A keenly-anticipated meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and European leaders brought no apparent progress on bringing peace to Ukraine and exposed again the gulf between the two sides as they come to terms with their rapidly disintegrating relations.
Hopes had risen ahead of a meeting of Asian and European heads of government that the two sides, including Ukrainian Petro Poroshenko, could make progress in enforcing a shaky ceasefire that was agreed last month and begin to unwind some of the sanctions that have badly affected confidence in both the Russian and European economies.
However, such hopes got their first dampener last night after a tough two-and-a-half hour session of negotiations between Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Kremlin put out a statement saying that the two had “serious differences in views on the source of Ukraine’s domestic conflict, as well as root causes for what is happening there today.”
Things didn’t go any more smoothly Friday morning at a working breakfast with an expanded circle of leaders (including Merkel again). Putin’s spokesmen Dmitry Peskov told reporters after the meeting that “from many participants there was a complete lack of desire to understand the reality of the situation in Ukraine.”
Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert tweeted: “So far no breakthrough; rapprochement on some points of detail. Central point: will Ukraine’s territorial integrity be respected?”
U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said Putin had reassured them he doesn’t want to create another “frozen conflict” in eastern Europe, a reference to pro-Russian enclaves in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova that have no officials status.
“But if that is the case then Russia needs to take the action to put in place all that has been agreed – getting Russian troops out of Ukraine, getting heavy weapons out of Ukraine, respecting all the agreements and only recognising one legitimate set of Ukrainian elections.”
“If those things don’t happen then the European Union, Britain included, must keep in place the sanctions and the pressure so that we don’t have this kind of conflict in our continent,” Cameron said.
Putin might be forgiven for not being absolutely on top of his game at the breakfast. After his talks with Merkel ended at 1.30 in the morning, he had gone on to pay a visit to the disgraced former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, staying at his house till 3 a.m., according to Peskov.
Berlusconi, who has been convicted of tax fraud and embroiled in allegations of having sex with an underage prostitute at one of a series of wild late-night parties, was one of Putin’s biggest advocates in the E.U. while he was in power.
Both Russia and Europe badly need to patch up their differences to revive their economies, which are both stalling.
“Putin’s war against Ukraine and other geopolitical concerns seriously dented German business confidence and investment from May 2014 onwards,” Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank, said in a note to clients this week, adding that this has had knock-on effects in the rest of the Eurozone.
In Russia, meanwhile, the ruble on Friday rebounded only weakly from the all-time lows it had posted against the dollar and euro earlier in the week. Already under pressure from a sharp slowdown in growth, the currency has hit a series of historic lows as global oil prices have headed south. Oil and gas account for the vast bulk of Russia’s exports. Prices for its other big exports such as steel and grain are also close to multi-year lows.
