Putin Definitely Won't End War By That Time

A strange situation that can be called schizophrenic.

Jens Stoltenberg after the meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Council stressed that there are only two options for how the war in Ukraine should end.

One option is that the Allies will be able to provide Ukraine with enough weapons to liberate its territories. The other is that there will be no such weapons, and then Russia will have the opportunity to seize another part of the territory of Ukraine. Moreover, in the second option, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the West will find itself in an even more difficult situation than it is now. But the liberation of Ukraine as a result of assistance from the Allies, they say, is a guarantee that Vladimir Putin realizes that he will not be able to win the war and agrees to negotiations, where Ukraine will have a strong position. Stoltenberg is confident that this can be achieved.

Of course, we can agree that the West should provide Ukraine with further assistance for Ukraine to be able to deter the offensive of Russian troops, and in the future to liberate its territories. But there is a question, why did the NATO Secretary General decide that if Putin lost some territories in Ukraine, he would agree to negotiations to end the war?

Such an illusion regarding the Kremlin's readiness to negotiate in the event of territorial losses already existed in 2022. But Moscow did not want any negotiations after the loss of the Kherson and Kharkiv regions. The illusion that Putin would agree to negotiations as a result of the Ukrainian offensive on Russian positions lasted all of 2023. Many still say that there were no negotiations, because there were no results of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, but this is not the case.

If the Ukrainian army manages to achieve territorial success in 2024, this does not mean that Russia will agree to any negotiations. Moreover, there are no such negotiations not only in the political calendar, but also in the mind of Vladimir Putin.

Russia's entire war with Ukraine is taking place in Ukraine. In Russia, during these 10 years, almost nothing has happened that would really affect the lives of the majority of the population. Even the situation in the Belgorod region, as we can see, did not affect the mood of Russians who voted for Putin without understanding that the re-election of the dictator means the continuation of the war or the beginning of new conflicts, which are already being contemplated in the Kremlin.

Putin can experiment as long as he understands that the West is not interested in the war moving to Russia. When US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says that Washington does not support Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries, when the West does not agree that raids can take place in Russia, when the UN condemns the shelling of Yelabuga, enterprises where drones were assembled to shell the civilian population of Ukraine – Putin can continue the war as long as he has enough economic, demographic and military resources.

After all, a war that takes place on the territory of another country is not a war at all. This is what Putin called a special operation. This is a strange situation that I consider schizophrenic.

As long as the West says that it is against Ukraine destroying Russian infrastructure, as long as Ukraine denies the military invasion of the country that is waging war against it, as long as there is no war for Russians, but only some kind of special operation in a foreign state to fight mythical Nazis – there will be no conditions for negotiations to end the war. This should be understood by the citizens of Ukraine, the Secretary General of NATO, the President of the United States, and everyone who talks about the development of events.

What really determines the end of the war

The Armed Forces of Ukraine cannot stop the war either if they liberate a significant part of the territory from the enemy, or if they manage to stop the offensive of the Russians. It is not the territory that determines the end of the war, but the political prerequisites that would make the Russia's president think about the future of his own power and state. The prerequisites for the end of the war are when two countries suffer, not one, this is when conditions are created for the victim of aggression that become threatening for the aggressor country.

A real invitation to join NATO is necessary so that Russia knows that if it continues to attack Ukraine, it will be threatened by a nuclear conflict. Putin is not very interested in the statements of Western politicians. As long as the Western political elite lives in the paradigms of the past, and the Ukrainians themselves live in illusions about how the war should end, Putin has a wide way to continue the fighting indefinitely.

Vitaly Portnikov, YouTube