US President Donald Trump said he thinks Vladimir Putin wants peace. Ukraine and its European allies don\u2019t believe he does, while the Russian leader himself said he wants peace but then refused to sign up to it when presented with the option. <\/p>\n
What Putin really wants, though, is much, much bigger. <\/p>\n
The Russian president has made no secret of the fact that he believes Ukraine should not exist as an independent state and he has repeatedly said he wants NATO to shrink back to its Cold War-era size. <\/p>\n
But more than anything, he wants to see a new global order \u2014 and he wants Russia to play the starring role in it. <\/p>\n
Putin and several of his most trusted allies emerged from the remnants of the KGB, the Soviet-era intelligence agency. They have never forgotten the humiliation of the fall of the Soviet Union and are not happy with the way the world has turned out since then. <\/p>\n
Putin rose to power during the chaos of the 1990s, when the Russian economy collapsed and had to be rescued by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank \u2013 another humiliation for the former superpower. <\/p>\n
But from 2000, when Putin became president, steadily rising oil prices made Russia and many Russians richer than ever before. And Russia had a voice. It was invited into the G7 group of the world\u2019s largest economies \u2013 renamed the G8 after it joined. <\/p>\n
\u201cPutin was happy to throw all that away on behalf of his citizens because of higher geopolitical aims,\u201d Berzina said. Russia was expelled from the G8, sanctioned by the West and ostracized on the global stage because of its aggression against Ukraine. <\/p>\n
Berzina said it was never good enough for Russia to be \u201cthe eighth in the G7.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cThat doesn\u2019t work within Russia\u2019s understanding of its own exceptionalism. It is the largest country in the world, the richest in (natural) resources, so how can it simply be one<\/em> of the players?\u201d she said. <\/p>\n To understand what Putin wants from the current talks with the US, it\u2019s key to remember that the two sides are talking because the United States made a policy U-turn under Trump \u2014 not because of a fundamental change in Russian thinking. <\/p>\n Trump wants the war in Ukraine to end as soon as possible, even if it means further territorial losses for Ukraine. <\/p>\n This means Putin has little to lose from talking. <\/p>\n Trump has claimed that \u201cRussia holds all the cards\u201d in the war with Ukraine, but the battlefield has been mostly stalled for the past two years. <\/p>\n While Russia is making some incremental gains, it is definitely not winning \u2013 though this could change if the US was to stop supplying arms and intelligence to Ukraine. <\/p>\n For Putin and the people around him, Trump\u2019s push for a ceasefire simply presents an opportunity to secure quick wins while keeping an eye on the long-term goals, he said. <\/p>\n \u201cPutin is an opportunist. He likes creating dynamic, chaotic situations, which throw up a whole variety of opportunities. And then he can then just pick which opportunity appeals to him, and he can change his mind,\u201d Galeotti said. <\/p>\n Putin and his aides have made it very clear that their long-term goals have not changed. Even as they talk about wanting peace, Russian officials have continued to insist that the \u201croot causes\u201d of the conflict in Ukraine must be \u201celiminated.\u201d <\/p>\n In the Kremlin\u2019s view, these \u201croot causes\u201d amount to Ukraine\u2019s sovereignty and its democratically elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as NATO\u2019s expansion to the east in the past 30 years. <\/p>\n Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 to force a regime change in Kyiv, planning to install a pro-Moscow government. His goal was to turn Ukraine into a vassal state like Belarus and prevent it from joining the European Union and NATO in the future. <\/p>\n He has not achieved that goal by using military force, but that doesn\u2019t mean he has abandoned it. <\/p>\n Instead, he might try to achieve it by other means. <\/p>\n \u201cThe easiest way for Russia to attain what it wants in a different country is not through military means, but through interference and electoral process,\u201d Berzina said, adding that it is possible \u2013 even likely \u2013 that this is what Moscow would try to do after a ceasefire was in place. <\/p>\n This is likely why Russia keeps questioning Zelensky\u2019s legitimacy and pushing for an election \u2013 and why Kremlin was delighted when Trump adopted this narrative and called the Ukrainian leader \u201ca dictator without elections.\u201d Ukraine\u2019s martial law \u2013 imposed because of Russia\u2019s aggression \u2013 prohibits elections from taking place while the conflict is ongoing. <\/p>\n Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, have rejected the idea that Ukraine could join NATO any time soon and Putin has asked for a US commitment that this will not happen to be part of any ceasefire agreement. <\/p>\n But Berzina said that Ukraine\u2019s European allies are not buying Putin\u2019s promises that he would stop fighting if Ukraine became \u2013 as he called it \u2013 neutral. <\/p>\n \u201cNo matter what Trump and Putin think they can arrange this week or this year, many people in Europe now find Putin fundamentally untrustworthy,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n \u201cCould there be a desire for Russia to try its hand again militarily? Sure. And that is why the Europeans are very clear-eyed on the potential for future military engagement.\u201d <\/p>\n Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and security expert who lives in exile in London, said Putin and his aides believe they can \u201ctry to get something out of Trump right now.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThey think they can win some tactical battles but that he would not give them what they really want, which is a complete rearrangement of security arrangements in Europe,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Russia\u2019s wariness of the US goes far back. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very personal to them because they were all young KGB officers back then, and they lost their social standing, they lost a place in Russian society, they lost the country as they describe it now, and it was extremely humiliating,\u201d Soldatov said. <\/p>\n \u201cThey really believe that the West has been after the complete destruction and subjugation of Russia for centuries. It\u2019s not just propaganda, they really, really believe in this.\u201d But Putin has also framed his plan for Ukraine within his own \u2013 inaccurate \u2014 interpretation of history, which goes well beyond the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin has often argued that Ukraine is not a real country because Ukraine and Ukrainians are part of a larger \u201chistorical Russia\u201d <\/p>\n Experts say this is, of course, nonsense. <\/p>\n \u201cWhat he\u2019s talking about is the fact that Russia and Ukraine and Belarus share a political ancestor called Rus \u2026 but it\u2019s very much not the same thing as any modern country. It was an early to late medieval political entity and to say that Ukraine doesn\u2019t have a right to exist because of this shared ancestor \u2014 no country looks the same as in the 10th century,\u201d said Monica White, an associate professor in Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham. <\/p>\n Putin has also often turned to Russia\u2019s religious identity in support of his plan. The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, is one of the loudest supporters of the war. <\/p>\n \u201cAfter the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia lost its connection with the ancestral Orthodox lands and I think part of Putin\u2019s project is to try to bring back that thread connecting 10th century Rus with this pure orthodox continuity,\u201d White said. \u201cWhat he\u2019s doing is actually not so different from some of the early Romanov Tzars who kept trying to get back the Orthodox lands that were under either Ottoman or Catholic rule, and they eventually did.\u201d <\/p>\n Putin\u2019s overwhelming desire is to return Russia to the global stage with a bang, she suggests \u2013 by creating a wedge between Europe and the US and teaming up with the West\u2019s other adversaries. <\/p>\n \u201cRussia wants to be at all the important tables \u2013 so whatever comes next, maybe it doesn\u2019t have to mean territorial conquest in Europe, but I think it does have to be in a starring role in the more powerful bloc, if it sees that to include China or Iran or others, a bloc that is defined by its willingness to disrupt and destabilize,\u201d White added. <\/p>\n Putin clearly believes that Russia \u2013 the largest country in the world by area \u2013 should be involved in running the world. He might have a like-minded man in the White House. Trump has made it clear that he believes the biggest and most powerful countries should get what they want \u2013 whether it\u2019s Greenland, the Panama Canal, or a chunk of Ukraine. <\/p>\n \u201cI think that the fundamental point is that, as far as Trump is concerned, Ukraine is a bought and paid for vassal state and has to understand its place and accept that, essentially, America will work out some kind of a deal with Russia and then bring it back to Ukraine,\u201d Galeotti said. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" US President Donald Trump said he thinks Vladimir Putin wants peace. Ukraine and its European allies don\u2019t believe he does, while the Russian leader himself said he wants peace but then refused to sign up…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5480,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Long term plan<\/h2>\n
It\u2019s all personal<\/h2>\n