Trying to solve everything is solving nothing. But then that’s the point. “It is obvious that Putin is just buying time, trying to destroy or capture Ukraine or win this war of attrition, waiting for aid to stop in Europe and Europe to be divided,” Ukrainian opposition lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytskyi told POLITICO.
The “let’s negotiate together” approach is a key part of the playbook that Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have used time and time again when it comes to Ukraine, and earlier in Syria. Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, now his country’s ambassador to London, warned that the operation was aimed at wearing down and exhausting opponents and was also a classic Soviet ploy.
“Putin wants Empire, Ukrainians want freedom,” Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador who served as special representative for Ukraine negotiations during Trump’s first term, told POLITICO. “The rest is just detail.” Assumptions that Putin wants peace, will negotiate seriously or accept a reasonable deal “are all wrong,” he added.
Negotiations as a weapon of war can be used to distract, block, allow time to maneuver and trap the well-intentioned – something that was highlighted between 2014 and 2017, when Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry “negotiated” on Syria. The talks helped Moscow save Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from defeat, by persuading President Obama to take his finger off the trigger and ignore his own red line on Damascus’ use of chemical weapons.
The only other top Kremlin aide as relentless as Lavrov in this technique of exhaustive obfuscation is Putin’s favorite “historian,” Vladimir Medinsky, who served as arch-patriotic culture minister from 2012 to 2020. A proponent of erecting statues of Joseph Stalin, he led the Russian delegation in talks with Ukraine dating back to Istanbul in 2025. There he invoked the Great Northern War of 1700-21 to warn that Russia is in danger. ready to fight Ukraine for as long as it takes to win. Medinsky again led the Russian delegation to Abu Dhabi.
In fact, Moscow’s red lines have not moved one iota since Putin launched his full-scale invasion. The Russian leader and his top aides have insisted on them for years – conditions that would, in effect, tear the Ukrainian nation to shreds. They want guarantees that kyiv will never join NATO, that it will remain geopolitically neutral and unable to control its own destiny, with severe limitations imposed on weapons stockpiles and the size of its army. Moscow also wants Crimea and the four eastern regions it claims as part of the Russian Federation to be recognized internationally as such.
And until then – as Medinsky boasted – Russia will continue to wage war.
Gn world
