President Putin has confirmed to Tucker Carlson that Russia favors a “negotiated settlement” to the crisis in Ukraine, saying that it will be up to Kiev and its Western partners whether or not to accept it.
“We prepared a huge document in Istanbul [during peace talks in the spring of 2022, ed.] that was initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation. He affixed his signature to some of the provisions, but not all of them. He put his signature and then said himself ‘we were ready to sign it and the war would have been over long ago, eighteen months ago. However, [then-UK] Prime Minister [Boris] Johnson came, talked us out of it and we missed that chance’,” Putin said, referring to Ukrainian top negotiator David Arakhamia’s bombshell comments late last year about London’s role in sabotaging the Russia-Ukraine peace talks.
“Well, you missed it, you made a mistake, let them go back to that, that’s all. Why do we have to bother ourselves and correct somebody else’s mistakes?” Putin added, hinting Moscow’s readiness to return to the Istanbul format, which reportedly included non-bloc status enshrined in Ukraine’s constitution, security guarantees from world powers, restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, accepting Crimea and the Donbass’s status as part of Russia, etc.
Asked by Carlson whether Kiev’s NATO sponsors will be willing to accept a Russian victory in Ukraine, Putin said the alliance should “think how to do it with dignity,” noting that “there are options if there is a will.”
Unfortunately, Putin said, “up until now there has been uproar and screaming about ‘inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia’ on the battlefield. Now they are apparently coming to realize that it is difficult to achieve. If possible at all. In my opinion, it is impossible by definition, it is never going to happen.” In event case, Russia remains “ready for this dialogue,” Putin stressed.
“I think the most important message in Putin’s interview is that Russia is ready for for a political or diplomatic solution of the Ukraine conflict,” says Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of the Center for European and International Studies at Russia’s Higher School of Economics. “But it requires a political will from the United States,” the observer told Sputnik.
“Putin identified the concrete conditions on which Russia would be ready to end the conflict through diplomacy. And this is first, the recognition of the current territorial settlement. Putin bluntly said that it's up for NATO to look for and to find a form which could be, I mean, not humiliating for them, but accepts the current territorial settlement,” the academic noted. “Putin bluntly again identified the Istanbul communique as the basis to which Russia could return. And that from the Russian perspective, the process could be resumed at any moment.”
“Thirdly, he identified in a very detailed way the condition of denazification and explained what it means, and also, mentioned that it was partly included into the Istanbul communique. So, I think that this is a very important message, that if the United States is ready for serious negotiation on the basis of these conditions, Russia would not hesitate to resume and to start those negotiations,” Suslov said.
Unfortunately, the observer noted, Putin has reason to be skeptical about Kiev’s Western sponsors’ sincerity, given the seemingly unchanging imperative of US geopolitical “hostility” against and “arrogance” toward Russia.
“Putin's pessimism is explained by his personal experience in dealing with the United States, because [he] has been dealing with actually five American presidents since Bill Clinton. And no matter the personal relationships with those presidents, no matter the party orientation of those presidents, the fundamentals of the US foreign policy remained the same. And the reason is that the US foreign policy is run by foreign policy elites, not necessarily by the president himself. And this is likely to remain so,” Suslov said.
Nevertheless, the observer noted that if Donald Trump, who has expressed a desire to end the Ukrainian crisis and normalize relations with Russia, were to return to power and “bring fundamentally new representatives of the US elites to power…that situation could change.”
“But of course, in this interview Vladimir Putin could not say that he's hopeful of such a scenario because he would have been immediately accused of interference into the US elections and identifying his preferences. And this is not in Russian interests,” Suslov summed up.