Kiev must re-start peace talks with Moscow instead of begging NATO states for ever-more arms — so says a US academic.
In an interview with a US news agency this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insisted that the Donbass city of Artemovsk — known as Bakhmut to the Kiev regime — would cause a collapse in morale at home and foreign support for the conflict with Russia and force him to negotiate a peace deal.
Professor Nicolai Petro told Sputnik that the comedian-turned-politician should take heed of popular opinion and seek a path to peace.
"I personally see this as 90 percent lobbying the West to provide more weapons and more resources to carry on the fight," Petro argued. "If Zelensky were interested in the opinion of Ukrainian society, then there would be negotiations going on."
"Every observer agrees that there must be negotiations to end the war and the objective is to end the war on terms that are favorable to Ukraine," he added. "So it's it's rather strange for him to appeal to the need to appease Ukrainian society today when the obvious way to do that is just to start negotiations."
But the professor said that Zelensky's fears of his Western backers losing interest in funding his military campaigns were well-founded.
"It is clear that if Western support in the magnitude that it has been given were to end, Ukraine could literally not fight," Petro said. "So the West, and primarily the United States is propping up the current regime and encouraging it to do what the West wants it to do."
According to Petro, Kiev must ultimately break with Washington's policy of "pursuing this war to the bitter end to the last Ukrainian" because "it cannot be in the interests of Ukraine for everybody to die."
At that point Kiev must return to peace talks that it broke off in April 2022 at the urging of then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Those negotiations will have to finally acknowledge Moscow's proposals in late 2021 for a new model of relations in the European continent, which takes Russia's security concerns into account.
"The negotiations that must take place must be negotiations between Ukraine and Russia," Petro stressed. "It would be eminently sensible to tie those into a larger set of negotiations between Russia and Europe over a peace and a new post-war settlement in Europe, which would give Russia a place at the generals in the general security arrangement for Europe."
Even as US President Joe Biden inaugurates his second 'Summit for Democracy' — excluding many of the world's most important states — European leaders are flocking to Beijing for meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Union's executive the European Commission, will visit soon. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was there recently.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is in China this week, urging Xi to accept calls from Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky over Beijing's 12-point framework for a ceasefire, which calls for an end to the West's "Cold War mentality" and imposition of unilateral sanctions on its rivals.
Washington, which dominates NATO, has already rejected that blueprint as a "cynical trap."
The academic believes that China has become the centre of the West's attention simply by refusing to denounce its neighbor and closest trading partner — Russia.
"At this point, China doesn't need to do anything more to be effective than stand in the corner by Russia's side. It just needs to be there," Petro said. "Right now it's getting all that it wants and all the the acknowledgment that it wants from Europe by doing exactly what it's doing."
The recent summit in Moscow between Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin provoked a string of hostile reactions from NATO members, including an attempt to charge Putin with war crimes at the International Criminal Court — whose jurisdiction neither Russia, China nor the US recognize.
"it's very early in the game, but the game is a big one," Petro said, one of "changing the correlation of forces in the world between West and east."
"if Russia and Europe were to reach a new security arrangement that gave Russia an equal voice to other European states, then the question would arise of why are... American bases and troops needed in Europe?" he asked. "There is a fundamental incompatibility with European security that includes Russia, but is dictated by American interests."
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