The return of magnate Donald Trump to the White House in January and his promise to end the war in Ukraine has led to an acceleration of the diplomatic and military movements of kyiv’s main allies, also by Washington, which after months of Suspicion is finally willing to authorize its ATACMS missiles to attack targets on Russian territory.
Trump promised just minutes after becoming the winner of the November 5 elections that he would seek to “end wars,” with an eye toward both the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East and the Ukrainian context, the scene of a military invasion that began in February. 2022 by order of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Already during the campaign he even said that, if he had been in the White House, neither of the two sources of tension would have reached the current point.
Both Trump and Putin have even dropped the possibility of direct contact, despite the fact that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has always been against building bridges with Moscow without any type of compensation, a message that he has conveyed to all his allies. throughout these thousand days of war.
In fact, Zelensky made clear last week his discomfort with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s call to Putin, the first after almost two years of broken communications. He fears that with this call “Pandora’s box” will be opened and that other leaders will now resume the dialogue. “This is exactly what Putin wanted for a long time,” he lamented.
Scholz, in fact, has been balancing for months to try to justify that he remains a firm supporter of kyiv while at the same time denying Zelensky some of his main requests regarding weapons, in particular the Taurus missiles, with a range up to 500 kilometers.
Berlin maintains that the green light for these missiles could mean an escalation in the conflict, an argument also underlying the fear that Washington has been showing until now to authorize Kiev to use the ATACMS missiles to bomb targets on Russian soil. The Administration of Joe Biden, now on its way out, varied this weekend the doctrine it had been maintaining until now, according to media such as ‘The Washington Post’ or ‘The New York Times’.
THE RIO FORUM
Ukraine will foreseeably be one of the main topics to be discussed on the margins of the G-20 leaders’ meeting in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Biden’s last. The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has avoided including the conflict on the formal agenda of the meeting, but it is expected to give rise to a range of bilateral contacts between key allies.
The turning point to which several governments have alluded in recent weeks underlies the deployment of North Korean soldiers on the open combat front in Russia, but as a backdrop there would be a last effort to reinforce the position of Zelensky and his troops before of a hypothetical negotiation process promoted by Trump from the Oval Office.
The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, who in the early stages of the war also participated in several calls with Putin, has clarified from Buenos Aires that Putin “does not want peace” nor is he “ready to negotiate”, which is why he has called continue to strengthen support for Ukraine.
For his part, the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once a bridge between Moscow and kyiv, is finalizing a new proposal for a ceasefire, according to sources cited by the Bloomberg agency. The Turkish plan would include the possible deployment of international troops and a curb on Ukrainian ambitions to join NATO.
kyiv’s Euro-Atlantic ambition has always been used by Putin as an excuse to justify the 2022 invasion, but Zelensky has insisted that he will not give it up, just as he does not want to give up the territories in eastern Ukraine currently controlled by Russia – -nor the Crimean peninsula, in Russian hands since 2014 like some areas of Donbas–.
In his call with Scholz last week, Putin instead warned that any potential agreement would have to take into account their grievances in the area of security and “new territorial realities.”