Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said the longer the war in Ukraine drags on, the harder it will be to reach a negotiated solution and warned the West against trying to defeat Russia.
“We aren’t giving up on peace talks but those who decline to talk should know that the longer they do so, the harder it will be to come to an agreement with us,” Putin said, according to the Russian news agency Tass.
Early on in the war, Russia and Ukraine held several rounds of negotiations. Russia asked that Ukraine drop its claim to Crimea and recognize the independence of the breakaway Donbas republics, among other demands.
But since the peace talks have stalled, Russia has gained more territory in the Donbas, as well as in the oblasts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, giving Ukraine much less leverage. Western leaders have discouraged Ukraine from negotiating with Russia, most notably Boris Johnson, who resigned as British prime minister on Thursday.
According to a report from Ukrainska Pravda, Johnson told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a visit to Kyiv in April that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin,” Ukraine’s Western backers were not. The exact details of the Ukrainska Pravda report haven’t been confirmed, but Johnson later told French President Emmanuel Macron that he “urged” the Ukrainians not to negotiate with Russia.
Putin on Thursday also responded to President Biden and other Western leaders that have called for Russia’s defeat in Ukraine. “We are hearing these days that they want to defeat us on the battlefield. What can you say? Let them try,” the Russian leader said.
“We have heard many times that the West wants to fight us to the last Ukrainian. This is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people, but it seems that everything is heading towards this,” Putin added. The Russian leader also signaled that he could expand the war further, warning that “we haven’t started anything yet in earnest.”
Russia has no motivation whatsoever to stop the military activity in Ukraine. First – it is impossible. Ukrainians and their sponsors will carry on with the provocations and with the attacks against the civilian targets in Donbass anyway.
Second – to stop the military activity, means to give NATO green light to carry on with moving their military infrastructure closer to Russian border. In December 2021 Putin demanded that NATO must respect Russia-NATO treaty 1997. Obviously no one in USA political class is ready to do it.
Third – the complete defeat of Ukrainian army is not far away. No amount of NATO weapon supply can change the unavoidable.
4 – This war is a great training experience for Russian army. After this war, Russian army would be much stronger than before the war. Longer it lasts, better it is for the Russian army.
5 – This confrontation with NATO gives Russian economy a chance to concentrate upon developing it’s own high tech and concentrate upon cooperation with China, India and other independent nations rather than pumping Russian oil and gas to The West and increase Russian dependency upon western technologies, which in the end makes Russia only more vulnerable.
Sadly, you’re correct. As an antiwar advocate, I didn’t want this war to start. Since it has, I can’t imagine how it’s going to end other than in WWIII. To the west, the death of more than a million Ukrainians would not make it end short of WWIII. The west’s population is feeling economic/lack of energy and food pain, but isn’t really allowed to understand why or who to blame. It’s very sad.
Russia invades and goes full Hitler on Ukraine and yet, we still blame Ukraine for this.
I guess it is wrong for Ukraine to just want to be a free and prosperous country.
Again, Don:
You’re associating the wrong country with Hitler.
Well said!
By Russian being much stronger after this war, did you mean, they will have more Nukes?
Edit:
The India/China market can only buy reduced price oil from Russia.
Russia needs the EU market, without it, it cannot sustain oil production and its GDP will suffer.
Start the negotiations already! Every Ukraine cheerleader is cheering for more bloodshed and destruction. Peace is a universal value.
Right from the start of the SMO the Russians warned that any refusal to negotiate would lead to harder conditions later. BoJo and Biden ensured Ze would refuse to make any concessions and ever since, the Russians have systematically overcome the Western-supported, NATO-trained troops and will continue. Refusing to face reality will not lead to success or peace.
“Right from the start of the war of aggression”
Fixed, no charge.
No, there is a charge. We have to read your bullcrap.
No, you don’t.
You’re kind of right, an invasion on a aggressive Nazi entity run and armed by US/Nato as an anti-Russia entity for the sole purpose of AGRESSION and provocation against Russia and Russians, is also an invasion. Sure.
After they killed 14.000 civilians, their own civilians mind you, albeit deemed subhumans by the US installed Nazi regime, during 8 years and started to threaten Russia with nukes and bioweapons, could the issue have been solved in any other way? No, Nato and the US refused and here we are.
In a nutshell.
Who’s the “they” who “killed 14,000 civilians?”
Of the 14,000 dead in Donbas, the largest group was Ukrainian troops, the second largest group was Donbas separatist troops, and the smallest group was civilians, at least some of whom were presumably killed by the separatists rather than by the Ukrainian troops.
There aren’t any good guys to be found at the regime level in this thing.
Thanks for revealing yourself as a neo-Nazi supporter. I expected that.
Thanks for proving, once again, that logic isn’t your strong suit. I expected that.
You probably think my Polish friend was lying when he told me most of his family was murdered by the OUN in Lvov in WW2. You know the same OUN that are now revered as national heroes by today’s Ukrainian government!
I don’t think anything about what your Polish friend said, and don’t understand the reason for the complete change of subject you’re trying to pull off there.
I’m not changing sh**. You seem to love the glorious Ukrainians!
In your fevered imagination, perhaps. In the real world I’ve spent the last eight years or so writing that the US should butt out of Ukraine, that NATO should dissolve, that Putin’s “security concerns” are not unreasonable, that the Ukrainian regime should let the Donbas republics peacefully secede, etc.
In other words, it is courtesy of well-intended individuals like yourself that Russia waited in vain for nearly eight years in the baseless hope that the crises could be resolved diplomatically. Which allowed ample time for the azov specimens to become endemic. Incidentally, have you ever come across this document: HTTPS semicolon //www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896 .pdf
Yeah, I’m sure it was my “courtesy” that caused Putin to finally say “well, the Donbas isn’t going to just fall into my hands like fruit dropping from a tree after all, guess I have to take it if I want it, and I do.”
Yes, I’ve come across the good ol’ “Page Not Found” document many, many times.
Well, the best I can do about the first paragraph of your bordering on the irrational reply is to ignore it completely. I can only guess that you might be on very strong painkillers hence this beyond surrealistic passage: “well, the Donbas isn’t going to just fall into my hands like fruit dropping from a tree, after all, guess I have to take it if I want it, and I do.”
Here is the link again: https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf
And probably the best article to date written on the subject: https://consortiumnews.com/2022/07/01/ukraine-is-the-latest-neocon-disaster/
There are plenty more for those who wish to see.
For instance: https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/04/how-zelensky-made-peace-with-neo-nazis/ Although something tells me that no amount of strictly factual info would be helpful for you.
Thomas, what were those Ukrainian troops doing in the Donbas?
The same thing that Union troops were doing in Mississippi in 1863, that Serbian troops were doing in Kosovo in 1999, that Russian troops were doing in Chechnya in 2000, etc. — try to suppress secession.
I could support or oppose any of those secessions (I support secession in general, including the Donbas secessions) without pretending that all of the casualties involved were civilians, and/or that all of those civilian casualties were perpetrated by one of the warring factions.
I support the Donbas secession as well, so I view the Ukrainian side as the aggressor and the Russians as justified in intervening, after spending 8 years trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement.
The Ukrainian troops were on Ukrainian territory putting down a domestic insurrection. Even if the secessionists had legitimate grievances, it was an internal Ukrainian matter and not a justification for a war of aggression.
See my comment to Thomas above.
You forgot “unprovoked & illegal”.
Fixed, no charge.
Jaysus, Thomas, you’re starting to sound like Bandow.
There are worse things than “sounding like Bandow.”
One of them, in my opinion, is talking about the Russian regime in the same way and for the same purposes that would get one called (not entirely without justification) “hasbara” if one was talking about the Israeli regime or “neocon” if talking about the US regime.
Thomas, Thomas, Thomas.
See your reply to Lord Baldric, please.
I didn’t just see it, I wrote it.
And it matches the post you’re replying to.
Regimes are regimes, and I’m against all of them.
And the worst of all is the Amerikkkan regime.
Only if you believe the Ukrainian and Western media. The West follows the USA military manual of “the three Fs-first, fast and forceful”. Get your story out, get all the other media to follow and keep it going. Notice that every item in the West is “from Ukrainian sources”. The real facts have great trouble being found. It really works, as you see.
Putin has just explained that the real Russian response has not even started. The aggression started years ago from the West, and the NATO refusal even to consider Russia’s legitimate demands for security as NATO declared it an enemy and imposed sanctions, have led to the present impasse.
He said it quite openly: “you want to fight Russia? Try! But keep in mind that we haven’t even started anything serious yet.”
The idiots had the chance to somewhat cut their losses and somewhat, barely, save their faces at the beginning of this SMO but no. The first to go was Bojo a Go Go. Now they keep digging the holes for themselves and collective west.
Nothing new and nothing previous Russia Presidents have not already done to Ukraine. They have historically abused the Ukrainians.
Stalin for example starved to death 3.9 million Ukrainians and called peasant farmers resisting the oppression “Kulaks” (New Term: Neo Nazis or drug addicts). Putin is just finishing what Stalin started.
https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin
Ukraine provided some pretty great guards for the camps, especially extermination camps.
‘Scuse me. Putin is spelled P-U-T-I-N, while Stalin is spelled S-T-A-L-I-N.
Which somehow leads me to believe that they are not the same person.
It seems to me that Ukraine’s nationalists want a Ukraine with all of the resources of the Donbass region and none of the ethnic Russians who live there. Many of those resources have been destroyed. The trenches they built over the past 8 years have largely been overrun. So what’s the point?
Biden evidently bought into the delusion that Ukraine was just like Afghanistan and that a few SAMs would be all it takes to bankrupt Russia. But that didn’t happen. He may slowly be waking up to the fact that regular financial injections into Ukraine are costing the US too much.
When the disbelief wears off, (given the state of the global economy, that may happen very soon), Biden might be willing to change his underwear, so that he can get ready to negotiate in good faith.
Is it me, or does Biden appear to be drooling more?
https://sonar21.com/nato-fantasy-soldiers/
NATO Fantasy Soldiers
I hear that Amerikkka is seriously considering lowering its standards on whom may join the armed forces, considering the rock-bottom number of recruits being presently fielded.
It’s either that or resume the draft.
We’ve got potential cannon fodder crossing our southern border. They’ll have the right-to-vote in most states this November.