ROME. The fact that Moscow has sent Vladimir Medinsky, former Minister of Culture, head of the Military Historical Society and presidential adviser on history and memory, to the head of the Russian delegation to negotiations with the Ukrainians, on the Belarusian border, has raised not a few discontent. Medinsky is in fact one of the promoters, in the Russian elite, of the use of history as propaganda. He too, like President Vladimir Putin, is convinced that Ukraine “is not a country”. “The modern state, which we call Ukraine,” he said two days before the Russian invasion, “is a historical ghost shaped by specific tactical decisions of specific politicians in specific circumstances.” With strong nationalist positions, his appointment as head of the Russian negotiators was not seen by many as a good signal for dialogue. Together with Medinsky, in the negotiations near the Pripyat River – a symbol not only of the border between the three Slavic nations but also of the nuclear disaster of nearby Chernobyl – there were also: Deputy Defense Minister Aleksander Fomin, formerly in charge of the department that looks after the relations with the former Soviet republics; the head of the International Affairs Committee of the State Duma, Leonid Slutsky, and the Russian ambassador to Belarus Boris Gryzlov, who leads the Russian representation in the Donbass Peace Contact Group.
At the head of the delegation arrived from Kiev there was the Minister of Defense, Oleksii Reznikov, a loyalist of President Volodymyr Zelensky, who recently took a selfie with him that went viral: the two are portrayed embracing and smiling as a sign of union and resistance , in stark contrast to Putin’s distance from his defense minister, Serghei Shoigu, left at the opposite end of the long table now regularly used by the head of the Kremlin for business meetings. Together with Reznikov, the president of Zelensky’s ‘Servant of the People’ party David Arakhamia was also sent to negotiate; presidential adviser and de facto spokesman Mikhail Podolyak; the Deputy Foreign Minister, Mykola Tochitsky; the first deputy head of the trilateral contact group (between Russia, Ukraine and OSCE) for a ceasefire in the Donbass, Andriy Kostin and the deputy elected in Kiev Rustem Umerov.
Both delegations, after the first round of talks today, agreed to return to their respective capitals for consultations, promising to return to negotiations “in a few days”, probably on the border between Russia and Poland.