The Kremlin Pensioner Mentality: Why Putin’s Circle Keeps Sabotaging Peace Talks

Source: Author’s Facebook page

It should be noted that this is, in fact, only a recording of the current state of affairs. The active phase of the negotiations actually stopped after the start of the war in Iran. During the negotiations, Russia hoped to put pressure on Ukraine through the Americans, but nothing came of it. Ukraine hoped that the US would put pressure on Putin for a ceasefire on the front line, but Putin refused. None of these scenarios had a chance of life for the reason that the Russian dictator categorically refuses any compromises that do not involve the complete dismantling of Ukrainian sovereignty.

However, the current statement may be an element of classic diplomatic pressure. I have already written several times that Putin needs the negotiation process no less and, in some cases, much more than Ukraine or the West. Since the Kremlin’s strategic goals are exclusively political, Putin can legitimize them in the long term only through negotiations. In addition, the very existence of the negotiation process and a meeting with the American president brings Putin out of isolation, and it is not in the Kremlin’s interests to stop these processes.

It is clear that to break the deadlock in negotiations, one or both sides must take additional steps to bring their positions closer together. Ukraine has already made huge concessions,” said Zelenskyy.

The public’s willingness to discuss “freezing” the conflict on the front line is a colossal domestic political risk, which, by the way, may cost him a criminal case in the future. Just as Zelensky himself opened cases against Petro Poroshenko in 2019 for signing the Minsk agreements.

So it is clear that ending the war depends entirely on Putin. And Putin does not need peace—he needs an instrument of surrender. The Kremlin has made it clear that it wants a peace agreement for this, the terms of which it will discuss only after the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the four regions that Russia hastily and completely illegally incorporated into its own constitution.

In the end, we are back to where we started: the total misunderstanding by Western elites of the psychology of Kremlin pensioners. Rubio’s statement demonstrates that Washington is beginning to realize the obvious—it is impossible to reach an agreement with Putin in the middle, because his “middle” runs along the western borders of Poland and other European countries that emerged from Soviet oppression. Another deadlock in the negotiations is the logical end for any attempts to look the dictator in the eye or freeze the conflict at the cost of Ukrainian territories.

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