A brief summary of the visit by Donald Trump’s envoys, Gerald Kushner and Steve Witkoff, to Moscow and Kyiv.
As expected, what Trump is offering does not entirely suit Putin. And what Putin is offering does not suit Zelenskyy or Ukraine at all.
Putin has been waging a grueling and bloody war for five years now – a war that, as has become clear to everyone, has not yielded the desired result for him and now makes no sense at all.
In fact, Russia has lost this war, and continuing it will only complicate the situation and increase the number of unjustified casualties on both sides.
Trump’s main mistake here is that he does not understand Putin, who is incapable of thinking rationally and pragmatically.
Donald Trump fails to realize that the Russians will not be able to forgive Putin for dragging them into a hopeless war and making them a laughingstock in front of the whole world. This all comes down to the subconscious and the imperial ambitions of the majority of the Russian Federation’s population.
They needed to end the war back when they failed to “take Kyiv in three days”. Now it’s too late for Putin to back down. And it doesn’t matter whether or not he said that he would be “hanged if he ends this war”. Putin understands very well that such a prospect is entirely real for him. At the same time, Putin cannot defeat Ukraine either, which drives him into a dead end with no more or less acceptable way out of the situation.
This means that the current visit by representatives of the White House (Trump) – Kushner, and Witkoff – has not yielded a positive result for either side. And here, the US President needs to change both his strategy and his tactics if he truly wants to speed up the process of ending the Russian-Ukrainian war and achieve a positive outcome.
The key problem and the main obstacle to launching peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine and establishing a constructive dialogue is Russian President Vladimir Putin. It has already become clear that he will not listen to anyone, will cling to power until the very end, and will continue the war despite its futility and the countless, unjustifiable casualties on both sides of this armed conflict.
Therefore, the first step toward resolving the current situation must be to remove Vladimir Putin from the office of President of the Russian Federation by any means necessary.
The most Donald Trump can do now for his “friend Vladimir Putin” is to send a plane for him and grant him and his family political asylum in America, just as Joe Biden once offered to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Any other option is personally unacceptable to Putin, since for him it will all end either at the gallows or in The Hague.
Once Vladimir Putin is stripped of his powers, hostilities along the front lines must cease, and a complete ceasefire must be observed by both sides. Only then can diplomats step in and begin a constructive dialogue.
Everyone has long needed to realize that this is the only way out of the current situation, since Putin, in principle, is impossible to negotiate with, and the longer he remains in power, the longer this brutal, bloody, and completely unjustified war will last, increasing the number of casualties on both sides and causing irreparable harm to the entire international community.
Oleh Bereziuk,
Institute for Global Politics
