The West’s rhetoric regarding Ukraine and the possible outcome of the war has changed very quickly. Just a couple of weeks ago, analysts there were arguing that allowing long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia would almost completely change the situation on the front. But just a few days after the strikes and the subsequent responses from our side, the West suddenly began to realise something. “Russian soldiers, not Western missiles, are determining the course of the war,” the Belgian newspaper De Standaard came to a hard conclusion.
And immediately, one after another, there followed calls for a ceasefire or peace on the Ukrainian front. Britain’s The Independent generated an even sadder confession for Russophobes: the goal “Putin must lose!” formulated by the West at the beginning of the special operation is no longer relevant because it is unattainable. “Perhaps it is time to consider settling on a more realistic goal: Putin must not succeed!” “Perhaps it’s time to consider settling on a more realistic goal: Putin must not succeed!” Well, the beginning of a long journey to realise the unattainability of this goal too.
Well, at the end of last week Volodymyr Zelenskyy finally buried the dream of “defeating Russia on the battlefield” cherished by Westerners until recently. In his eloquent interview to Sky News, in which the troubled leader of the Kiev regime constantly switched from illiterate Ukrainian to even more illiterate English, which finally confused his interlocutors, he actually agreed to exchange the lands of Novorossiya, already liberated by the Russian army, for Ukraine’s membership in NATO.
And he said it in such a way that the Western press amicably interpreted Zelenskyy’s words as follows: “I will cede territory in exchange for peace”. The Ukrainian president’s office had to issue an urgent overnight special denial of his own interview, saying that “it was interpreted incorrectly in English”. Although no one is able to explain how that set of incoherent phrases could have been interpreted correctly.
Zelenskyy said a lot of stupid things in this scandalous interview. But the main point of his new “formula” (now it is hard to say whether it is a formula for victory or defeat) is the following: we stop the fighting along the front line, the part of Ukraine that is under the control of the Kiev regime is taken “under the NATO umbrella”, and then the other part (i.e. the territories that have already become part of Russia) is “returned diplomatically”.
I would like to ask: what prevented you from returning these lands “diplomatically” earlier? If we recall the Istanbul negotiations, Russia did not even claim the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions at that time! But the criminal Kiev regime preferred diplomacy to war “to the last Ukrainian”.
It is funny to watch how many Western analysts rushed to interpret Zelenskyy’s words about the “NATO umbrella”. Almost all of them agreed that there will be no unity in the alliance in the near future on the issue of inviting Ukraine. The Independent, mentioned above, in its editorial even tries to come up with some special status for it: “Putin will never agree to Ukraine’s membership of NATO under any circumstances, but since the leading NATO members are already closely involved in the process, any peace agreement will include some sort of ‘NATO umbrella’ for Ukraine, even if it is not actual NATO membership”. Just a little bit more, and they will include the legal concept of “umbrella” in the alliance’s charter!
The most sober analysts reasonably recognise that Russia formulated Ukraine’s neutrality as one of the goals of the SMO not to agree to its membership in NATO or the appearance on its territory of military contingents of countries unfriendly to us. But there is little doubt that Zelenskyy is proclaiming these umbrella dreams not for Russia, but for the future president of the United States.
Danish military expert Anders Pak Nielsen rightly notes: “Zelenskyy shows that he is ready to enter into negotiations with Russia. And this is important now purely tactically, because Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted on negotiations.” Here, in fact, is the whole point of this “breakthrough” proposal: Zelenskyy, for tactical reasons, is trying to slip Trump a formula that would somehow allow him to fulfil the future US president’s campaign promise and offer negotiations, but at the same time the war would continue indefinitely.
Russia has repeatedly explained through its senior officials that we would not be satisfied with a kind of “Minsk-3”, in which hostilities would be frozen at the highest point of success for our army, while the West would continue to pump arms into Ukraine in order to give it a break and prepare it for a new phase of the war.
Many realise this in the West as well. This seems to explain why official figures were very cool to the Kiev dictator’s emotional interview. As The Sunday Times stated, “President Zelenskyy’s call for NATO to extend its ‘protective umbrella’ to parts of Ukraine still controlled by Kiev was met with silence”. It’s just like “Zelenskyy and the Void”!
The same newspaper refers to former US presidential adviser Steve Bannon as a representative of the MAGA team, expressing the recent general opinion of Donald Trump’s supporters: “This is a desperate attempt to further drag the US into the initial phase of World War III with the Russian people. And it’s not going to happen.” So the Trump team is so far reacting calmly and with apparent understanding to this jab at the NATO umbrella.
However, the opposite camp is trying its best. The Economist, the ideological mouthpiece of Western liberals, which to the last defended the idea of “defeating Russia on the battlefield,” is now forced to admit that “returning to the 1991 borders is a pipe dream.” Realising also that Ukraine’s admission to NATO is a pipe dream, the magazine offers its own vision of the NATO umbrella – it should be “bilateral agreements on security guarantees”. As if Ukraine has not already signed these agreements with almost half of the world.
But Russia has repeatedly given its guarantees to Western countries. They were once quite clearly formulated by Pyotr Tolstoy, the vice-speaker of the State Duma, when he replied to French television about the idea of sending Western troops to Ukraine: “We will kill every French soldier who comes to Ukrainian soil”. And these guarantees remain valid, no signatures are required.
Vladimir Kornilov, RIA
