Hi, This is Hot Mic and I'm Nidhi Razdan. Are there the first signs of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine? Or is this a smokescreen for an even more aggressive Russian campaign? On Tuesday, Russia said that it had decided to drastically cut its military activity around the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and the city of Chernihiv.
Russia's Deputy Defence Minister who attended the talks with the Ukrainian officials in Turkey, said that this was being done to, as he put it, "increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and achieving the ultimate goal of agreeing and signing an agreement".
On its part, Ukraine has conceded to a key Russian demand. It has offered to maintain the status of a neutral state, which means it will not be part of any military alliance like NATO, nor will it allow any military bases to be set up on its soil. This would have strict legally binding guarantees from countries that include the UK, China, the US, Turkey, France, Canada, Italy, Poland and Israel. It would also agree to protect a neutral Ukraine in the event of attack. Any international exercises would require the consent of the guarantor states. The future status of Crimea that was seized by Russia in 2014 would be decided by 15 years of consultations.
Now Ukraine's negotiator has told journalists that its offer of neutrality was a chance to restore the territorial integrity and security of Ukraine through diplomatic and political means. But while this meeting is being seen as the first possible breakthrough in this 35-plus-day war, there is also a huge dose of skepticism and caution. Very simply, Russia's words have to be tested on the ground.
Ukraine's President Zelensky has said he will judge Russia's offer to pull back its forces by concrete results and that while there are positive signals, the situation on the ground has not become easier.
On the ground, while some troops have moved away from Kyiv, there are fears expressed by some experts that Russia may be using this time to regroup. The governor of the Chernihiv region has said that Russian strikes continued all night, even after the big announcement on Tuesday. But it's also a fact that publicly Russia has changed the goalposts since the start of this war.
When Putin first invaded Ukraine, it's reported that he believed the country would fall to Russian forces within days. However, that has not happened. Instead, Ukrainian forces have put up a much better than expected resistance and Russian forces have been stalled for many weeks.
Western military analysts say that Russia has suffered a series of setbacks and Putin may now be looking for a face-saver. Which is why, only a few days ago, Russia reframed its war goals in Ukraine. A senior Russian military official said that the real objective was to liberate the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainian army for the past eight years.
Putin has accused Ukraine of waging a genocide against ethnic Russians in Donbass. But as a Reuters report points out, if capturing Donbass had really been the objective from the start, Moscow could have mounted a much more limited offensive and spared itself the effort and losses involved in invading Ukraine from the north, east and south. Russia, even by its own accounts, has suffered on the ground.
Their official figures acknowledged the deaths of over 1,350 soldiers. Though Ukraine claims that the real figure is more than ten times higher. A Dutch military blog called Oryx claims that Russia has lost 295 tanks, 16 planes, 35 helicopters, three ships and two fuel trains. It has also verified Ukrainian losses of 540 items, including 77 tanks.
Coming back to the present day, Russian forces have been shelling nearly all cities on the front line, separating Ukrainian and Russian-controlled areas in the Donetsk region in the east of the country. There may have been some progress diplomatically this week, but there is still a long way to go.
For weeks before the start of the war, Russia had insisted it had no plans to invade Ukraine. But they did have more than 100,000 troops on Ukraine's border, and eventually they did invade. The denial was a lie, and that is why any promises of peace are being looked at very cautiously.