Demystifying "Istanbul". What's next
The “demystification” of last year’s Istanbul agreement, which took place before our eyes in terms of its international political consequences, will undoubtedly become an important milestone in the ongoing game around Ukraine, perhaps bringing it to some new stage. Although it's unlikely to break the game itself.
What also happened has an important domestic political dimension. This is important, first of all, in terms of working on mistakes in the propaganda circuit, if someone from the authorities decides to do so.
After all, what did Lukashenko's announcement and then Putin's main speech demonstrate? They revealed a profound gap between the actual content of the behind-the-scenes negotiations on Ukraine and the freewheeling fantasies of publicists on this topic, broadcast to the masses by the domestic media and propaganda.
It was the deep dissynchronization between these two processes, as well as the unwillingness of the authorities to honestly discuss important issues with their people, slipping them instead a tasty but useless surrogate in the form of false targets and various kinds of false panels, that led to the formation of an extremely negative public background, and these failed agreements themselves were firmly labeled as “shameful” and “treasonous.”
The belief, lovingly cultivated for a long time by the expert community and transmitted to the masses, that the words and theses spoken out loud by the country's top officials was something like a red herring that should not be taken seriously, also had an impact. And what they “really” meant – a whole brood of Kremlinologists specially trained in reading Putin’s thoughts and catching near-government insiders from the air will tell us about this.
While Pelevin was right in fact, with his immortal adage, " the world is ruled not by a secret lodge, but by obvious failure ." And if the government screws up somewhere, it's not because of conspiracies or betrayals, but because of the banal excess of an incompetent executive or the flapping of a "black swan." In the case of "Istanbul," that "swan" turned out to be the intransigence of the Ukrainians, who suddenly blew all the agreements after the fact.
Translated into layman's terms, it means that what the authorities say on their tongues is, with a high degree of probability, on their minds. Putin spoke quite sincerely and clearly a year ago, and now he repeated at SPIEF that he did not and does not set as a goal either the liquidation of Ukrainian statehood or regime change in Kyiv. And indeed, as we now understand after the fact, in order to achieve the goals of that time, the issue of regime change was completely unprincipled.
Following Putin, Lavrov and Peskov repeated this in different ways.
But these words of the top officials were drowned in the white noise of propaganda, which was given the go-ahead from above to broadcast to the masses various fantasies of opinion leaders who had nothing to do with the real content of the negotiations, who composed the “goals of the NWO”, each in whatever way they wanted, depending on the degree of fervor of their imagination .
Hence all these chimeras about “we’ll get to Lvov”, “we’ll divide Ukraine with Poland” and so on. As a result, consumers of information heard not Putin, but a conventional Kholmogorov with the same conventional Dugin. That is, what they wanted to hear and what was more pleasant to the collective ears. In the “I came up with it myself, I believed it myself” mode. The moral here is simple: believe Putin, not his mind readers from a distance.
In this sense, it's worth paying close attention to Peskov's words now that "the task of demilitarizing Ukraine has been largely accomplished." Over time, it may turn out that this wasn't just a casually omitted phase, but a prologue to some higher-level actions. The absence of clearly defined goals not only facilitates the setting of objectives and the selection of tools for achieving them, but also allows for the post-factum declaration of what has been achieved as desirable.
What they heard, in turn, created the basis for wildly inflated expectations, which then boomeranged into shock , disappointment, and a general conviction of "Istanbul betrayal." This is an extremely unfortunate self-inflicted blow to domestic propaganda, but, I repeat, the leadership created this situation to its own detriment, with its own hands.
And the Russian authorities, based on what journalists managed to look at in the documents that Putin was holding in his hands, and adding to this the words of Putin himself, Lukashenko and the entire sum of reservations of other VIPs involved in the process, set themselves, starting the SVO, quite specific , extremely rational, although down-to-earth goals from the point of view of domestic patriotic megalomaniacs. Whether these goals were initially achievable given the available input is another matter. And this is also material for working on mistakes.
Next - a word from the author of the quite serious publication “Russia in Global Affairs” Fyodor Lukyanov:
“From what the Russian President said at a meeting with the African delegation, it follows that the initially announced and sounded abstract goals of the NWO (demilitarization, denazification, etc.) implied very specific tasks. Namely, with the help of military force, impose political (permanent neutrality and internal political obligations) and military (parameters of the armed forces) restrictions on Ukraine. To this we can add Lukashenko’s recent arguments with a hint of some territorial and financial exchanges discussed in Istanbul.
The conclusion suggests itself: the Russian leadership did not have an existential battle for a new world order in mind when giving the order to use force. It was, first of all, about solving the Ukrainian problem and, first of all, in military-political parameters.”
The expert’s final conclusion is also interesting:
“Now it’s definitely impossible to talk about something like Istanbul. In the meantime, if everything is as it appears, we can state a discrepancy between the scale of actions of the Russian side (the start of a full-scale military campaign against a satellite state of the world hegemon) and expectations regarding the ability to complete them with fairly minimalist results (fixation of some territorial acquisitions and “Finlandization+” of an obstinate neighbor ). When making a swing, it was strange to count on such a completely moderate result and the agreement of the enemy, and most importantly his cartridges. Actually, the result demonstrated this.”
The conclusions of HSE professor Dmitry Evstafiev are also interesting. Quote again:
“Disavowing the “Istanbul shame”, and even in this form and in front of such an audience, is a response not only to the United States, but also to China to their propaganda about freezing the conflict. By the way, the “African Peace Initiative” (more than vague, declarative and inarticulate) is a living illustration of the fact that “Chimerica” fully exists. Even if it’s situational. One would have to be very naive not to see that Beijing and Washington – each due to their own interests (one needs to save the “Great” Silk Road, the other needs to get out of the funnel of conflict) – were “co-investors” in the “African project”. They were shown the direction of further movement.
The direction of movement is also quite clear: Ukraine can exist, but not as a significant military force on a European scale (an armed force of 100 thousand people with the equipment indicated in the Istanbul “memorandum” is a significant force), but the main thing is that security guarantees for this state can only be provided by Russia, under certain conditions, is a Union State (which will have to be politically recognized, at a minimum, de facto), and, at a maximum, a Union State plus China, if it recognizes the new political-territorial alignment. Which is unlikely. And Ukraine, of course, can exist. No problem".
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