Over the past two days, diplomats and observers of the war in Ukraine have waited on word whether Russia’s president would follow through with his commitment last week to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart in Turkey.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, keen to keep the Americans onside and set in motion a peace process with Vladimir Putin, flew to Istanbul in anticipation of talks.
Perhaps worse for Putin, he now looks even smaller and more cowardly than he has throughout the war. AP
We have now received what appears to be definitive advice from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that neither Putin nor Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will attend the talks. Instead, a scratch team of low-level Russian bureaucrats will be sent to Turkey.
For Putin, this may be yet another carefully calculated move to show that he controls the levers of this war and – as the person who began this war in 2014 – only he can end it.
He is playing a high-risk game, however. The Russian president has calculated so far that Donald Trump, unwilling to escalate the conflict, will continue to tolerate Putin’s insults and brutal behaviour against Ukraine.
But Putin’s decision might also be seen by Trump and others in his administration as a deliberate insult. It could (if we squint our eyes enough) finally force Trump to take action against the Russians. This might comprise additional sanctions, and potentially, an increase in the amount of US weaponry that Trump permits Ukraine to purchase.
Regardless, Putin is not the master chess player that his propaganda network portrays him as. He has made many strategic errors in this war, and this might be his largest yet.
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