Ukraine
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin, faced with rising violence in southeastern Ukraine that threatened to draw in the Russian Army at great cost and prompt severe new Western economic sanctions, pressed pause on Wednesday in what had started to look like an inevitable march toward war.
But it remained unclear to analysts and political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic whether he was truly reversing course on Ukraine or if this was just another of his judo-inspired feints.
Using a far less ominous tone than in previous remarks about Ukraine, Mr. Putin told a news conference at the Kremlin that Russia had withdrawn its troops from along the border and that he had asked separatists to drop plans for a referendum on sovereignty this Sunday. Russia would even accept Ukraine’s presidential election on May 25, he said, if demands for autonomy from the country’s east were recognized.
Mr. Putin said Russia wanted to spur mediation efforts led by the Europeans. He said he did not know whether talks between the warring sides in Ukraine were “realistic,” but was determined to give them a chance, in particular a suggestion from Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany that the factions engage in a round-table discussion.
Photo
Pro-Russian gunmen carried the coffin of a colleague killed during clashes in Slovyansk.
Credit Manu Brabo/Associated Press
“I simply believe that if we want to find a long-term solution to the crisis in Ukraine, open, honest and equal dialogue is the only possible option,” he said.
While Western governments welcomed Mr. Putin’s apparent about-face, there was also abundant skepticism, based in part on his record in Crimea. Mr. Putin repeatedly denied that Russia’s soldiers were involved in the region, only to admit later that they were.
A White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, told reporters traveling with President Obama aboard Air Force One that while the United States would welcome a Russian military pullback, “there has been no evidence that such a withdrawal has taken place.” NATO officials confirmed that on Wednesday, saying they saw no troop movements.
Senior British officials also reacted warily to Mr. Putin’s announcement, noting that he had once before announced a sizable troop withdrawal from the border, in a phone call with Ms. Merkel, but moved only one battalion a modest distance. One official said that satellite photos that would better verify Mr. Putin’s assertions would take a while to come through.
Nevertheless, British officials regarded Mr. Putin’s comments as positive. They suggested that he wants to avoid a larger economic confrontation with the United States and the European Union and that some of the concerns of Russian businessmen may finally be getting through to the tight circle around Mr. Putin.
While the world was caught off guard by Mr. Putin’s sudden peace offensive, analysts in Moscow cited several robust military, economic and political reasons he might be inclined to switch tracks.
First, there has been an increasing sense here, as elsewhere, that conditions in Ukraine were rapidly approaching the situation in Yugoslavia in 1991, when the former Soviet satellite broke into pieces. The violence among various factions was creating facts on the ground, they said, that nobody could predict or manage.
Paradoxically, some added, this dynamic was nurtured in large part by round-the-clock reports on Russian state television that Ukraine was heaving with violence instigated primarily by neo-fascist cells emanating from western Ukraine. But with the notable exception of some 40 deaths in riots last week in Odessa, far from the separatist hotbeds of Slovyansk and Donetsk, the violence was mostly confined to small skirmishes.
There were worrying signs that was changing, however.
“The problem is that in all these types of conflicts, once the black swans have started to fly, you will never control the situation,” said Sergei A. Karaganov, dean of the School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and a periodic adviser to the Kremlin on foreign policy.
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