Ukraine Peace Talks Are Stalling. A Firebrand Russian Historian May Be To Blame.

Ukrainian and Russian negotiators described the Geneva peace talks as "difficult" and "complex work."

Volodymyr Zelenskyy cut to the chase: "historical shit."

The Ukrainian president posted his take the morning after two days of negotiations concluded somewhat abruptly on February 18.

There were already low expectations that the US-brokered gathering, the third such meeting over the past month, would yield a breakthrough to halt the conflict that hits its four-year mark next week.

But Zelenskyy's undiplomatic spit-take highlights a major reason the talks haven't, as well as highlighting one of the main reasons the Kremlin decided to go to war in the first place.

The man at the center of it is a historian and former culture minister who also happened to be the head of the Russian delegation in Geneva: Vladimir Medinsky.

Best-Selling Author (And Alleged Plagiarist)

A student of English and journalism at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the Ukrainian-born Medinsky later worked in the press office of the Russian Embassy in Washington around the time of the Soviet collapse.

After returning to Moscow, he joined a public relations firm, and later became a spokesman for the Tax Police. He won a seat in the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, in 2003.

During Dmitry Medvedev's four-year tenure as president, Medinsky was appointed to the Presidential Commission Against the Falsification of History.

For President Vladimir Putin, who for years has lamented what he argued is a gross distortion of Soviet and Russian history in the West, Medinsky was a kindred spirit.

Medinsky drew attention, and notoriety, for authoring a series of best-selling nonfiction history books, whose factual basis was questioned by more established historians.

Among his more eyebrow-raising statements: The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided up Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, "deserves a monument"; anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia was "greatly exaggerated"; and the Soviet Union never occupied the Baltic states, it just "incorporated" them.

In 2012, when his debut book of history, The Wall, was released to scathing reviews, Putin appointed him culture minister.

In 2016, a group of Russian academics complained that Medinsky's doctoral dissertation was a "propaganda pamphlet." Other accused him of outright plagiarism.

After leaving the Culture Ministry in 2020, Medinsky joined the Kremlin administration, where he oversaw an effort to rewrite the history textbooks used by millions of Russian school children.

Released in 2023, the new textbooks, critics argued, signaled a return to Soviet-style practices of ideological indoctrination aimed at students facing the future possibility of military service.

In the final volume, the book includes a justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine: "The West became fixated with destabilizing the situation inside Russia. The aim was not even hidden: to dismember Russia and to get control over its resources."

Culture Warrior

Medinsky's position also put him at the forefront of Russia's culture wars, as Putin leaned into policies marginalizing gay and lesbians, and promoting so-called traditional values embraced by the Russian Orthodox Church and conservative lawmakers.

In 2017, he picked a fight with one of the country's best-known film and theatrical directors over a ballet based on the life of famed Soviet dancer Rudolph Nureyev, who was openly gay.

The previous year, in an interview with a Russian news site, Medinsky suggested the US-video streaming service Netflix was a US government tool for mind control.

At a 2018 panel discussion at the Valdai Discussion Club -- a Kremlin-organized, invitation-only meeting of Russian and foreign experts -- Medinsky argued that rap and hip-hop were uniquely Russian art forms. (Russian writer Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose avant-garde poetry was a favorite of the new Bolshevik leaders following the 1917 revolution, was in fact the very first rapper, he argued.)

Peace Negotiator

In July 2021, about seven months before the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin released a 5,000-word essay under Putin's name titled On the Historic Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. The essay was seen as a full-throated expression of Putin's aggrieved historical revisionism and argued essentially that Ukraine was an artificial state.

It's not clear how much Medinsky was involved, but close Kremlin watchers believe he was central to its drafting.

In the weeks after the invasion, Russia and Ukraine met in Istanbul amid sputtering efforts to reach a cease-fire and halt the Russian onslaught. The efforts went nowhere, in part because of Russian demands that Ukraine essentially give up its sovereignty.

Medinsky was part of those negotiations.

Last year, US President Donald Trump gave a new push to resolve the conflict, and Ukrainian and Russian negotiators again started to meet. Medinsky was again the head of the delegation.

Earlier this year, again with active involvement of White House envoys, the two sides began a new round of talks.

Russia's delegation was initially headed by the director of the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU. Kyiv's delegation, which included the former head of Ukraine's own military intelligence agency, Kyrylo Budanov, appeared to welcome the effort, seeing it as technical and granular.

"We can see a qualitative change in the composition," Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha was quoted as telling Evropeyska Pravda. "These are different people, and there were no more pseudo-historical lectures."

In the days prior to February 17, however, the Kremlin announced that Medinsky would be returning as head of Moscow's team.

For veteran Russian experts, it was a sign that "political demands" were back on the table for Moscow and a sign that the Geneva talks might go badly.

For his part, Budanov issued a veiled signal ahead of the talks, saying, "We will discuss the lessons of our history with our colleagues."

Future Talks

Zelenskyy's barnyard epithet -- "historical shit" -- was seen as an acknowledgment that the Geneva talks likely included some sort of fight over historical events.

He accompanied his social media post with a jab at Putin, asserting he knew more about Russia than Putin knows about Ukraine.

As of February 19, it was unclear when any new talks would be held and under what circumstances -- or whether Medinsky would return to the negotiating table.

"Medinsky's role is the same as before: to pretend negotiations are under way, to roll out demands and conditions that are impossible to implement and unacceptable to Ukraine, thereby demonstrating 'the intransigence of the Ukrainian side,'" Boris Bondarev, who resigned as a Russian United Nations diplomat in protest of the war, told Current Time. "There's nothing new here."