Since it became clear that Putin will not overrun Ukraine, and especially after Russia's third and biggest defeat in Kherson, the key word of the war in recent weeks has been "negotiations". Although negotiations have actually been mentioned since the beginning of Russian aggression, the conditions and positions of the parties have changed drastically.
Russia has abandoned the disarmament of former communist states throughout Southeastern Europe. "Demilitarization" and "denazification" turned into genocide, the intent of which will soon be proven before an international court.
The United States of America is now offering Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky far more than accommodation in exile, and Germany has given the Ukrainians more than helmets and winter socks.
Zelensky was not overthrown, and Ukrainians are not fleeing from Lviv. The second military power of the world has already been defeated, because Putin did not win the war as he planned, which in the Russian militant and imperial understanding is considered to have been lost.
The collapse of the giant on glass legs
Can the Russian leader, who imagines that he is Peter the Great, enter into peace negotiations with Kiev in the conditions of losing the conquered territories? Of course, but only to heal the wounds, restore the losses and continue where he left off.
He will also be consulted by the key inspirers of the aggression against Ukraine: Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev and almost a family member - the main Russian media magnate Yuri Kovalchuk. This is how the Minsk-2 Peace Agreement, signed in 2015, was violated. Without a militarily defeated Kremlin, any future agreement with Russia that many in the West would gladly welcome will be trampled.
Putin has set Russia on a course of unstoppable war, the goal of which is the destruction of Ukraine. These are no longer the imaginations of a few mentally ill gray Soviet heads. A real end to the war will disrupt the newly established balance of power between the security services, military structures, the praetorian armies of Prigozhin and Kadyrov, as well as the oligarchs from whose yachts and from whose accounts the West plans to pay reparations to Ukraine.
Putin must not stop the war now, because in that case he falls. But he does not fall alone, with the imbalance among the elites, he opens up a somewhat forgotten fear from the beginning of the nineties, when, after several years of crisis, suddenly, like a house of cards, after the failed August coup in 1991, the largest country in the world collapsed in a few months and the other power of the Cold War – the USSR.
The West was then taken aback by the speed of the collapse and feared the chaotic disintegration of the giant on glass legs, whose consequences of local conflicts would be worse than its continued loose existence.
A situation brought to uncertainty
If we read the miniature maps of the disintegration of the SFRY, Putin cannot stop this war, and Russia will leave Ukraine only if it is defeated militarily. That such a scenario is already being considered publicly is evidenced by writing about the evacuation channels of Putin and his clique to Latin America. Many predict that this may cause a disturbance of stability in the entire Eurasian expanse, similar to that after the defeat in Afghanistan and the collapse of the USSR. The situation has already reached the limits of uncertainty.
But Putin is here and it is too early to get carried away by his quick departure. He still has the strength to mobilize hundreds of thousands of tons of cannon fodder and to damage and cripple Ukraine, attack NATO, change Europe.
At one point, Putin was deprived of the advantage to quickly end the war with the use of nuclear weapons. Especially after the Summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Samarkand and the G20 in Bali, where the key Asian actors, China and India, warned the Russian president about the use of nuclear weapons.
In addition to Russia's defeat in the trenches, which depends on Western weapons, the war in Ukraine can also be stopped by Xi Jinping, by denying support to Putin.
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