Stupid story
OF COURSE his demands haven’t changed. That is how negotiations work. Unless you are the stupid people running the US Government under Biden or Obama, you don’t weaken your position to get the other side to the table.
However, in the case of Ukraine, it is Russia that has the upper hand / leverage. Any deal (compromise) made will greatly favor their side.
To bring about an end to this war means to acknowledge that, and that is when reality (that we didn’t win this war) will settle in.
Ironically, those RESPONSIBLE for this war and its continuation will then turn around and blame Trump for a bad deal or losing it.
Putin is in an interesting position. If the war ends now, the Russian economy will collapse. That’s because it is entirely focused on the war. The same thing happened when WWII ended. The US economy went into recession. What rescued the US economy was the industrial base of the entire world was destroyed by the war. Every soldier came home to a job. That can’t happen in Russia. The world will be very slow to trust Russia on anything again.
Having said that, if the war continues the Russian economy will collapse. It will just be a slower collapse. Putin is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.
Exactly. If keeping the borders at where the lines are now is Putin’s opening position, then he is ready to move from that in negotiation. Trump has a very strong hand, with many cards to play. One such card is China. As Nixon understood, the key to influencing Russia is through China. At the same time Putin proclaims that that Ukraine is historically Part of Russia, China has an ambition to reclaim Eastern Siberia, which was seized from it in the 1870s. I hear that China is already publishing maps which show Vladivostok with its original Chinese name. Russia cannot defend its borders from China while mired in Ukraine, where the best of its army has already been killed, twice. My guess is that Trump will speak with Xi before Putin.
DC and London really want a “frozen conflict” with a DMZ etc. Then they can bring Ukraine into NATO or NATO-lite, then spend a few trillion building a new huge Uke military, flood in NATO and US “advisors” etc.
This “talks” push is just another Minsk II.
The DC/London axis will not return stolen Russian gold and property, turn SWIFT back on, repair Nordstream, etc.
OF COURSE his demands haven’t changed.
But they have, though. Putin’s bandit regime has “annexed” into Russia large Ukrainian cities that are not under Moscow’s control. That is the old Soviet maximalist positioning and there is no basis to negotiate. Putin is gaslighting Bolshevik that says whatever suits him at the a particular moment. President Trump will pay no attention to such nonsense when he formulating his America First policies as they relate to the decaying and increasing irrelevant Russian World.