Putin goes on to say
”Our proposal is not to freeze the conflict, like how the west wants it, but to end it. I repeat, this is not to freeze the conflict, but for its final completion.”
I’m not that up to date, so I would like to ask other people: why now? Has Russia decided that the war is too costly to be worthwhile continuing, or does Putin expect that he has demonstrated that Ukraine could never win a war against Russia? I know he’s proposed private peace deals, and I imagine they had similar terms.
Either way, I really doubt Zelesky will accept peace. This war has been way to beneficial for America. They’ve bought up public Ukranian assets, blown up the Nord Stream, made a shit load of money selling arms, cultivated massively successful propaganda, made Europe way more dependant on them, and so on. Zelesky would probably be being paid a visit from the men in black if he accepted this deal.
They’ve probably been offering this deal privately for more than a year now. I guess at this point they feel it’s been long enough to demonstrate that Ukraine can’t kick them out even with NATO weapons. They’re making the offer public to put pressure on Zelenskyy and make him seem less reasonable with his completely unrealistic hard position of pre-2014 borders.
How well it will work I don’t know.
public proposal to cut through the narratives they’re spinning in Kiev, i imagine the expectation is that Ukrainians & especially conscripts will hear ‘lose the troublesome provinces for peace’ and rally to pressure the government. for Russia, a withdrawal of Ukraine’s troops will achieve what would probably take months in terms of territory, despite the ‘Ukraine is collapsing’ hype Russia hasn’t exactly been making rapid progress
my best guess would be that this weekend is the swiss peace summit where they invited like ninety countries but not russia. putting out the barest, most basic sounding demands is an easy play when you aren’t even invited to the current version of peace talks. it’ll make ukraine’s demands for crimea, belgorod, kaliningrad, and billion dollar annual reparations look ridiculous in a few days, if the talks even get that far. you’re right that the west isn’t done, but the west is the one cooking up this swiss conference
Wait Ukraine wants Kalingrad? Shouldn’t that exclave either stay with Russia or go to Poland?
The real reason is the west has given Russia every reason to believe they’re about to be hit with a nuclear bomb at any given moment. This isn’t really Russia changing their strategy or anything, I see this as more about Russia openly declaring they would rather have peace than nuclear war one last time.
