George Friedman
Last week, I wrote about the phone call Russian President Vladimir Putin made to U.S. President Donald Trump, during which he proposed a new economic relationship with the United States. By itself, it indicated a shift in Russian policy, as did the telling cancellation of the full ceremonies of the May 9 celebration of the end of World War II. Pressure is growing in Russia for Putin to end the war in Ukraine, given that the battle lines are essentially frozen and that the Russian economy has become extremely weak.
It would seem the internal pressure is working. On May 9, Putin announced that the war in Ukraine is coming to a settlement, and that he wants a new relationship with Europe. (Toward that end, he will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.) Specifically, he said he wants the war to end via negotiations involving the Europeans, along with possible new security arrangements. His preference is to negotiate through Gerhard Schroeder, a German ex-chancellor with whom Putin had been close and who was from 2017 to 2022 the chairman of Russian energy giant Rosneft. Schroeder’s chancellorship began in 1998, not many years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when it seemed possible that Russia would become not just a liberal democracy but a part of Europe.
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