by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
The last time an obscure official of junior rank named Vladimir Medinsky (lead image) was recorded officially as having words with President Vladimir Putin was on November 20, 2019.
At the time Medinsky was the Minister of Culture, and he was briefing Putin on one of his portfolio activities, the St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum. “Over 15,000 people attended the forum in St Petersburg,” Medinsky counted. “It lasted almost five days: it started earlier and ended later than scheduled… it was attended by 96 countries and saw the signing of over 90 international contracts for museum exhibitions, guest performances and exchanges…for the first time, and this is a very good trend, the forum was not just a club for cultural figures but also a place that attracted a lot of attention from the younger generation. Tens of thousands of St Petersburg students went to the forum.”
Putin said next to nothing: “Yes…Why?..Good…Very good…A very good festival, we need to cooperate with them…Good. Thank you.”
Eight weeks later on January 24, 2020, the Kremlin announced that Putin had removed Medinsky from the culture ministry, and instead appointed him an assistant to the President. There were no other details in the official announcement; nothing leaked then or later to the press on whether this was a demotion or promotion. What is certain is that Medinsky’s talk of cultural events was camouflage. Putin had told Medinsky he was changing his role for one of the most personal foreign policy operations on Putin’s agenda.
This didn’t materialize in public until Medinsky appeared as the leader of the Russian delegation to negotiate end-of-war terms with the Ukrainian government in Istanbul between March 29 and April 1, 2022.
Medinsky was sharply criticized by the General Staff, State Duma, and press for the terms he initialled in the draft agreement. After these domestic attacks combined to reverse Putin’s support for the pact and the Kiev regime appeared to withdraw under Anglo-American orders, Medinsky disappeared from view. But he has retained the role of Putin’s negotiator in the preparation of a sequel agreement, Istanbul-II.
He reappeared publicly at the Kremlin on July 5, 2024, when Medinsky was listed by the Kremlin in negotiation of end-of-war terms between Putin and Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban, and through Orban, US presidential candidate Donald Trump. In the Kremlin communiqué of the Orban talks, Medinsky was ranked ahead of foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yury Ushakov. The Kremlin has not explained what the former expert on Russian culture and history was doing there. Despite evidence made public by Orban himself, the Kremlin has denied the discussion in which Medinsky participated was about terms for an end of the Ukraine war with the US, after the presidential election on November 5.
A Moscow source confirms Medinsky was identified to Orban as Putin’s personal messenger. “He remains the chief negotiator but he has not been seen with the Chinese or with the Indians. This means that Putin is only serious about Orban – of course not about Orban, but Trump whom Orban went on to meet in Miami on July 11.”
Then last week, on September 20, Medinsky reappeared again in public, this time – and for his first time – at a weekly session of the Security Council.
According to the Kremlin communiqué, Putin began by announcing “we all know that in recent years, history has often been used as a means of achieving political goals with regard to our country. This is often done in an opportunistic and unscrupulous manner. As such, this can be viewed as a current policy issue, and our country, its official authorities need to define their attitude to it. Therefore, I propose that we discuss this today. We have two speakers, Mr Medinsky and Mr Lavrov.”
What Medinsky had to say about Russian history remains top secret. His Security Council speech has not been quoted on the Kremlin website; the Kremlin’s Telegram platform has ignored it. Asked for a copy or a summary of Medinsky’s remarks, the Kremlin press office replied: “If we get it, we’ll add it. Follow the website”. So far as Moscow political observers can remember, this is the first time that an official statement on Russian history has been classified.
Russian sources believe the reason is the same as Medinsky’s November 2019 meeting with Putin. It is camouflage. Only this time, the sources add, Putin’s purpose is to expose the camouflage himself, confirming he is ready for Istanbul-II, and is employing Medinsky in the president’s effort to override opposition to the end-of-war negotiations from the General Staff and from the Deputy Secretary of the Security Council, former president Dmitry Medvedev.
“Whatever Medinsky says is Putin’s thoughts exactly, more powerfully than Medvedev,” a Moscow source explains. “Putin wants the Americans to understand this.”
By making public Medinsky’s presence with Orban on July 5, and now at the Security Council on September 20, Putin is sending a signal to Trump, and also to the Biden Administration, that they should reciprocate with a negotiating signal of their own and stop the Kiev regime’s plans to escalate on the battlefield, with F-16 operations, and with long-range missile attacks on Russian territory.
Medinsky, 54, is Ukrainian. He was born at Smila, a small town 170 kilometres south of Kiev on the west bank of the Dnieper River. His father, Rostislav Ignatievich Medinsky (right), is a retired Soviet Army colonel who was a specialist in the automobile forces delivering ammunition and fuel, evacuating
and repairing combat vehicles. He served in the Prague intervention of 1968, the Afghanistan war, and in the military rescue operations associated with the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident (Ukraine) in 1986 and the Spitak earthquake of 1988 (Armenia). After he retired, he set up the Ya corporation in which his son Vladimir worked for a time.
His mother, Alla Viktorovna Medinskaya, is a general medical practitioner. Both parents appear to be ethnically Russian. They moved from garrison to garrison during the father’s army service, but then settled in Moscow where Vladimir went to high school.
He went on to study journalism and political science at universities in Moscow and then, at an unusually young age, he was posted to the Soviet (then Russian) Embassy in Washington in 1991-92. His arrival at the press department of the Embassy was registered by US counterintelligence as likely to indicate KGB cover. A Russian source comments: “Medinsky was definitely a KGB officer but low-level. Still, these guys have very high opinion of themselves just as Putin has of himself in Germany.”
Medinsky went on to a career in a variety of political party and government posts ever since. Between 2015 and 2017, however, he was the target of serious allegations that he had faked his expertise in Russian history and plagiarized large parts of his doctoral thesis, “Problems of objectivity in covering Russian history of the second half of the XV–XVII centuries.” Details of the case presented against Medinsky by several senior academicians and the scientific director of the Russian Military Historical Society were widely published.
The investigation became highly politicized at several universities, academic councils and the Ministry of Education, where by a split vote Medinsky retained his degree. By the end of the process, Medinsky’s survival in his job and his reputation for Russian history were attributed to intervention in his favour by Putin. A purge of Medinsky’s academic critics reportedly followed.
Since 2012 Medinsky was recorded as meeting Putin annually to brief him as Minister of Culture. In the same capacity, he arranged for the president to visit new Russian plays, films and theatres, and preside at ground breakings and unveilings of public monuments.
After he had left the ministry to join Putin’s personal staff, Medinsky was assigned the role of head of all government policymaking in education and culture, responsible for “strengthening the spiritual and moral foundations of society, preserving traditional values and state policy in the field of historical education.” He took charge of the rewriting of Russian history textbooks for the country’s schools.
In October 2020, Medinsky was reported by the Kremlin to have told a forum of the Russian Military Historical Society, the Russian Culture Foundation and the Victory Museum, that “it is “important to study the past “via one’s own answers to questions: how and why this happened and why our ancestors acted in this way.” He was followed at the same forum by Sergei Naryshkin, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, who said there are “similarities between historians and intelligence officers, because their professional duty is to take a look at the full picture and obtain unbiased and truthful information by analysing sources and gathering facts.”
For analysis of the terms Medinsky agreed to, on Putin’s instructions, during the Istanbul negotiations of March-April 2022, and why they were overruled in Moscow, read this.
In Istanbul on March 29, 2022, Medinsky, right, at the head of the Russian delegation, and extreme left, the head of the Ukrainian delegation, Davyd Arakhamia (aka Braun).
Medinsky, left, with Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin in Istanbul on March 29: Fomin was reading the announcement: “The Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation has taken the decision to radically reduce combat operations in the Kiev and Chernigov areas in order to boost mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and for the signing of the aforementioned agreement.”
By late in 2023, Medinsky began again to promote his role as Ukrainian peacemaker. “My personal deep conviction is that Ukraine and I have a common historical past, we are one people, and we have an inevitable common historical future.”
Source: https://rtvi.com/
In Medinsky’s interpretation of the Special Military Operation and of the purpose of Istanbul-I, the strategic objective was limited to the Crimea and the two Donbass regions, Lugansk and Donetsk. “Among the unconditional demands on our part was recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, recognition of the independence of the republics of Donbass, then there was a large number of humanitarian demands, but we proceeded from the protection of the Russian—speaking population of Donbass… Russia’s peace with Ukraine will be possible with the full fulfillment of its tasks and goals.”
At the end of February this year, Medinsky told the press he is ready to resume his end-of-war negotiations with the Kiev regime in Istanbul. “If they give us the assignment,” he is quoted as saying, “we’ll go.” In another press report of the same remarks, Medinsky responded to announcement of a new mediation effort by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by saying: “They will give the instructions – let’s go.”
In his version of Istanbul-II, Medinsky has implied — just as he has insisted on his interpretation of Istanbul-I — that Russia is not at war with the US and NATO, dismissing the range of demilitarization of Ukrainian territory required by the General Staff and the Security Council, and ignoring the terms of regional security proposed by the Russian Foreign Ministry in the draft treaties presented to the US and NATO in December 2021.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has confirmed Medinsky’s status in preparing for Istanbul-II. Medinsky “has conducted negotiations, so, of course, the entire array of developments is supervised by him,” Peskov said. He added: “the negotiating group has not yet been formed, since Moscow does not yet see prospects for the emergence of a peace process in Ukraine.”
Source: https://life.ru/p/1670471
Medinsky’s version of the end-of-war terms is flatly opposed by the General Staff. In the Security Council their case is argued by Deputy Chairman Medvedev. Medinsky’s appearance at the Security Council last week is a sign, Moscow sources believe, of the intensification of the debate between the Army and the President.
In an unusual disclosure of military command thinking, the former Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral Sergei Avakyants, has written earlier this month that “despite its external logic and attractiveness”, the Medinsky terms for ending the Special Military Operation “lead to a catastrophe that threatens to become the last and most tragic in the history of the Russian people. In Russia, it is dangerous for the current government to lose wars, especially when for a long time this government held parades and convinced the people of the invincibility of their native army. Defeat will cause disappointment and loss of faith, but not in the army, rather in the political leadership.”
Avakyants was warning Putin publicly. In private, Putin had ordered Avakyants’s dismissal in April. No Russian military blogger has reported the circumstances of the clash between Avakyants and the Kremlin.
Left: Admiral Sergei Avakyants; right, Avakyants’s unprecedented attack on Kremlin end-of-war negotiating strategy published on September 13, 2024.
According to Avakyants’s declaration of military independence from the Kremlin, “the pressure on Russia from its historical opponents will only increase, and the escalation process will enter an irreversible phase. The enormous resources currently invested in the indirect hot war of the collective West against our country will be redirected to finance all destructive and anti-state forces (regional separatism, ‘the fight against the rotten corrupt regime’, ‘the promotion of universal freedoms and values’, etc.). Various states ‘historically offended’ by our country will begin to make territorial claims against Russia from all sides.”
“The sanctions will not be lifted, but they may take even harsher and more painful forms for our economy. Part of the elite — weakened but still strong compradors, the remaining part of the ‘fifth column’ in the country – will painlessly adapt to the conditions of the collapse of the state. The country’s leadership, elite groups directly integrated into state structures, will be destroyed (politically, economically, and some even physically). No one will be forgiven, and no one will be forgotten.”
“It is very important for the West to once again demonstrate to the entire world what awaits the ‘rebels’ who have encroached on its model of world order. There is no hope for support from allies due to the absence of any (except Belarus). It will be necessary to answer a very difficult question that is already forming in the public consciousness: ‘For what were so many sacrifices made if the goals of the SVO were not achieved, and is not peace concluded at the expense of fundamental concessions to enemies a defeat for Russia?’ The people, having once again lost their ‘Faith’ and ‘Tsar’, will remain silent, watching the collapse of their ‘Fatherland’. All this will not happen overnight, but by historical standards very quickly – in five to seven years.”
“To avoid all this, Russia must choose the second option. It can be briefly described in two words – ‘Fight and Victory’. This option is unattractive and uncomfortable. It requires the leadership to assume the heaviest burden of responsibility, implement unpopular decisions, change the usual, established way of life for millions of people, introduce a different system of values and life priorities for the ruling elite. ‘Option No. 2’will require (for some time) exerting all efforts, attracting new personnel selected on the basis of professionalism, patriotism and the prevalence of the interests of society and the state over personal ones. It will be necessary to carry out a significant reorganization and restructuring of various government structures and a significant part of the entire state mechanism.”
In Avakyants’s outline of end-of-war terms, he proposes negotiations after military victory. “The victory must be unconditional – neither enemies, nor partners, nor our own people should have even the slightest doubt that this is Russia’s Victory. The goals declared by the President must be achieved without fail: access to the 2014 administrative borders of the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions; denazification – a change of the ruling regime in Ukraine, a change in the Constitution of Ukraine and current legislation (permission for the UOC [Ukrainian Orthodox Church], official bilingualism, a ban on Nazi-Bandera ideology, etc.); demilitarization – constitutionally activated neutral status of Ukraine, prohibition of deployment on its territory of foreign military bases and military contingents (including advisers and instructors), heavy weapons, types of weapons capable of threatening the territory of Russia; after the invasion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into the Kursk region, Ukrainian statehood in its current form should not exist or, in extreme cases, can be preserved, but weakened as much as possible.”
For the time being, no Russian mainstream media nor alternative press have reported Medinsky’s reemergence as Putin’s personal negotiator of end-of-war terms. The military bloggers Boris Rozhin (Colonal Cassad) and Mikhail Zvinchuk (Rybar) refused to respond to questions about Medinsky’s role. Dmitry Rogozin, currently the senator representing Zaporozhye and a future presidential succession candidate, has not commented publicly on Medinsky as Putin’s spokesman for negotiations.
The Communist Party, which fiercely attacked Medinsky’s performance in Istanbul-I, has warned against the prospects for Istanbul-II but party leaders and the party spokesman refuse to answer questions on Medinsky’s current role.
