Western Allies Reportedly Engaged in ‘Secret Consultations’ on Ending Ukraine Crisis

Russian and Ukrainian diplomats held four rounds of talks to try to resolve the crisis in February and March, but stopped meeting after Kiev pulled out of negotiations as US and European officials announced that the conflict must be decided on the battlefield, and sent tens of billions of dollars-worth of military hardware and economic aid to Kiev.

The United States and its European allies are conducting “secret consultations” aimed at ending the Ukrainian crisis, Germany’s Welt newspaper has indicated.

In an commentary published Friday, former US ambassador to Germany John Kornblum and German journalist Rudiger Lentz claimed that the secret talks are intended to find a way to provide Russia with a “face-saving exit” from the crisis. Moscow, they suggested, is waging a war of nerves with the US and its allies, and “counting on war weariness in the West and anti-Western sentiment in the rest of the world” for support.

Kornblum and Lentz cited former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s strategy of ‘Ostpolitik’ with East Germany and the Soviet Union as a “classic example” of a diplomatic solution, but said that this policy had only been made possible after decades of Cold War confrontation, including the proxy conflict in Vietnam. They recommended a Reagan-style ‘peace through strength’ approach of military and economic pressure to force “the aggressor” to the table, and suggested that Europe should start by regaining control of the narrative on the Ukraine crisis.

The authors did not elaborate on how the West could ‘regain control of the narrative’. Russian media including Sputnik, RT and others have already been blocked across the European Union, while Facebook and Twitter pay close attention to their platforms to ensure that a pro-Ukrainian, anti-Russian narrative prevails. At the same time, mainstream media outlets from across the political spectrum in the EU and the US continue to echo government talking points about “Vladimir Putin’s aggression” and Russia’s “unprovoked and unjustified war on Ukraine.”

“We are told and hear today that we started the war in the Donbass, in Ukraine. No, it was started by the very same collective West which organized and supported an unconstitutional armed coup in Ukraine in 2014, and then encouraged and justified the genocide carried out against the people of the Donbass,” Putin said in a meeting with Russian lawmakers on Thursday.

Russia does “not reject peace talks,” Putin said. “[B]ut those who do not must understand that the longer [the conflict drags on], the more difficult it will before them to come to an agreement with us,” he added.

On Friday, commenting on the inflationary and energy price crisis facing much of Europe and the United States, Putin indicated that he had warned his foreign colleagues repeatedly about the madness of imposing politicized sanctions on Moscow, particularly when it comes to the energy market. However, his warnings “fell on deaf ears,” he said.

US and EU officials have sought to put a brave face on the self-inflicted crises facing their nations, with US President Joe Biden calling inflation and record gasoline prices “Putin’s price hike” and admonishing Republicans who have criticized him by questioning their sense of patriotism. In Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has recommended that Europeans simply ‘turn down the thermostat a couple degrees’ to compensate for the loss of Russian energy. EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell, meanwhile, has called the “serious difficulties” that European economies are facing “the price which we must pay to defend our democracies and international law.”