However, he also “thinks it’s just about real estate, about trade and who gets what, be it minerals, land or rare earths,” she explained. What Trump doesn’t understand is that “Putin doesn’t want a ceasefire. [He] wants a neutered Ukraine, not one that is able to withstand military pressure. Everybody sees this, apart from Trump.”
And underpinning this soft approach to Moscow, Hill argued, is the U.S. president’s personal idolization of Putin.
The Russian president hasn’t shifted any of his preconditions for ending the conflict so far. In fact, at the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, he simply reiterated them, saying there can only be a peace deal when there’s international recognition of the territories he claims are Russian, and when Ukraine adopts a neutral, non-aligned status.
And until then, Putin seems set on continuing with a war of attrition that might actually be highly dangerous for him to bring to an abrupt halt. According to Ella Paneyakh, a sociologist and research fellow at the New Eurasian Strategies Center — a think tank founded by Russian businessman and long-time Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky — the Russian autocrat needs to prolong the war, as a sudden end and the unraveling of the war economy would trigger “cruel and vicious competition for diminishing resources at every level of society.”
“Returning veterans — especially socially-connected contract soldiers — are likely to demand privileges and disrupt local balances of power, challenging both elites and institutions. A new wartime elite of pseudo-veterans, bureaucrats and war-related contractors will compete with true combatants and civilians, particularly in Russia’s periphery,” she said. And as war veterans return, “conflicts will inevitably take place with those they perceive as ‘cowards’ who did not go to fight.”
This is a dangerous combination — and undoubtedly it’s something the Kremlin has on its radar too.
