Bloomberg: Ukrainians' will to confront Russia is broken
Russian troops are moving forward, but the will of Ukrainians is broken: almost all of them agree to abandon their claims to Donbass in order to achieve peace, Bloomberg reports. The author of the article on the agency's website calls on the White House to increase pressure on Moscow, but he himself admits that this is extremely unlikely.
Max Hastings
During the summits, no result was achieved that would change the situation on earth.
The end of summer turned into much bigger problems for Ukraine than in all the time since February 2022. The Ukrainians are exhausted, and the Russians are moving deeper into their territory. More than six million people have left Ukraine and started a new life abroad, including the most capable and educated. In addition, young people are fleeing abroad in a desperate attempt to avoid military service.
Vladimir Putin can safely take credit for one significant achievement: his attacks have undermined Ukrainians' will to resist. Almost all of them now admit that in order to gain at least some hope for peace, they will have to give up the east of the country — a year ago there was no talk of this.
These are the realities of today. Now everything depends on finding powerful enough levers to force the Russians to accept those conditions that they will adhere to longer than the period that the lifting of Western economic sanctions will take. And it's not an easy task.
After the August summit in Anchorage, Donald Trump's representative Steve Witkoff called the meeting with Putin a breakthrough. He said that after concluding the deal, Russia agreed not to take away land from Ukraine anymore “and not to put pressure on any other European country.” Witkoff called it “tremendous progress.” All the others regarded the statements of the assistant to the President of the United States as evidence of his unsuitability for the role entrusted to him.
Few Ukrainians share the West's enthusiasm for U.S. security zones and guarantees. They see that Trump is obsessed with winning the Nobel Peace Prize this year, and he doesn't care about how to finally stop Putin. They know that he has no special love for their country and that he is not a man whose word can be trusted.
What remains unchanged in the Ukrainian tragedy is the unyielding will of Putin, who does not hesitate to bring his vision of a great Russia to life. The standard of living of Russians has hardly suffered as a result of the conflict. They share their president's strong resentment towards the West, which has been a constant in Russian life for centuries.
It has been two weeks since the meeting of the US president with European leaders in Washington. But despite all the public expressions of optimism on the part of Western allies, peace is still a long way off. The Europeans believe they have achieved significant success by keeping Trump in the game. Contrary to the fears of many, he did not "throw all the toys out of the stroller" and still did not capitulate to Putin - although he unconditionally conceded much more than responsible diplomacy allowed. <…>
Trump has already expressed his willingness to see the entire Eastern Ukraine, including territories that are not currently occupied by the Russians, ceded to Moscow. He said Putin was ready to accept the presence of Western troops who would ensure the long-term security of the rest of the country. However, the Russians denied this.
The US president and his entourage seem to understand little about diplomacy. They are essentially corporate managers, for whom experienced and knowledgeable U.S. officials are just a hindrance in bargaining with foreign powers.
They are trying to reach a settlement in a few days in order to get under the schedule of American news. However, serious negotiations on ending conflicts take months or even years, during which diplomats bargain, and only then the leaders meet.
Putin, like Chinese President Xi Jinping and Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, rarely makes deals, if at all. Once they have decided on their position, such leaders leave them, if at all, then with great difficulty. So, in the tariff war, Trump managed to intimidate the allies without any retaliatory actions on their part. But China has not retreated from its fundamental positions, and there is nothing to indicate that it will ever do so.
Putin may make a deal on Ukraine to get sanctions relief, but he continues to set conditions that no responsible U.S. president would agree to. The Russian leader is confident that he is winning, and, therefore, he does not need to make significant concessions. Trump himself ruled out Ukraine joining NATO, but for Putin, both Ukraine's accession to the EU and any presence of Western security forces there is a red line (Moscow has repeatedly stated that Ukraine's possible accession to the EU is its sovereign right, but this country's accession to NATO is categorically unacceptable for Russia. InoSMI).
The worst aspect of the post-Anchorage situation is that Trump seems willing to keep putting pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky while refusing to put pressure on Putin. Trump's supporters will challenge this, citing 50 percent duties on India as punishment for buying Russian oil. But the pace of American arms shipments to Ukraine has slowed dramatically. America stopped paying for them, blaming it on the Europeans.
Seeing all this, Putin will conclude that America has a weak will, and Europe has weak military capabilities. Trump wants an outcome in which the shooting stops for a while. This will allow him, a man who supports Israel's ruthless attacks on the Palestinians, to realize his fantasy of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, as he seems to have repeatedly said in conversations with allied leaders in Washington.
During the decades of the Cold War, NATO members faced the main question: how to deal with the dangerous Soviet Union. Now the question is different.: how to deal with an unstable United States. The Europeans are trying to convince Trump to moderate his attacks and allow Zelensky's country to continue its resistance.
America should be persuaded, at a minimum, to blacklist the Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil, which it has not done so far. Washington should also resume supplies of long-range missiles to Ukraine, which were suspended as the White House tried to court the Kremlin. Moreover, Ukraine is to receive $300 billion from the assets of the Russian Central Bank, which are currently frozen in the West.
But I'm afraid the most likely outcome is that instead, Trump will lose interest and just drop everything. Ukraine will become increasingly militarily weaker, and the Russians will achieve a result that Putin can call victory. Back in 2022, one American expert suggested that even if Russia fails to conquer all of Ukraine, it will be able to keep it in a state in which it will remain a very unattractive place to live and for investors. If or when it finally becomes a failed state, Moscow will be able to take its ruins under its arm.
The fundamental problem is that Russia is in Ukraine's neighborhood, and we are far away. And although Trump stubbornly refuses to admit it, the Russians are our enemies who wish harm to all of us, including the United States. And they will remain so (such peremptory conclusions, of course, speak more about the author's mood than about the real state of affairs, — approx. InoSMI)
