Recent Quiet in Ukraine Offers Hope for a Peaceful Resolution

By CELESTINE BOHLEN

PARIS — Once Russian warplanes started bombing targets in Syria on Sept. 30, the world’s attention shifted away from Ukraine, a development that in the view of some analysts may have been part of the Kremlin’s calculations all along.

Whether this was the intention of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, it is certainly true that the tenuous cease-fire in eastern Ukraine and the tense negotiations underway in Minsk, Belarus, to find a political solution are no longer in the news, not in Russia and not in the West.

When the four signatories of the agreement reached in February in Minsk held a summit meeting here in Paris on Oct. 2, the headlines were all about Syria. In fact, the leaders of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia spent five hours talking about the future of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions now under the control of Russian-backed separatists

None of this is entirely settled. Last week, separatist leaders pushed back the deadline for the withdrawal of weapons by another week, and negotiators are still trying to figure out how separate elections in Donetsk and Luhansk can be held under Ukrainian law, a major stumbling block.

But the guns have been silent for six weeks now, no small matter in a region where 8,000 people have died and two million have been displaced over the past 18 months.

This cease-fire may still collapse, as have others, but for now Russia seems committed to making it stick.

President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine said last month that the truce effectively proves what Moscow has long denied: The separatists are under Russian control. “That’s why when Putin gives an order to make a cease-fire, they do it,” he said, in a Washington Post interview published on Sept. 28.

Does all this mean Russia is looking for a way out of the mess it has helped create in Ukraine? Certainly, Moscow now seems to have “dialed down” the conflict, said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

But Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, based in Washington, prefers to call the lull in fighting a “temporary armistice,” akin to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed before the end of World War I by the young Bolshevik government.

“It is a response to circumstances which have not been propitious for Putin,” she said in an interview. Other analysts, both in Russia and in the West, have also concluded that Russia’s aggression in eastern Ukraine is regarded by the Kremlin as a disappointment, if not an outright failure.

The local population did not prove to be as enthusiastic as the Crimeans about either joining Russia or declaring independence; the Ukrainian Army put up a better fight than expected; and despite Moscow’s best efforts, the United States and the European Union have remained united in imposingeconomic sanctions against Russia.

“It didn’t go as planned,” Ms. Hill said. “It has been costly in terms of resources, and the sanctions have clearly hurt.”

Russia’s gamble in Syria did not prompt its decision to take a step back in Ukraine, but, Ms. Hill said, “it didn’t hurt that Putin had another card to play.”

“He’s hedging his bets,” she said. But, she added, this is not a sign that Russia has abandoned its goals in Ukraine: The country remains fragile, and Moscow’s grip on the Crimean Peninsula seems unshakable, no small factor in Russia’s newly-flexed geostrategic reach.

Still, the recent quiet on the Ukrainian front offers some hope for a resolution in Minsk, not by the December deadline but maybe in 2016.

So far, the negotiations have inched forward at an awkward, painful rate, causing public debate only in Kiev, but the next few months will be crucial.

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