On May 9, Vladimir Putin will supervise a parade on the Red Square of Moscow, commemorating the victory of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, an annual demonstration of military bravado which, since the political invasion on the scale of Russia, in 2022, took more explicit political subns. The triumph of the country on Nazism is presented as proof of its justice in the current war – and its role of global power. Last year, when intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of transporting nuclear warheads crossed the place, Putin linked the “radiant memory” of those who abandoned their lives in the Second World War with “our brothers in arms who fell in the fight against neo -Nazism and in the right fight for Russia” – which is, the Russian soldiers killed in the present war in Ukraine.
This year, Moscow celebrations serve another objective: a means for Putin to show that it is not geopolitically isolated – Xi Jinping de China and Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva of Brazil should attend. In recent weeks, Donald Trump has called for a thirty-day ceasefire like not towards the end of the war in Ukraine, a proposal to which Ukrainian President Volodyr Zelensky accepted. Putin ATTER with a three-day ceasefire during the May 9 celebrations, a way to protect the Russian capital from Ukrainian drone strikes and to give Trump just enough so that he does not manage any interest or, worse, blame poutine to have hampered his peace creation efforts.
“Putin tries to travel a thin line,” said Thomas Graham, a scholarship holder of the foreign relations council, who was an adviser to the White House in Russia during the George W. Bush administration. “He does not want to offer concessions on Ukraine, but he also wants to keep the United States engaged.” Trump’s intention to offer a rapid end to the war in Ukraine led to a dynamic in which Putin and Zelensky are in competition to make the subject of Trump's anger. “If Trump's mediation attempts fail, what matters, who will be guilty: Moscow's stubbornness or kyiv's reluctance to accept his conditions?” A source of foreign policy in Moscow told me. “The two parties organize a piece for an audience of one.”
As a result, the two leaders were forced to make adjustments. Putin, for example, began with an insistence that the United States puts pressure on Zelensky to resign as Ukrainian president, that Russia would only deal with his successor or, as Putin suggested in March, a “transitional administration” led by not directed by not directed “. For a moment, Trump seemed receptive to the idea, calling Zelensky as “dictator” and calling him as Putin, like the intransigent party in the negotiations.
But holding elections in Ukraine would be a complicated and written process; Trump wants a faster affair. Finally, the concentration of Putin on the elimination of Zelensky led to a rare reprimand of Trump, who, at the end of March, said that he was “very angry” and “upset” by Putin's demand. Since then, Putin's precondition has regularly merged into recognition which, for the moment, Zelensky has not been going anywhere, and Russia cannot use this fact as a reason not to engage with Trump on the question of the end of the war. Recently, Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called “legal issues related to legitimacy” of the presidency of Zelensky as a “secondary” concern. “The Kremlin admitted functionally that it was ready to face the existing political regime in kyiv,” said the source of Moscow foreign policy.
However, Putin and others, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, have clearly indicated that any agreement must attack the so-called “deep causes” of war: a list of grievances that extend from NATOExpansion is east in the nineteen years to the supply of Western weapons in Ukraine. In An interview with CBS News Last month, Lavrov spoke of “direct military threats against Russia just at our borders” and, in a moment of dark irony, the “human rights” of Ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine – Code for the historical claim of Russia on Ukraine itself.
From the start, Putin saw the invasion as a means of forcing a wider conversation with the West in the words of Russia, in which the entire post-war safety architecture of Europe would be religious. Graham, who went to Moscow in February for informal interviews with Russian officials and experts, said to me: “From the point of view of Russia, there is no solution to war which does not contain a broader understanding of the way European security will be managed in the future.” Putin has not abandoned this goal; If anything, Trump's conciliatory provision towards Russia's claims – “I think what caused the start of the war is when they started talking about joining NATO“Said Trump about Ukraine during A recent interview with Time– made this perspective appear more feasible than ever. “President Trump is probably the only land leader who recognized the need to meet the deep causes of this situation,” Lavrov told CBS.
The discourse of these deep causes is a way to widen the opening of American-Russia relations, with the ultimate objective a kind of Yalta 2.0, Putin's ambition of several years, in which Washington and Moscow divide sober on the back of each other. “The Russian party has tried to diversify the number of subjects on the agenda:” Let's talk about diplomatic relations, cooperation in the Arctic or in space, the Iranian track “,” said the source of Moscow foreign policy. “All this is part of an attempt to show Trump that relations between Moscow and Washington may include much more than Ukraine.”
Sometimes Trump seemed interested. He suggested restoring Russia as a member of the G-8; His telephone calls with Putin have gone from Ukraine to subjects as varied as global energy markets, the role of the dollar and artificial intelligence. His envoy, Steve Witkoff, has developed a clear affection for Putin, calling it “graceful”, “intelligent” and “not a villain”. During an interview with Tucker Carlson, in March, he spoke of the “so-called five territories” in Ukraine that Russia annexed in the context of the legitimate domination of Moscow. “There were referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people said they wanted to be under Russian domination,“” Said Witkoff.
This creates Putin incentive to maintain the momentum. “If the United States leaves, all these efforts to attract America to a broader conversation in which two major powers solve the problems of the world are likely to disintegrate,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior member of Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. For Putin, Stanovaya continued: “Too much of what he wants to achieve is now linked to Ukrainian negotiations, which means that he was forced to rethink his position – not on his wider war objectives, but how he pursues them here and now.”
In the opposite case, if no agreement is concluded and Russia is not blamed for failure, the United States could completely abandon Ukraine. This scenario would be even more advantageous for Putin, which puts little merit in the defense of Ukraine or the ability of Europe to fill the gaps. “He thinks that the Americans simply need to go out, then it is only a matter of time before Ukraine throws in the sponge,” said Stanovaya. The war will continue to extract a cost on Russia's resources – including dead soldiers, lost equipment and unsustainable budgetary expenses – but “Putin is sure that history is on its side, so he cannot imagine any other results than Ukraine resolution dissolving sooner or later and Russia gets what it wants, or rather, deserves.”
Whatever the scenario that happens, Putin has any incitement to drag the process. According to Western estimates, Russia uses great cash bonuses to recruit up to thirty or forty thousand new troops per month. Russia's military spending increases faster than those of all combined European countries. Russia accelerates the production of long -range drones and missiles, for example, while Ukrainian missile stocks for its air defense systems are low. “There is a feeling in Moscow that time is on our side,” said the source of foreign policy, “that our negotiation position will only be strengthened in the coming weeks and months.”
