviansk in the Donetsk Oblast using rifles, mortars and grenade launchers, reported Vladislav Seleznev, the spokesman for the Ukrainian government’s anti-terrorist operation. Terrorists also ambushed a support base for the operation near the Russian border on June 24. “As a result of mortar fire and shots from anti-tank directed rockets, an infantry vehicle was damaged and two Ukrainian soldiers were fatally injured, while another three were injured,” Seleznev reported.

 

Pro-Russian terrorists used a rocket launcher to shoot down a Ukrainian helicopter on June 24 near the Karachun hill in the vicinity of the embattled city of Sloviansk. The helicopter was returning from a delivery made to a Ukrainian roadblock. All nine soldiers on board died.

 

The Russian government has continued to accumulate military forces on the Ukrainian border in recent days, Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Nations Yuriy Sergeyev told the UN Security Council meeting on June 24. “We welcome the intention of the Russian president to cancel the decision of the Federations Council on the issue of using Armed Forces on Ukrainian territory,” he said. “Yet in recent days, we are becoming witness to a significant increase in the concentration of soldiers and military hardware in the Russian Federation’s border regions with Ukraine.” Sergeyev also pointed out that the illegally armed formations have continued to attack Ukrainian military sites despite the declaration of a ceasefire.

 

Zenon Zawada: Putin’s request to cancel the order authorizing Russian forces in Ukraine is a concession being offered to the Ukrainian government and its Western backers. The threat of further Western sanctions has borne its fruit. We certainly can’t rule out behind-the-scenes agreements being reached between the Russian and Ukrainian sides as well.

 

Pro-Russian fighters not only in the Donbas region, but in other southeastern cities as well, had placed high hopes in getting support from the Russian military in their efforts to overthrow the pro-Western government. Putin’s indication that he won’t dispatch the Russian military anytime soon is a huge blow to the potential for attacks in the next few months that pro-Russian forces had been planning. Certainly, their morale has been hurt by Putin’s decision.

 

Yet in the big picture, Ukraine’s military problems are far from solved. The ceasefire has clearly failed, which means the Ukrainian government will have to resort to killing the terrorists unless its deadline is extended beyond June 27. The Russian media will likely exploit such an operation to portray the Ukrainian government as ethnically cleansing Russians. Meanwhile, it will come as little surprise if the Russian government continues its covert flow of arms and fighters into the Donbas region with the goal of creating an intractable pseudo-state in Ukraine that serves as a burden to the new government.

 

As widely noted by Ukraine observers, Putin’s goal is not to control Ukraine as it is to disrupt Ukraine’s functioning as a state. An unresolved war zone in the Donbas region is enough to achieve that goal. It’s also worth considering there’s nothing to stop Putin from asking for the Federations Council to approve another similar resolution in the future asking for the use of the military in Ukraine. Once considered unimaginable, now no one would be shocked by a Russian military invasion of the Ukrainian mainland in the future.