Trying to solve everything means solving nothing. But then that’s the point. “It is obvious that Putin is simply stalling for time, trying to destroy or capture Ukraine or win this war of attrition, waiting for aid to stop in Europe and for Europe to be divided,” Ukrainian opposition lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytskyi told POLITICO.
The “let’s negotiate everything together” approach has been a key part of the playbook Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have used time and again when it comes to Ukraine, and earlier in Syria. Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, now his country’s ambassador to 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 a Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations during Trump’s first term, told POLITICO. “The rest is detail.” Assumptions that Putin wants peace, will negotiate seriously, or will accept a reasonable deal, “are all misguided,” he added.
Negotiations as a weapon of war can be used to distract, stall, allow time to maneuver and to ensnare the well-meaning — something that was highlighted between 2014 and 2017, when Lavrov and then U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry “negotiated” over Syria. The talks helped Moscow save Syria’s Bashar al-Assad from defeat, persuading then-president Obama to take his finger off the trigger and ignore his own red line on Damascus’ use of chemical weapons.
The only other top Kremlin aide as relentless as Lavrov in this technique of exhaustive obfuscation is Putin’s favorite “historian,” Vladimir Medinsky, who served as an arch-patriotic culture minister from 2012 to 2020. An advocate of putting up statues of Joseph Stalin, he has led the Russian delegation in talks with Ukraine stretching back to Istanbul in 2025. There he invoked the Great Northern War of 1700-21 as a warning that Russia is ready to fight Ukraine for as long as it takes to win. Medinsky again led the Russian delegation in Abu Dhabi.
In fact, Moscow’s red lines have not shifted one iota in the years since Putin launched his full-scale invasion. The Russian leader and his top aides have emphatically outlined them for years — conditions that would, in effect, rip the nation of Ukraine to shreds. They want guarantees that Kyiv will never join NATO, that it will remain geopolitically neutral and unable to command its own fate, with severe limitations placed on stockpiles of weapons 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 has bragged — Russia will continue to wage war.