Russia intensifies pressure on Ukraine ahead of runoff vote

Several key developments occurred in Russia on the
Ukrainian foreign policy front ahead of the second-round runoff vote this Sunday
in the presidential elections. Russian President Putin told journalists on Apr.
17 that he doesn’t have planned for June a meeting of the Normandy Four to
resolve the armed conflict in Donbas, as Ukrainian President Poroshenko
asserted the previous day. “I don’t know anything about that. No one discussed
this with me,” he said, as reported by the tass.ru news site.

The same day, a Russian district court ruled to extend
until late July the detention under bail of 24 Ukrainian sailors who were
detained in late November for allegedly refusing to comply with the orders of
border guards and violating Russian territorial waters. The incident sparked an
international scandal, along with a new round of sanctions against Russia, and
prompted Ukrainian President Poroshenko to declare martial law for one
month.

President Putin issued a decree promoting the deputy
of the border cooperation administration, Aleksei Filatov, to the
administration head, the rbc.ru news site reported on Apr. 4, which surfaced in
the Ukrainian media yesterday. Last year, Filatov was designated “curator of
the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics,” the report said. Meanwhile, Putin
is planning to sign a decree to ease the procedure of gaining Russian
citizenship for the residents of the occupied territories of Donetsk and
Luhansk (collectively known as “Donbas”), as reported by the kommersant.ru news
site, citing anonymous government sources.

Zenon Zawada: All these
developments have a common thread of the Russian leadership intensifying
pressure on Ukraine ahead of the runoff, and in possible anticipation of a new
president. Regarding the June meeting, it’s possible Poroshenko was inventing a
breakthrough in the Donbas peace talks to score more votes in the presidential
runoff election this Sunday. He claimed on Apr. 16 that a Normandy Four format
meeting in May or June would lead to the removal of Russian soldiers from
Ukrainian territory and the introduction of UN peacekeepers.

The development with the most potential for
destabilization is a possible decision to ease granting Russian citizenship for
the residents of occupied Donbas. This would make it far harder for
presidential front-runner Volodymyr Zelenskiy to fulfill his promise of
reaching a ceasefire in Donbas, the single mechanism for which is the execution
of the Minsk Accords. It would be nearly impossible for the president to agree
to return the occupied territories under Ukrainian control, which the Minsk
Accords call for, with a large number of Russian citizens potentially living
there.