Mick Ryan
Apparently Ukraine and Russia will meet in Istanbul next Monday for another round of peace talks, but only if the Kremlin produces its promised memorandum of terms for an agreement. We should not hold high hopes for anything of substance to emerge from the meeting however. For Putin, this is just a smoke screen to allow him the opportunity to undertake another series of major military campaigns in Ukraine during the summer and autumn months.
In my latest weekly update, I examined the potential for the Russians to undertake an offensive in northeastern Ukraine in this northern summer. But it is also important to examine this topic in the context of the wider ground offensive that is already underway, the broader Russian campaigns that will take place over the northern summer, as well as Putin’s political objectives for the coming months.
Over the past few weeks, I have been examining some of the key elements of the ongoing Russian offensive in the east and north east of Ukraine. You can read some of these here, here and here. These provide a useful foundation for this article.
This article examines the evolution of the political environment surrounding the war since January this year, and how (if at all) this has impacted on Putin’s political aims for his war. I will then explore the various Russian campaigns that will be executed in the following months in the hope of achieving Putin’s goals, and what this might mean for the overall direction of the war.
Putin’s Calculus and the Political Environment
Putin has, so far, successfully strung the American president along without any negative impacts. While Trump has acknowledged this might be the case on a couple of occasions, including his comments in Washington DC in the past 48 hours (read the full report on this here), he is yet to actually take any action against Russia. Indeed, in the wake of his last phone call with Putin, which I examined in this article, Trump appeared to give up on trying to negotiate peace in Ukraine and accepted that Putin did not want the war to end.
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