The time factor in the negotiations on Ukraine

Putin stalls, because it happens

Russia’s car in war is now oiled and works. The country has a very high inflation that will not be sustainable only in the medium long period. In the meantime, the forces at the front advance in Donbass and try to resume control of the Kursk region.

Moscow has a long tradition of negotiations conducted in parallel to actions on the front that the negotiation finally influence decisively. At the end of the Second World War, as the Soviet forces advanced in Poland against the forces of the Reich, Stalin increased the requests addressed to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosvelt, with the consequences on Eastern Europe persisted until the collapse of the Urss.

On a diplomatic level, the unlocking of relations with the United States is already a victory for Moscow that has thus saw the international isolation to crack that has been subject to a growing way for some time.

Trump’s haste

The American president instead is in a hurry. Not only for character issues – his proverbial impatience for his lack of concentration capacity on a single dossier – or because during the election campaign he had promised to end the war in 24 hours after his settlement.

Trump needs a result quickly also to give substance to one of his main ‘disruptive’ policies of the structure implemented by the previous administration on which the President’s narrative aims to make the responsibility for the conflict fall and to loosen the front Comune Russia China, so that you can exercise her arm wrestling with Beijing with greater weight. An effort that the phone call between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin of yesterday morning seems to have frustrated, with the Chinese president who reiterated as Russia and China “cannot be removed, how they support each other and seek common development”, and the “without limits” partnership launched on the eve of the start of the Russian Vication of Ukraine.

What is the need for Russia, the axes in the sleeve of the USA

Time will be necessary for negotiations, Putin had said in recent days. “How long, I can’t say it right now,” he added. Moscow, has been said at different levels, is not only interested in a ceased but to eliminate “the causes that led to the conflict” to the root “, therefore not only Ukrainian in NATO, but a control over the entire military apparatus Ukraine, that there are no foreign weapons in the area, and limits the number of strength, means and weapons, the entire safety structure in Europe. To achieve these goals, Putin is needed much more than Trump’s philorusse externalizations.

“At the Kremlin it is doubtful that Trump and his own understand the difficulties or complexity of the issues that must be addressed,” commented Thomas Graham, former councilor of the White House on Russia with George W. Bush, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal return from a mission to Moscow.

The United States have some ace up their sleeve to accelerate negotiations. New sanctions on the Russian oil exports or other military aid in Kiev, even if for days now he has not mentioned it in official declarations, where instead the accent is directed against Ukraine and President Volodymir Zelensky. But it’s not much. Putin has already shown in the past he knows how to wait, Russia to resist.

Today new US-Russia meeting in Riad

Meanwhile, Russian and Americans will still meet today in Riad for a “follow-up” compared to that of 18 February between the American Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, said a diplomatic source at the INFP On condition of anonymity, underlining that it is a ” lower level ” meeting compared to the previous one, but which in any case marks ” progress ” in the right direction. part of the two delegations.