Negotiators from the United States, Russia and Ukraine convene here this week for the first peace talks since February. Local broadcasters have scheduled live coverage of the arrival of the negotiators, the corridor where the negotiators will walk, and the door behind which the negotiators will disappear. The door has been rehearsed. A network spokesperson confirmed the camera position was tested twice against an empty version of the door, and that the empty door performed adequately.
The mechanism deserves note, briefly. When no talks occur, outlets publish updates stating that talks are not occurring; other outlets summarize these updates, generating the impression of continuous diplomatic activity. This month a wire service issued a correction to a summary of a non-meeting, on grounds that the summary overstated what had failed to happen. The correction was itself summarized. The talks have not been.
"The absence of talks was never a gap," a senior official involved in the preparations told pooled reporters. "It was a phase." A deputy envoy for one delegation was calmer still: "No one benefits from meetings happening before they are scheduled, and these were not scheduled until recently. The waiting was deliberate, and it worked, because we are no longer waiting."
For the off-world reader, the relevant measurement is the distance between briefing and event. Declared: peace pursued without interruption since February. Printed: two hundred-plus daily updates confirming the pursuit, zero confirmations of contact between the pursuers. Measured precisely, the phrase "talks are expected soon" circulated for approximately forty weeks before the talks existed. The expectation thus enjoyed a forty-week exclusive on an event that then occurred once. My bureau logs such gaps as timing credits; here the credit runs entirely to the coverage, which arrived early, stayed late, and filed from a meeting that had not convened.
A European observer not attending the talks summarized the prevailing mood to a wire colleague: "Everyone understands the war. The schedule is the difficult part."
Session number: two. Interval since previous session: ten months. Interval covered by continuous reporting on the sessions: also ten months. Tonight the broadcasters will carry the door live, and the door will open onto either peace or another update about peace, indistinguishable at broadcast resolution. Both will be described as a breakthrough.
