MOSCOW: After two years of war in Ukraine, there is no prospect of negotiations to find a breakthrough as Russian President Vladimir Putin, emboldened by the erosion of Western support for Kyiv, girds for a long conflict. 2024 will be another year of war as Ukraine is determined to keep on fighting to recapture territory while Putin will only be satisfied with Kyiv’s full surrender, analysts and diplomats say.
Putin may have signalled in last week’s interview with right-wing US talk show host Tucker Carlson that Russia was interested in negotiations but this would be so much on Moscow’s own terms that Kyiv would not countenance such talks. “I don’t see any negotiations taking place any time soon,” Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Kremlin-linked Council on Foreign and Defense Policy think tank in Moscow, told. “There’s nothing they can negotiate about.”
While the winter of 2022 was humiliating for Putin, who failed to take Kyiv within days, he has now regrouped and appears reinvigorated by Ukraine’s unsuccessful counteroffensive, the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House in a November presidential election and the rise of the far-right in Europe.
“Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with Russia?” Putin told Carlson, urging the United States to discuss a deal that would allow Moscow to control 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory. “Sooner or later we’ll come to an agreement anyway.”
Mykhailo Podoliak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, reiterated Kyiv’s long-held position that no negotiations were possible until Russia withdraws from occupied territories. A European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, also ruled out any talks under the current circumstances.
