Every once in a while, someone from the Kremlin calls Steve Witkoff and explains that Putin wants to end the war, that the Ukrainian situation on the front is desperate and that it is time to tighten the screws Zelensky to accept a peace on the invader’s terms. That’s exactly what happened again this week.
With the mediation of the banker Kiril DmitrievUkrainian by birth, but a fervent follower of Putin and his expansionist policy, Witkoff drafted a twenty-eight-point memorandum for Ukraine to accept before Thanksgiving.
The conditions are dire for kyiv: Ukraine would be forced to give up the entire Donetsk oblast, where it still maintains the key cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the core of the Ukrainian eastern defense.
Furthermore, he would have to reduce his army to 600,000 men, renounce in writing a possible inclusion in NATO and share the use of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in exchange for Russia allowing it to use the Dnieper River for commercial purposes.
These are conditions typical of a surrender and Zelensky has already responded in distressing terms: “We will have to choose between our dignity and the possibility of losing an ally like the United States.”
The Ukrainian president did not completely close the door to the agreement, but it seems impossible for it to stick to these demands. He insisted that he still wants to fight for a “just and lasting” peace and expressed his misgivings about having to trust a country that “has already invaded them twice,” in reference to the seizure of Crimea and part of Donbas in 2014.
Putin makes himself interesting
Nor is it that Vladimir Putin has shown great enthusiasm. It’s the usual thing. He filters an interest that later does not exist and Trump dedicates himself to doing his dirty work.
The Russian president stated that he has received the document with the twenty-eight points and that he finds it interesting, a basis for a possible agreement, but that he has only “looked at it over the surface”, in the umpteenth gesture of contempt towards the White House efforts to please him.
Although the conditions are clearly favorable to Russia, they do not meet the expectations that the Kremlin set when it ordered the invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.
Russia will never accept “ten years of reliable security guarantees” for Ukraine, whatever they may be. Initially, there was talk of a second agreement to grant Ukraine a status similar to that of a NATO country in the event of an attack, although it is most likely that it will be guarantees similar to those offered to Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Russia is also not going to accept having demilitarized zones imposed on its territory, and if it accepts it, it will be to militarize them as soon as possible. As humiliating as it may be for Ukraine that the fulfillment of the peace will be verified by a commission made up only of the United States and Russia, it is most likely that Putin will have the United States over in that equation… and that the current White House will not put many obstacles in place when it comes to stepping aside.
“The end of the end”
In the middle, as always, Europe remains. Trump basically wants him to take care of everything. That they accept Ukraine in the European Union, that they monitor its policies and that they “denazify”, to use the Russian vocabulary snuck into the text, a country whose number of neo-Nazis is tiny compared to Russia itself.
Immediately, The main European leaders have come out to show their support for Ukrainetheir anger at Trump for not counting on them in this solution and their determination to stop Putin.
The most forceful of all has been the Lithuanian foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergiswho stated on his social networks that we were facing “the end of the end” in the relationship between Europe and the United States and urged the other leaders to forget about traveling to Washington again to pay homage to Trump and try to appease him, as happened in the embarrassing summit after the meeting in Alaska between the American president and Putin.
Now, the truth is that there is nothing to suggest that we are not facing the same situation as then or in February 2022, when Zelensky was cornered in the Oval Office for refusing to sign a trade agreement for his country’s “rare earth” minerals under the terms demanded by the Treasury Secretariat.
Nor, therefore, can we rule out that this crisis ends like the other two: Trump loses his pro-Russian passionsomething else crosses your path and your attention shifts completely.
The wrong approach
The damage, meanwhile, is enormous for the Western community. Putin buys time and can observe from the Kremlin how his enemies confront each other.
That way, you can continue your progress on the ground, even if it is at a very expensive price of livesand can avoid the sanctions that the United States never ends imposing on him, no matter how much Trump assures that they are “imminent.”
Although the situation is not at all what Russia and the United States paint it – “these are lands that they are going to lose in a short time,” said the US president on FOX News – it is undeniable that the punishment to which Ukraine is being subjected is tremendous, with a winter ahead that could become even harsher than usual due to the continuous electricity outages resulting from Russian attacks on energy sources.
From there to assuming that Kramatorsk and Sloviansk are going to fall in the short term or that it is in Ukraine’s best interest to throw away all the effort of these four years and see how the Russians keep their lands, re-enter the G8 and once again be an active part of the international community goes a long way. In any case, as we said, it doesn’t matter. Zelenski accepts Trump’s conditions, it is most likely that Putin would have the pleasure of rejecting them himself and imposing even more beneficial ones.
Last Wednesday, the vice president J.D. Vance He stated in an interview that what they were proposing to Ukraine and Russia was that they “stop killing each other and start trading.”
That is not understand anything at all of what goes through the mind of Russian imperialism. This is an existential question that does not admit degrees or lines of battle and that, of course, cannot be solved with a trade that has always existed since the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
The sooner they realize it, the less time we will all waste.