Russia is playing for time by opposing security guarantees and a Putin-Zelensky bilateral meeting. Trump should impose new sanctions.
, and European leaders toward reaching a just end to the now three and a half year war in Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. The war is the largest and bloodiest in Europe since the Second World War ended in 1945.
to secure a durable peace. Unfortunately, however, it’s equally clear that Putin is again manipulating Trump’s good intentions to buy time to continue his war of conquest. Kremlin actions over the past 24 hours underline how Russia doesn’t want to take any substantive steps toward advancing the peace process.Crime statistics show Trump’s decision to deploy troops in DC is working Take Trump’s push for Zelensky and Putin to hold a bilateral meeting as soon as possible. Zelensky has endorsed this suggestion, stating that as long as the talks are held at the head of state level, he is ready to meet in a neutral country. In contrast, Putin first responded to Trump’s suggestion by inviting Zelensky to Moscow. This invitation to Moscow was a deliberate slight designed to broadcast his dominance over Zelensky at home in Russia. It also served to advance the Russian imperialist narrative that Ukraine is actually part of Russia.As Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov put it on Wednesday, “When it comes to meetings at the highest level, it is necessary to prepare them in the most thorough way at all previous stages, so that the summits do not turn into a deterioration of the situation, but really put an end to the negotiations that we are ready to continue.” This might sound legitimate, but it’s actually just Russian gamesmanship 101. The truth? Putin doesn’t want a bilateral meeting with Zelensky because the aftermath of that meeting would prove that he isn’t ready to make real concessions. At the same time, however, Putin doesn’t want to provoke new U.S. sanctions. That means the Kremlin has to keep inventing excuses to buy time without seeming to invent excuses to skirt Trump’s priority diplomatic agenda. But the gamesmanship is now fully apparent. Take Lavrov’s simultaneous effort to divide the U.S. and Europe over the security guarantees question. Deliberately avoiding the show of Western unity at the White House on Monday and Trump’s associated offer of air support to any European peacekeeping effort, Lavrov claimed that European countries want “to drag the United States back into its aggressive belligerent campaign to preserve and strengthen Ukraine as an instrument of deterrence of Russia. … This will not work.” Again, the deflection here is apparent. Moscow wants to slow down any real momentum toward either peace or new U.S. sanctions by presenting the Kremlin’s emotive theatrics as legitimate concerns that require more debate and delay. Putin knows full well that while any peace deal will mean that Ukraine doesn’t join NATO anytime soon for reasons of Russian protest, nor can Ukraine accept a peace deal that doesn’t provide substantive safeguards against Russia again breaking its word and reinvading down the road. Remember, Russia breached its 1994 Budapest Memorandum commitments by seizing Crimea in 2014, and its 2015 Minsk 2 accord commitments by its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Trump needs to recognize that Putin is the clear obstacle to the fulfillment of his noble agenda. Russia should be given a deadline of one week to get serious or suffer wide-ranging sanctions on its central bank and energy export partners. After a few months of suffering that pain in an economy already riven by high inflation and numerous other problems, and the continuing inability of the Russian armed forces to secure major territorial gains amid ever-increasing casualties, perhaps Putin will become more serious about peace.
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