Negotiations to try to end Russia’s war against Ukraine resumed on Monday (14) without concrete progress, despite the expectation of officials in both countries that an agreement could be reached later this week.
At the same time, Russia has suggested that it will be able to militarily occupy all the main “population centers” of the neighboring country, in addition to maintaining the intense rhythm of attacks in the sieges it is carrying out on cities such as Kiev, Kharkiv and Mariupol.
“Let’s take a technical break until tomorrow [terça, 15] to continue working in the subgroups,” Mikhailo Podoliak, top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said on Twitter. Unlike three meetings of delegations in Belarus and a frustrated diplomatic summit between foreign ministers in Turkey, this Monday’s meeting was virtual.
It came after unusually optimistic statements from both sides on Sunday, predicting some sort of arrangement beyond the issue of humanitarian corridors for “the coming days”, according to Russian negotiator Leonid Slutski.
At the same time, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said on Monday that Russia did not rule out occupying major Ukrainian cities.
“The Ministry of Defence, while guaranteeing maximum security for the civilian population, does not exclude the possibility of taking the main population centers under full control,” he said.
He was responding to a question about information leaked by Washington that Russia had asked China for military and economic aid. “No,” he said, asserting that Moscow can handle the war alone. Beijing also denied the hypothesis, calling it an American intrigue.
The move to increase military pressure and nod diplomatically makes sense in the view of the Kremlin, which has stripped the overthrow of the Zelensky government from its rhetoric and, in Peskov’s own words last week, enumerated its conditions for ending the war.
The Russians want Kiev demilitarized, rejecting membership of NATO (Western military alliance) or the European Union and recognizing the Russian-majority areas it already lost in 2014: Crimea annexed by Vladimir Putin and the Donbass declared independent by Moscow.
Zelensky positively waved at the idea of ​​talking about it, but later reverted to the “fight to the end” stance he took with Western support, even though he complains that NATO does not enter the war on his side.
On Sunday, that equation took dramatic shape with the Russian attack on a training center and liaison between Ukrainian and Western forces 25 km from the country’s border with Poland, the NATO member most willing to raise the tone against the Russians so far. . Fears of an escalation that, at the limit, could lead to World War III, guide this discussion.
Peskov’s phrase seems to add threat, and in practice Russian forces are already redrawing the map of Ukraine. The certainty of an insurgency and the continuation of world sanctions against Moscow, however, suggest that the Kremlin can let Zelensky remain in power if it accepts the conditions imposed.
