Trying to solve everything means solving nothing. But that’s the point. “It’s obvious that Putin is simply buying time, trying to destroy or capture Ukraine or win this war of attrition, waiting for aid to Europe to stop and for Europe to divide,” Ukrainian opposition lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytskyi told POLITICO. The “let’s negotiate everything together” approach has been a key part of the playbook that Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have used time and time again when it comes to Ukraine, and previously in Syria. Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, now his country’s ambassador in London, has been warning that it is designed to exhaust and wear down opponents and was also a classic Soviet ploy. “Putin wants empire, Ukrainians want freedom,” Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador who served as Special Representative for Ukraine negotiations during Trump’s first term, told POLITICO. “The rest are details.” Assumptions that Putin wants peace, will negotiate seriously or accept a reasonable deal “are all wrong,” he added. Negotiations as a weapon of war can be used to distract, paralyze, give time to maneuver and trap the well-intentioned, something that was highlighted between 2014 and 2017, when Lavrov and then US Secretary of State John Kerry “negotiated” over Syria. The talks helped Moscow save Bashar al-Assad from defeat in Syria, persuading then-President Obama to take his finger off the trigger and ignore his own red line on Damascus’s use of chemical weapons. The only other major Kremlin collaborator as relentless as Lavrov in this technique of exhaustive obfuscation is Putin’s favorite “historian,” Vladimir Medinsky, who served as archpatriotic culture minister from 2012 to 2020. An advocate of installing statues of Joseph Stalin, he led the Russian delegation in talks with Ukraine dating back to Istanbul in 2025. There he invoked the Great Northern War of 1700-21 as a warning. that Russia is willing to fight Ukraine for as long as it takes to win. Medinsky once again headed the Russian delegation to Abu Dhabi. In fact, Moscow’s red lines have not moved one bit in the years since Putin launched his full-scale invasion. The Russian leader and his top advisers have outlined them emphatically for years: conditions that would, in effect, tear apart the nation of Ukraine. They want assurances that kyiv will never join NATO, that it will remain geopolitically neutral and unable to control its own destiny, with severe limitations imposed on weapons arsenals and the size of its army. Moscow also wants Crimea and the four eastern regions it claims as part of the Russian Federation to be internationally recognized as such. And until then – as Medinsky boasts – Russia will continue to wage war.
