As U.S. President Barack Obama prepares to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of next week's United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York, Ukrainian officials are fretting that their country is about to get "traded."
The refugee crisis in Europe has made the civil war in Syria the world's top concern. And Mr. Putin's surprise deployment of Russian fighter jets and ground forces to support the regime of Bashar al-Assad gives him another card to play when he meets Mr. Obama on Monday.
Mr. Putin can be helpful to U.S. interests in Syria, where an American-led coalition is waging an air campaign against the so-called Islamic State. Or the Russian leader can make things even more complicated than they are.
In Kiev, the worry is that Mr. Putin's price for any co-operation will be for the White House to pressure the Ukrainian government to make further concessions over eastern Ukraine – where Russian-backed separatists rule an unrecognized mini-state – and the lowering of Western sanctions imposed on Russia following Moscow's 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.
"We want to know if we are [being] traded or not. Hopefully not," Vadym Prystayko, Ukraine's deputy foreign minister, said in an interview last week with The Globe and Mail. "But I understand that the big guys have their big games and Syria is very important. People describe it as a crisis in Europe, and CNN is full of images of these [refugees] climbing over fences."
Speaking inside the Soviet-era Foreign Ministry building that towers over part of central Kiev, Mr. Prystayko said Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko should also be present for any discussions about the country's future. (At the time, Mr. Prystayko was speaking about a hypothetical meeting between the U.S. and Russian presidents, which the White House has now confirmed will take place.) "We are worried when somebody else is negotiating something behind our backs, even having the best intentions in mind."
When Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin do meet, it will be their first face-to-face encounter since the multilayered crisis in Ukraine erupted early last year, plunging relations between Moscow and the West to their lowest point since the Cold War. The tête-à-tête effectively ends a year and a half of efforts to isolate the Russian leader.
The Kremlin announced Friday that Mr. Putin would also hold bilateral meetings – and discuss Syria – with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande on the sidelines of an Oct. 2 summit meeting in Paris dedicated to the Ukraine crisis. Mr. Poroshenko will also attend the four-way summit talks, but will not meet Mr. Putin one-on-one.
Relations between the Kremlin and the White House remain cool. The two sides were publicly at odds over the agenda for Monday's meeting in New York, as well as which side requested the meeting.
Mr. Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow that "of course, the primary topic will be Syria." He said Ukraine would only be discussed "if time allows" during what Mr. Peskov said would be a roughly hour-long conversation following Mr. Putin's scheduled address to the General Assembly on Monday.
Mr. Obama's spokesman, Josh Earnest, retorted that "there will be time" to discuss Ukraine.
The White House claimed the Kremlin had "repeatedly" requested a meeting. An adviser to Mr. Putin called that a distorted version of events.
The two leaders' last face-to-face conversation was a brief exchange in Beijing in November 2014, during a gathering of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group. They also had a 15-minute conversation on the sidelines of a D-Day commemoration in June 2014.
Russia has deployed more than two dozen fighter jets to Syria's Mediterranean Sea coast – as well as tanks, artillery and anti-aircraft systems – over the past few weeks, while constructing barracks capable of hosting 2,000 soldiers. Satellite imagery shows Russia has established a new base near Latakia, Mr. Assad's home city and power base, while also building up an existing naval outpost in the nearby port of Tartus.
Since the Russian arrival, the U.S. has backed away from its former demand that Mr. Assad immediately leave power. Secretary of State John Kerry said this week that Mr. Assad's future should be decided through negotiations, and called on Russia to "bring [Mr. Assad] to the table."
While the Kremlin's full intentions in Syria remain murky, Mr. Putin has said Russia would oppose any effort to remove Mr. Assad, a longtime ally, arguing it would lead to even greater chaos. Upwards of 200,000 people had died in four and a half years of civil war. Four million others have fled the country.
As Russia has stepped up its involvement in Syria, fighting has subsided in eastern Ukraine, raising hopes that a ceasefire is finally taking hold there after 17 months of fighting and 8,000 deaths. Moscow denies allegations from Kiev and NATO that its regular army has fought alongside the separatist forces.
Mr. Prystayko said the Kremlin now appears to want to "freeze" the conflict in eastern Ukraine, turning the rebel-held areas into an unrecognized state-let akin to the Trans-Dniester region of neighbouring Moldova, which Moscow has supported since the early 1990s.
Such an endgame would put a potentially permanent block in front of Ukraine joining the European Union, the main aspiration of last year's pro-Western revolution in Kiev, or NATO.
Mark MacKinnon