Ukraine Negotiations Still Hover Around Its Root Cause
The most important sentence from President Trump about yesterday’s phone call between President Putin and him is this:
Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War. The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of.
The most important sentence by President Putin about yesterday’s phone call is this:
Notably, Russia’s position is clear. Eliminating the root causes of this crisis is what matters most to us.
Russia will not fall for ending the war without having achieved its main goal.
Western media, here the NY Times, continue to play dumb (archived) about what the Russia’s main goal is:
[Putin] repeated his mantra that a peace deal needs to “remove the root causes of this crisis,” referring to Russia’s pursuit of wide-ranging influence over Ukraine.
David Ignatius, a CIA spokesperson at the Washington Post, makes a similar (archived) nonsensical claim:
He still wants victory, which he described once again after Monday’s call with the phrase “eliminate the root causes of the crisis.” That’s code for his conviction that Ukraine cannot be a European country, as it wants, but must remain under Russian hegemony.
Russia as well as Ukraine are European countries. Russia has no interest in having ‘hegemony’ or ‘wide-ranking influence’ over Ukraine. Its interest is the defense of the Russian Federation. It had to prevent Ukraine from becoming a U.S. (NATO) spear tip aimed at its heart.
A different NY Times piece about the Russian northern defenses build up after Finland joined NATO is far more correct when it states (archived):
From Moscow’s perspective, the Russians need to bolster their defenses to protect themselves from NATO expansion, which has always been a sore subject. The Baltic nations were the first members of the former Soviet Union to join NATO, bringing large stretches of Russia’s border up against NATO’s. The prospect of Ukraine, an even bigger former Soviet republic, following suit was so threatening to Moscow that it became one of the causes of the most devastatin
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