Suddenly, Putin has started talks about peace. Or was it quite expected?
It was and here’s why.
In an interview with China’s Xinhua news agency, Putin highly praised China’s peace plan, which consists in starting negotiations on the current front line and without withdrawing Russian troops.
So, this is actually what Russia needs – to preserve the occupied territories and have a respite to restore potential, after which, in a year or two, the war will begin with renewed vigor. But now Russia critically needs a pause.
The offensive, which began in October 2023 and brought very controversial results with very high losses, now continues with a show-off in the Kharkiv region. In this way, Putin is trying to deliberately show that his army can attack on all fronts and that Ukraine should be interested in peace talks.
The Russian army is exhausted by battles and does not accumulate resources. The strikes have long spilled over to Russian territory, 1,500 km from the Ukrainian border, and the whole world sees that the Ukrainians are not afraid to strike deep into Russian territory, and the Russians are practically defenseless against such strikes.
Putin urgently needs a pause and information reset. Not only to restore forces and means and accumulate them even more than the ROV had before the full-scale invasion, but also trivially, a year of information silence, so that they would forget how disgraced the Russian army was in Ukraine and how helpless it is even in matters of protecting its own country.
Therefore, this Putin’s statement is quite predictable, and given the reasons for it, we can draw an unambiguous conclusion about how to respond to it.
Tags: Budapest Memorandum ceasefire china China talks peace plan Putin Russia russia ukraine war Ukraine war
