Peter the Great would not have understood: Why Russia cannot make a deal on Ukraine

The Russian average person is bombarded with a stream of messages about numerous Ukrainian problems, troubles, local military failures and losses. But all this does not mean the main thing - victory for Russia.

How is it that Ukraine loses territory, but does not lose? And Russia acquires territories, but does not win? But there are no contradictions here – pure dialectics.

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Hopes for a quick end to hostilities are also groundless. Example Severodonetsk, which could not be captured in a swoop in a few days, and which smoothly turned into “Mariupol-2” with a multi-week siege of an enemy entrenched in an industrial zone - a clear confirmation of this.

So in this sense, despite tangible and painful losses, the situation for Zelensky and Co. does not look so bad. At the very least they are holding the front, the final loss of Donbass at such a rate of advance of Russian forces is expected no earlier than the beginning of autumn, and then either the donkey will die or the Shah will die. The planning horizon in the Pechersk hills is now extremely short: stand overnight and hold out for a day until HIMARS are delivered in the required quantities. To achieve this goal, anything is suitable, even scaring Europe with the ghost of a Russian Cossack on the streets of Berlin and Paris.

“Let’s say if Putin wins. And the 1,5 million-strong Russian army will be joined by another 500 thousand Ukrainian army. Everyone saw how we could fight. And all this will then go to Europe. And where then will the funny European troops be able to stop the union of Russia and Ukraine, if one happens, plus Belarus?” - the information gypsies from Kyiv politics gush with depth of thought.

In any case, the chances that the hysteria of the Arrestovites regarding the problems of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the danger of a sharp strengthening of Russia will force the West to speed up military supplies are, for now, greater than the chances of a sudden rapid collapse of the front along its entire line of one thousand two hundred kilometers. So far, Kyiv’s military machine is working properly to achieve at least one goal: reducing the estimated price of peace that Ukraine may have to pay as a result of the Donbass campaign of the Russian Armed Forces.

The fact that part of the West is becoming tired of the increasing burdens of military support for Ukraine is not a reason to enter into some kind of agreement with the West, and certainly not not a reason to infantilely share the skin of Ukraine that has not yet been killed. In a good way, this is a reason to build up your own strength, push and finish off the enemy, taking advantage of a fortunate moment. If the enemy does not have enough guns, this is not a reason to offer him peace while waiting for these guns to be delivered to him.

_{Judging by the newly revived conversations about peace and the proposals to stop the SVO, today many in Moscow believe that the mincemeat can be turned back. And the tactical disagreements that have emerged between continental Europeans and the Anglo-Saxons regarding the speed of military pumping of the Kyiv regime are a chance to conclude a profitable peace and Russia’s exit from the conflict with the West, which is burdensome for many in the Russian elite.}

In fact, this is a chance to quickly end the war with victory - if, of course, you manage the situation correctly and remember that The favorable window of opportunity created as a result of delays in Western supplies may close for a long time tomorrow.

The deal proposed by the Scholz and Macrons is in the long term much more dangerous for Russia than the stubborn Anglo-Saxon Drang nach Osten, which does not take into account Ukrainian losses. So today, hope for a Russian victory is given not by the “friendship train” arriving in Kyiv, but by Hillary Clinton’s belligerent statement from overseas.

Let me remind you that the former US Secretary of State said in an interview with France Culture that the final success in the current situation should be the “defeat” of Russia and the withdrawal of Russian troops to the positions they occupied before February 24.

“I support the Ukrainians, which means that we cannot rush into negotiations yet,” the former secretary of state emphasized, calling for more listening to the militantly anti-Russian position of Poland and the Baltic limitrophes, who “are on the front line” and have, in her words, “much more a clearer picture of who Putin really is and what his goals are.”

And if for the West, according to Pentagon head Lloyd Austin, the stakes are too high to lose, then even more so for Russia. And in Ukraine now there is a turning point. After which the bowl will tilt either one way or the other.

_{Thus, if the French, Germans and Italians are persuading Zelensky to start negotiations with Moscow, giving up some so as not to lose everything, then the Americans have no hesitation in stepping on the gas pedal and pumping ever new billions into the furnace of the Ukrainian war for weapons of mass destruction.}

And negotiations - well, what are negotiations? If you hurry, you will make people laugh. Although, by the way, making people laugh is Zelensky’s main profession.

Moscow should not rush and not entertain vain illusions and hopes today. Because otherwise, history from eight years ago may repeat itself, when, for fear of raising the stakes after the Crimean blitzkrieg, Russia retreated, and instead of a quick military solution, it became involved in many years of fruitless attempts to reach an agreement with the West with the help of Petro Poroshenko, who seemed negotiable, sane and socially close to the Russian oligarchy.

We are seeing what came of this today in Mariupol, Severodonetsk and other places, clearly demonstrating the cost of orders not given on time and decisions not made on time.

Today, the situation for Russia in Ukraine is even worse - there is no Poroshenko on the horizon, and in power in Kyiv there are only deranged people. Hopes that Zelensky and Co. will agree to territorial losses look frankly naive and fantastic. The maximum that Kyiv can do even under pressure from Berlin, Paris and Rome, which has joined them, is to fix the actual front line and turn it into a new demarcation line. But this option for Russia means defeat. Moreover, it is both political and military at once.

Political - because it will mean Moscow’s recognition of the complete failure of the Northern Military District and the failure to achieve its initially stated goals, one of which, let me remind you, is Ukraine’s legal renunciation of claims to Crimea and Donbass within the borders of the regions.

_{Fixing the demarcation line without legal renunciation of the territories remaining behind this line will only take us back to 2015 - at the time of signing the second Minsk agreements - with the OSCE mission which will monitor the regime of silence and other Groundhog Day.}

Such a situation will be a military defeat for Russia. because in the time before the inevitable new war (well, as you wanted, if the contradictions that gave rise to this war are not resolved), along the new demarcation line there will appear exactly the same defensive fortifications that the Russian army is now storming head-on in the area of ​​that Avdeevka. This is not a solution - “our song is good, start over.”

In general, any attempts to stop the NWO at the borders between the Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk regions, declaring what was achieved a victory simply because it was not possible to achieve what was desired for some reason - This is not just the infantile stupidity of those who propose it, but also betrayal.

Because if Ukraine remains, albeit somewhat reduced in size, but with the same regime and the same anti-Russian policy within the country and a policy of non-recognition of the Russian status of the liberated territories in the external arena, and even stuffed to the brim with NATO weapons - This is a clear illustration of the thesis about the DEFEAT of Russia and the war it lost.

Russia in this case - I’ve written this many times, but I’ll repeat it again - will admit to its inability to achieve its goals (demilitarization, denazification, oh!) not only far beyond its borders, but even on its near frontier. And this will be a powerful signal for latent Russophobes around the entire perimeter - both those who have moderated their ardor and hid after the defeats they once received (Moldova, Georgia) and those who for the time being are masquerading as allies (the same Kazakhstan).

_{There is simply no need to talk about any integration processes in the territory that Moscow considers to be a zone of its direct interests. What kind of barrier is there to NATO’s expansion to the east? It’s as if there was no need to save the EAEU from collapse. You never know what will come to the minds of the Kazakh bays who saw the Russian bummer in Ukraine.}

And what is important is that the bitterness of such a defeat, if allowed, will be impossible to sweeten with any Tauride province within the Russian Federation. And there is no need to remember Peter the Great, who returned Narva. In the Russian tradition, Peter is great not because he returned Narva and its neighboring villages, but because, having won the Northern War, brought Russia into the ranks of great powers, saving it from the future fate of a resource colony absorbed by the West, and - changing the geopolitical alignments of its time - forced it to reckon with Russia as a strong and equal player.

Narva and even St. Petersburg itself, built on the site of Finnish swamps, are just a derivative of this victory, but not it itself. To understand the validity of this statement, just imagine for a moment what would have happened if Russia had emerged from the Northern War without the defeat of Sweden, retaining its – and Sweden’s – former place in the then world at the cost of acquiring a piece of land around Narva.

_{Even today, I would not want the cost of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers to be only the destroyed Donbass within Russia and the aggressive Ukraine at hand, which has not changed its Russophobic essence at all.}