US President Donald Trump has said he believes Vladimir Putin wants peace. Ukraine and its European allies do not believe that he wants peace, while the Russian leader himself said he wanted, but then refused to sign a truce when he was given.

What Putin really wants, however, is something much, much larger emphasizes CNN in its analysis.

The Russian president has not hidden the fact that he believes that Ukraine should not exist as an independent state, and has repeatedly stated that NATO wants to shrink again to the size of the Cold War era.

But more than anything else, he wants to see a new world order – and wants Russia to play the lead role in it.

Putin and many of his most trusted allies came from the remains of the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service. They have never forgotten the humiliation of the fall of the Soviet Union and are not happy with international developments since then.

Putin climbed into power during the chaos of the 1990s, when the Russian economy collapsed and had to be rescued by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – another humiliation for the former superpower.

But since 2000, when Putin became president, the steady increase in oil prices made Russia and many Russians richer than ever. And Russia had a voice. It was invited to the G7 Group of the world’s largest economies – renamed G8 after its integration.

But that wasn’t enough for the Russian leader, Christine Berzina, chief executive at the German Marshal Fund in the United States, told CNN.

“Putin was happy to throw all this on behalf of his citizens for higher geopolitical goals,” Berzina said. Russia was expelled by the G8, imposed sanctions by the West and was exterminated by the world scene because of its aggression against Ukraine.

Berzina said it was never good enough for Russia to be “the eighth of the G7”.

To understand what Putin wants from current talks with the US, it is important to remember that both sides are discussing because the United States made a policy shift under Trump – not because of a fundamental change in Russian thought.

Trump wants the war in Ukraine to end as soon as possible, even if it means further territorial losses for Ukraine.

This means that Putin doesn’t have much to lose from the discussion.

Trump claimed that “Russia has all the papers” in the war with Ukraine, but on the battlefield it has been mostly deadlocked in the last two years.
While Russia is scoring some gradual territorial profits, it certainly does not win – though this could change if the US stops providing weapons and information to Ukraine.

“Putin went to Ukraine thinking that it will be an easy, fast -paced business. Three years later, he controls 20% of Ukraine, but at a terrible, terrible cost. I mean the Russians are essentially losing. But the point is that Ukrainians are losing faster,” The leading Russian analyst Mark Galeti told CNN.

For Putin and the people around him, Trump’s pressure on a ceasefire simply presents an opportunity to secure quick wins, while continuing to watch his long -term goals, he said.

“Putin is a weatherman. He likes to create dynamic, chaotic situations that create a wide variety of opportunities. And then he can choose which opportunity he likes and can change his mind,” Galeti commented.

Long -term plan

Putin and his assistants have made it clear that their long -term goals have not changed. Even when they talk about a desire for peace, Russian officials insist that the “primary causes” of the conflict in Ukraine must be “eliminated”.

In the Kremlin’s view, these “radical causes” are equivalent to Ukraine’s sovereignty and democratically elected president Volodimir Zelenski, as well as the expansion of NATO to the east for the last 30 years.

Putin ordered the full -scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 to force a regime change in Kiev, planning to establish a government in favor of Moscow. Its purpose was to turn Ukraine into a slave state such as Belarus and to prevent its future integration into the European Union and NATO.

He did not achieve this goal using military power, but that does not mean that he has abandoned him.

On the contrary, he may try to do so by other means.

“The easiest way for Russia to achieve what it wants in a different country is not through military means, but through interventions and the electoral process,” Berzina said, adding that this is the most likely – or more likely – that it will try to make a ceasefire.

This is probably the reason Russia continues to question Zelenski’s legitimacy and push for elections – and why the Kremlin was pleased when Trump adopted this narrative and called the Ukrainian leader “dictator without elections”. Ukraine’s military law – imposed because of Russia’s aggression – forbids elections while the conflict is ongoing.

Trump and Vice President Vance rejected the idea that Ukraine could soon join NATO and Putin called for US commitment that this would not be a part of any ceasefire agreement.

But Berzina said that Ukraine’s European allies do not believe Putin’s promises that he would stop fighting if Ukraine is – as he called it – neutral.

“Regardless of what Trump and Putin think they can arrange this week or this year, many people in Europe are now finding Putin virtually unreliable,” he said.

“Can there be a desire for Russia to test its forces militarily? Certainly. And that is why Europeans are clearly seeing the potential of future military involvement.”

‘Issue very personal’

Andrei Soldatov, a Russian researcher journalist and security expert living in London, commented that Putin and his associates believe they could “try to get something out of Trump right now”.

“They believe they can win some regular battles, but that this would not give them what they really want, which is a complete rearrangement of security arrangements in Europe,” he said.

“For the Kremlin, this is not a war with Ukraine, it’s a war with the West, and many people in Moscow do not really believe that they can achieve some kind of permanent agreement with the US.” Soldatov told CNN.

Russia’s reservation for the US goes far back in time.

“It is a very personal issue for them because they were all new KGB officials then and lost their social status, they lost a place in Russian society, lost the country as they are now described and that was extremely humiliating,” the Russian analyst noted.

“They really believe that the West has been seeking the complete destruction and submission of Russia for centuries. They are not just propaganda, they really believe in it. ” But Putin has also framed his plan for Ukraine with his own – inaccurate – interpretation of history, which far exceeds the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin has often argued that Ukraine is not a real country because Ukraine and Ukrainians are part of a larger “historical Russia”.

Experts say this is, of course, nonsense.

“What he is talking about is the fact that Russia and Ukraine and Belarus share a political ancestor called Ros … It was a medieval political entity, and to say that Ukraine has no right to exist because of this common ancestor – no country is as it was,” Nottingham.

Putin has also often turned to Russia’s religious identity to support his plan. The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Cyril, is one of the strongest supporters of the war.

“After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia lost its connection to the ancestral Orthodox territories, and I think part of Putin’s work is to try to reconnect this thread that connects Russia of the 10th century with this pure Orthodox continuity,” he said. “What he actually does is not so different from what some of the first Romanov tsars who continued to try to get back the Orthodox territories that were under either Ottoman or universal domination, and eventually did so.”

Putin’s overwhelming desire is Russia’s loud return to the world scene, White emphasizes – creating a “wedge” between Europe and the US, and in collaboration with other opponents of the West.

Putin clearly believes that Russia – the largest country in the world in terms of land – should be involved in the management of the world. He may have a homosexual in the White House. Trump has made it clear that he believes that the largest and most powerful countries have to get what they want – whether it is Greenland, the Panama Canal or a part of Ukraine.

“I think the fundamental issue for Trump is that Ukraine is a purchased and paid slave state, which has to understand its position and accept that America will essentially conclude some kind of agreement with Russia and then bring it back to Ukraine,” Galeti noted.