Putin invites Zelensky to Moscow: why the Kremlin wants it

Vladimir Putin is ready to meet Volodymyr Zelensky in person, but not in Istanbul, Abu Dhabi or Washington — only in Moscow. The Russian leader invited the Ukrainian president to the Russian capital and promised to guarantee his safety. He made the offer on Monday during a phone call with Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

Since the start of the full-scale war, the Kremlin has put forward similar proposals more than once.

A meeting on the Kremlin’s terms

A visit to Moscow would reflect Putin’s conviction that Ukraine cannot negotiate with Russia as an equal. It must come as a vassal to its liege lord, and any agreement would merely be the product of his goodwill. Such a summit would look more like an audience at which Putin dictates Russia’s terms and Ukraine agrees to them. Leaders of warring countries usually meet in a third, neutral country.

The proposal fits Putin’s theory that Russians and Ukrainians are one people whom enemies are trying to divide artificially. He first set it out in an essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” published in July 2021.

A “walk to Canossa” and 1968

Diplomats call this style of negotiation a “walk to Canossa.” The phrase goes back to 1077, when Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, tried to have the excommunication imposed on him by Pope Gregory VII lifted. He travelled to Canossa to see the pope, who made him wait for three days, barefoot in the cold and snow.

Ukrainian historian Radomyr Mokryk explained that the aim of Russian aggression is to destroy Ukrainian statehood, society and identity. According to him, Russia’s problem was that Ukraine was becoming more and more Ukrainian, rather than just a slightly different province of Russia. In the historian’s view, it is precisely Ukraine’s drive to break away from the Russian or Soviet empire and to stress its distinctiveness that provokes Moscow’s anger.

The obvious comparison is August 1968, when Warsaw Pact troops entered Czechoslovakia. The Soviet leadership, headed by Leonid Brezhnev, treated the dispute with Prague as a family matter. Soviet soldiers forcibly took Communist Party leader Alexander Dubček and Prime Minister Oldřich Černík to the Kremlin, where the Czechoslovak delegation signed a dictated treaty on the stationing of Soviet troops. In effect, it was a capitulation.

Will Zelensky go?

The Russians cannot bring Zelensky to Moscow by force: they are too far from Kyiv. He has not hinted so far that he is considering a trip to the Kremlin. When Donald Trump asked him last year in the White House whether he would be ready to go to Moscow, Zelensky replied sarcastically: “That’s difficult, many drones and missiles are flying there now.”

Zelensky and Putin have met face to face only once — on Dec. 9, 2019, in Paris, where they discussed the situation in Donbas in the presence of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. Since the start of the massive invasion in February 2022, only the foreign ministers, Dmytro Kuleba and Sergey Lavrov, have held talks in person. According to Kuleba, at the 2022 meeting in Istanbul Lavrov answered every proposal by saying he had no mandate to decide anything, and when Kuleba asked him to call Moscow, he refused.

Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz