Despite the losses suffered by his forces in Ukraine and the cracks that have started to appear within Russia, Vladimir Putin appears adamant about continuing his “flight forward” without imagining a scenario in which the war would end without the ability to engage in negotiations now and the threat of using nuclear weapons.
We are further away from the solution than we are getting closer, according to researcher Marie Dumoulin of the European Council on Foreign Relations, who points to the annexation of Ukrainian regions, the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of Russians, and the threatening rhetoric of the Kremlin.
The United States warns of a “end-of-the-world conflict” in the event that nuclear weapons are used, while France believes that Putin took a “flight ahead,” raising concerns about the options available to the Russian leader. How is he set up to maintain his dignity without losing a significant amount of his influence in Russia? On Thursday, US Vice President Joe Biden remarked.
All Western capitals that want to comprehend Putin’s objectives and find a solution to end the war are asking similar questions.
In opposition to any deal with Putin, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin stated that “Russia leaving Ukraine is the only way out of this crisis.” A Russian retreat is not an option, though.
The future will be decided on the armed front, as Ukraine has regained the initiative regarding the impact of counterattacks, and peace negotiations are not viable given the current circumstances.
In an interview with Eastern European newspapers on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that “we are still in a moment of war.” This came after he had long urged for discussions and was criticised for taking a tolerant approach toward Russia.
Paris reaffirmed that the end of the war must also take into account the needs of European security, but he also said that the war “will not end with a peace treaty, but at the time and conditions determined by the Ukrainians.”
While acknowledging that she is unsure of “when the Ukrainians consider that they have regained enough lands” and whether the restoration of the Crimea that it annexed Russia, Domolan, who recently returned from Ukraine, believed that the Ukrainians “will not stop until restoring their lands and inflicting a military defeat on Russia.”
Much while Putin has been referred to by diplomats as a “wounded bear,” making him even more dangerous, it is still impossible to determine his intentions, and no one is certain of the gravity of his “nuclear blackmail.”
He is currently in a challenging situation and engaged in a conflict that he cannot win, so nothing can please him, a French diplomatic source recently remarked. We don’t have a reply. However, the risk of vertical escalation never goes away. A dictator cannot lose a war because doing so would result in his demise.
Many analysts are encouraging Europe and the US to continue steadfastly backing Ukraine and not give in to Putin’s “nuclear blackmail.”
The Russian president is “losing the conventional war he initiated,” according to US historian Timothy Snyder, who stated this on his website. He expects that by making references to nuclear weapons, democracies will be discouraged from sending weaponry to Ukraine and he may buy some time to halt the Ukrainian advance.
In a letter to the Royal Belgian Institute of International Relations, researcher Joris von Bladel also thought that “Russia is trying to gain time in the expectation that European countries will collapse before it.
Researchers listed the fall of the Putin regime as one of the potential exits.
They are based on recent indications of dissatisfaction among Russian elites over the defeats in Ukraine, particularly the harsh condemnation of Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Chechnya, and Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the close-knit Wagner Paramilitary Group.
The partial mobilisation drive that led to the exodus of tens of thousands of Russians was denounced by a number of officials and propaganda supervisors as disorganised and arbitrary.
According to Tatiana Stanovaya, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment, Russian elites do not view Ukraine as a “existential problem” for Russia, in contrast to Putin.
She argued in this week’s issue of Foreign Policy that “the essential question is whether Russian elites and society in general are prepared to accompany him on his journey to hell, or whether Putin opened the door to his own doom by escalating his disastrous bet in Ukraine.”
In response to the Washington Post’s inquiries, sources in the intelligence services noted that there were no indications of the risks of overthrowing the regime. The Washington Post reported on Friday that a member of Putin’s inner circle had publicly expressed his disapproval of leading the war in Ukraine.
Marie Dumoulin emphasised that the conflict between “the groups within the regime” did not influence the Russian president himself and remarked, “We should not believe our wishes to be reality.”
“No one knows when this will happen, according to which scenario, and who will come after Putin,” she said in her conclusion.
Is there a potential “way out” of the Ukraine standoff for Putin?
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