Negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, and the USA have been suspended due to a lack of progress, stated Marco Rubio to journalists yesterday.
It should be noted that this is merely a reflection of the current state of affairs. The active phase of negotiations effectively stopped after the onset of the war in Iran. During the negotiations, Russia hoped to pressure Ukraine through the Americans, but nothing came of it. Ukraine, in turn, hoped that the USA would pressure Putin regarding a ceasefire along the front line, but Putin refuses. Neither of these scenarios had a chance of being realized because the Russian dictator categorically refuses any compromises that do not involve the complete dismantling of Ukrainian sovereignty.
However, the current statement might prove to be an element of classic diplomatic pressure. I have written several times that the negotiation process is needed by Putin no less, and sometimes even more, than by Ukraine or the West. Since the strategic goals of the Kremlin have an exclusively political nature, Putin can legitimize them in the long term only through negotiations. Furthermore, the mere existence of the negotiation process and meetings with the American president removes Putin from isolation, and the Kremlin is not interested in halting these processes.
Clearly, to break the negotiation deadlock one or both parties must take additional steps to bridge the gap in positions. Ukraine has already made significant concessions — just Zelensky’s public readiness to discuss “freezing” the conflict along the front line is a colossal domestic political risk, which, by the way, might cost him a criminal case in the future. Just as Zelensky himself opened cases against Petro Poroshenko in 2019 for signing the Minsk agreements.
So it is evident that the question of ending the war entirely depends on Putin. And Putin does not want peace — he wants an instrument of capitulation. The Kremlin has clearly indicated that it wants a peace agreement for this purpose, the terms of which it will discuss only after the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the four regions that Russia hastily and absolutely illegally incorporated into its own constitution.
Ultimately, we return again to the starting point: the total misunderstanding by Western elites of the psychology of the Kremlin pensioners. Rubio’s statement shows that Washington is beginning to realize the obvious: it is impossible to negotiate in the middle with Putin, because his “middle” lies along the western borders of Poland and other European countries that escaped Soviet oppression.
Another deadlock in negotiations is the logical end to any attempts to look into the eyes of the dictator or freeze the conflict at the cost of Ukrainian territories.
