Letter From the Editors
This week senior US and Russian officials met in Riyadh to discuss a peace settlement in Ukraine. Both sides seemed cautiously optimistic following the talks, which were their first in over three years. According to Meduza, the plan that came out of the meeting has three consecutive stages: a ceasefire, a presidential election and a formal peace agreement. Expert Maksim Samorukov says such a deal is unlikely to work, however, since the US has no “meaningful leverage” over Moscow.
Republic’s Aleksandr Zhelenin expands on this idea. According to him, Trump’s team is pushing for an in-person meeting between Putin and Zelensky. But, he writes, “there is no practical sense in forcing them to endure the spiritual anguish of looking each other in the face.*** For one simple reason. No agreement signed by Putin is a guarantee that he will abide by it.” Instead, he says, such an agreement could be signed by other officials, but this won’t change the fact that “the general sticking point for Ukraine, the US and Europe is a guarantee that [war] will not happen again, supported by material resources and military force.”
Meanwhile, Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, who was conspicuously absent from Riyadh, set off on a listening tour of Europe and Ukraine. As Vladimir Olenchenko tells NG, Kellogg’s goals for the trip were to “gain a detailed understanding of the prospects for the Ukrainian agenda, the future of European security and the nature of transatlantic cooperation,” as well as to “get unvarnished answers to questions of interest to the Americans.” But those goals appear to be at odds with Kellogg’s statement that “what we don’t want to do is get into a large group discussion.” The Europeans pushed back at this, saying, “a peace agreement without Europe is not an option.” Indeed, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he was “quite irritated” by the whole situation: “People are talking over the heads of Ukrainians about the outcome of peace talks that haven’t even started. This is highly inappropriate, to put it bluntly and honestly.”
However, as Sergei Shein writes in Izvestia, “the EU does not have the desire or the ability to pursue a foreign policy that would distance it from Trump’s America and raise the level of confrontation with Russia.” Thus, he argues, the EU will eventually fall in line with the new US approaches, but “will not agree to Russia’s ‘rehabilitation’ and will keep its sanctions in place.” Perhaps in an effort to console the spurned Europeans, the NG editorial board quotes Trump’s reasoning behind his decision to ban AP journalists from the Oval Office and Air Force One: “That’s the way life works.” All this phrase needs, NG quips, is the word “baby!” at the end of it.
Speaking of babies, Anastasia Bashkatova looks at the possibility of a baby boom in Russia. Citing new research by two American economists, Bashkatova explains how preferential mortgage programs helped spur the post-World War II baby boom in the US by expanding home ownership, which made it easier for couples to start their own families earlier and have more children. According to experts, though, similar programs in Russia have only complicated the financial situation for poor borrowers, who are increasingly using their loans not for single-family homes, but for one-room apartments. And, Bashkatova concludes, “you won’t create a large family in such a small space, that’s for sure.”
Russia’s current labor shortage does not bode well for a baby boom, either. As Izvestia describes, Russian businesses are now recruiting workers from Africa, Latin America and South Asia to fill the “demographic hole” created by “the transfer of labor resources to military service and defense-industrial complex plants, rapidly increasing production in labor-intensive industries and a decline in migration from CIS countries.”
With a demographic crisis clearly looming, perhaps it’s time for Russia to consider the peace plan embraced by the hippies in the 1960s: Make love, not war.