Should European leaders be holding phone calls with Putin?

There is a term in Italian for a specific kind of journalism. “Dietrologia” is the art of analysing the hidden background dynamics of the public outworkings of politics. Who made the decisive comment in the cabinet room? What quiet pact between rivals allowed a particular candidate to go forward? What unspoken motive drives a policy with a different public rationale?

Some dietrologia was called for to understand the dynamics at work in Brussels as the 27 European Union leaders met this week to discuss the fallout of the invasion of Ukraine.

The headline issues were an agreement to ban most Russian oil imports, a looming international food crisis, and how to best co-operate on defence strategy. Also talked about, though not explicitly an agenda point, were the politics of peace.

Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas said as much as she left the summit.

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“Of course we talked about pushing Ukraine for peace,” she said. “We had very intense discussions about this, and it’s only up to the Ukrainians to say what kind of peace they are able to live with. Even if there is peace, the atrocities for those areas that are conquered will continue. So if we want to end the human suffering, we also have to push the aggressor back to its borders.”

With this statement, Kallas was arguing that Ukraine should not be pressured to accept a peace deal that involves it giving up some of its territory to Russia. The fact that she has chosen to say it, in English, to the international media, means she at least suspects some other party to hold the opposite view.

Europe grapples with Ukraine, food and energy crises

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Not without difficulty, EU member states reached an agreement on new sanctions against Russia, this time banning most oil imports. Pat Leahy and Naomi O'Leary were at the summit.

It is no secret that there is mistrust among the Baltic states towards the approach of larger western European countries to diplomacy with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

This dates back before the invasion. Countries that border Russia felt talked over for years, particularly by Paris and Berlin, whom they saw as approaching Moscow as some sort of fellow great power and respected peer rather than as a major security threat.

Faith in the ability of Germany and France to negotiate a satisfactory outcome to the war has sunk along with the Minsk agreements, the manifestly failed peace process the two brokered after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Baltic ire has been expressed at the calls to the Kremlin that have gone on during the war. Kallas pointed out previously that these have not stopped the Russian army from committing massacres and instead make Putin feel “he’s the centre of attention because everybody wants to talk to him”. “He doesn’t get the message that he’s isolated,” she said.

On Saturday, German chancellor Olaf Scholz and French president Emmanuel Macron held a joint call with Putin in which they called for a ceasefire, according to the Élysée Palace. The Élysée statement said that “any solution to the war must be negotiated between Moscow and Kyiv, with respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine”, explicitly contradicting any idea that a change to borders was pushed.

Two days later at the European Council, Latvia raised an objection to calling Putin, according to a source close to the talks.

“I ... don’t see the point of talking with someone who’s committing genocide in a neighbouring country,” Latvian prime minister Krisjanis Karins told media afterwards. “Putin will talk when he feels that he’s losing, so that should be our goal.”

In the talks, his objection was met with a counter-argument from Italian prime minister Mario Draghi, who had himself called Putin four days prior in an bid to negotiate the release of millions of tonnes of grain that are trapped in the port city of Odesa and exacerbating a looming global food crisis.

The case made for the phone call was this: while it may come to nothing, speaking to Putin is necessary to try to solve the food shortage. And secondarily, doing it publicly communicates that western leaders are attempting to bring about peace, and that the conflict is Putin’s choice.

This addresses impatience for peace among the public in France, Germany, and Italy, and an international narrative that the West is the instigator of a war whose serious economic workings-out are perhaps only beginning to be felt.

“All leaders, in the end, are speaking to their electorate,” concluded Karins, the Latvian leader. “Regardless of some things that we say to the outside, we are all firmly united in our goal of supporting Ukraine and making sure Russia loses this war.”