He appeared in Geneva on Tuesday — seemingly out of nowhere — to take the lead for the Russian side in the Ukraine peace talks.

His name was Vladimir Medinsky, and I wondered who he was and what he was doing there, heading a delegation that still included two former lead negotiators: Kirill Dmitriev, and Admiral Igor Kostyukov, Chief of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (GRU), who had led the earlier talks in Abu Dhabi . . . as well as a Deputy Foreign Minister and a Deputy Defense Minister.

His earlier involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict dated back to talks held in Istanbul in the early days of the invasion, in March-April of 2022, and included some of last year’s talks as well. But his name has not been at the forefront of the media reports. So I did a little digging.

His Wikipedia biography identifies him as an historian with an education in English and journalism at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO); a former posting as Minister of Culture; a stint in the State Duma in the early 2000s; a present place as a member of Putin’s “ideological clan”; and a politically “statist” and “ultraconservative” philosophy, with a strong emphasis on a return to Russian “traditional values.” From that, I could only wonder anew at his relevance to peace negotiations.

The second day of talks brought no further clarity, when his only post-meeting comment was that they had been “difficult but businesslike,” and that further meetings would follow. [RFE/RL, February 18, 2026.]

My first clue came with this morning’s news reports, one of which quoted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — normally a model of realistic but diplomatic composure — as calling the Geneva talks “historical shit.” [Mike Eckel, RFE/RL, February 19, 2026.]

Well, that snapped my eyelids open and sent my mind into overdrive. So I grabbed my reading glasses and read on.

Aside from the dry biographical information, it seems Mr. Medinsky has been known — at least in Russia — as the author of a series of supposedly best-selling non-fiction history books . . . although their historical value has been questioned by experts. As reported:

“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 exaggeraged’; and the Soviet Union never occupied the Baltic states, it just ‘incorporated’ them. [Id.]

He has been accused by Russian academics of plagiarism; he has overseen the revisionist rewriting of history textbooks used in the Russian schools; and he attempted, in the final volume of his book series, to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine by writing:

“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.” [Id.]

While suggesting in a news interview that video-streaming service Netflix was a U.S. government tool for mind control, he conversely claimed rap and hip-hop music as being uniquely Russian art forms.

And it is believed he was central to the drafting in July 2021 of an essay released by the Kremlin under Putin’s name, titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” [http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181] — a revisionist theory of history that Putin has consistently used to justify his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. [Id.]

Still, what was he doing at Geneva? Earlier this year, when trilateral talks were again held, that time led on the Russian side by the head of the GRU (military intelligence), the Ukrainian officials were delighted. Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha said at the time, “These are different people, and there were no more pseudo-historical lectures” — obviously referring to Medinsky’s tendency to propagandize and sermonize.

So when Medinsky’s return to the table was announced just days prior to the February 17th meeting, experts agreed that it was not a good sign. And it appears they were right.

“Earlier, Sky News analyst Michael Clarke called Medinsky a ‘nasty piece of work’ with a deranged view of Russian history, who likes to lecture everyone. He ‘swears at people, he annoys them, he angers them.’ His goal, according to Clarke, is to make others walk away and later say the negotiations failed because they themselves abandoned them.” [Olena Mukhina, Euromaidan, February 18, 2026.]

It has now been reported that Medinsky spent considerable time in Geneva doing exactly that — while Moscow’s key demand of the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the entire Donetsk Oblast remains unchanged.

And there is your answer: Vladimir Medinsky, an “aide” to Putin with no official governmental position, was a diversionary tactic — what the Russians call an “otvlekayushchiy manevr,” or “red herring” — sent, not merely to reinforce Putin’s alleged historical claims to Ukrainian territory, but also to sabotage any serious attempts at genuine peace negotiations.

Unfortunately, he appears to have succeeded.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
2/19/26