Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov mentioned to the press after a meeting of the CSTO Foreign Ministers, Defense Ministers, and Committee of Secretaries of Security Councils that “Yesterday, alongside the negotiations in Abu Dhabi, a dozen EU countries began conducting exercises in Poland.” He added that “The scenario for the exercises is the deployment of troops into Ukraine to protect the Kiev Nazi regime from the Russian Federation”, which he said that Russia will “not allow to be implemented”.
Leaving aside the aforesaid scenario, Lavrov’s innuendo is that these drills were timed to coincide with the resumption of the trilateral talks on Ukraine, but it should be clarified that these drills were first announced in mid-July after a “Coalition of the Willing” summit for an unspecified date in the autumn. The British Defense Secretary then confirmed three months later in mid-October after a meeting with his American counterpart that these exercises will be held sometime “next month” in Poland.
Multilateral military drills are extremely difficult to hold on short notice due to the logistics involved, and despite the “military Schengen” that’s been in force for nearly three years already between the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland for optimizing their military logistics, this is still a lengthy process. The “Coalition of the Willing” therefore couldn’t have organized these drills in the four days between Putin confirming their date for 10-11 November on 6 November. It’s simply not possible.
This clarification is important since it shows that the timing of these two events, the “Coalition of the Willing’s” military drills aimed at preparing for a post-war deployment to Ukraine and the resumption of trilateral talks, had nothing to do with the “Coalition”. Rather, the US was the one that coordinated this with Ukraine and its close Emirati partner, which can be intuited by Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff suggesting the talks’ resumption to Putin four days after the UK defense chief’s trip to DC.
Russia would have been keeping an eye on the preparations for these exercises, which weren’t a secret whatsoever at all, and therefore knew that the resumed talks might coincide with them. As the organizer of multilateral military drills through the CSTO that it leads, Russia knows that they can’t easily be held on short notice, yet Lavrov’s choice of words made it seem otherwise. Given that he’s a world-class diplomat, however, he likely intended for them to reinforce his view that the EU doesn’t want peace.
Having clarified that, the question then arises of why the US timed these events to coincide, and it could be that the US envisages a post-war European peacekeeping deployment without Article 5 guarantees as the only way to get Europe and Ukraine to agree to compromises on the post-war security architecture. The emerging aforesaid order that was described here would align with the spirit of Russia’s security guarantee requests from December 2021 as realistically as possible given all that’s happened since then.
“The Trilateral Talks On Ukraine Could Lead To A Grand Deal If Trump Has The Will” to “creatively coerce” Europe and Ukraine into the requisite compromises, but so as to not look like it’s “bullying” them, they’d have to get something in return like permission for their long-sought peacekeeping mission. With these calculations in mind, the US’ timing of these talks’ resumption with the latest exercises is meant to reassure them that it’ll try lobby for this as part of a grand deal, which Russia might ultimately agree to.
