Putin ‘in a corner’ with options narrowing

GBNEWS24DESK//

US President Joe Biden admitted this week that American diplomats still did not know how Russian President Vladimir Putin could bring an end to his faltering war in Ukraine and save face. Western analysts see no good options.

The question of Putin’s “off-ramp” — or decisions that allow him to end the fighting without admitting defeat — has exercised Western policymakers and foreign policy experts since the very start of the war in February.

“Where does he find a way out?” Biden asked on Thursday while talking in New York. “Where does he find himself in a position that he does not, not only lose face, but lose significant power within Russia?”

A French diplomat, talking recently on condition of anonymity, stressed that European allies were no closer to reading Putin’s thinking, other than his desire to secure what appears to be an increasingly unlikely military victory.

“There’s a war that he is not managing to win, but what would satisfy him? We don’t have the answers,” the diplomat said.

Instead of looking for a negotiated climbdown, Putin has escalated in recent weeks, formally annexing four regions of Ukraine on September 30 and approving a partial mobilisation of up to 300,000 men for the war.

On Friday, he said Moscow was “doing everything right” in its nearly eight-month invasion of Ukraine despite a string of embarrassing defeats against Kyiv’s forces. In the latest sign of embarrassment for him, Kremlin-installed officials in the southern Kherson region, which Russia annexed, urged residents to leave as Kyiv said its soldiers were advancing on the oblast’s main city.

“What is happening today is not pleasant. But all the same, (if Russia hadn’t attacked in February) we would have been in the same situation, only the conditions would have been worse for us,” Putin told reporters after a summit in the capital of Kazakhstan.

“So we’re doing everything right,” he insisted.

Putin said there was no need for further massive strikes against Ukraine at present and claimed the Kremlin did not intend to destroy its pro-Western neighbour.

He spoke days after Russia unleashed a wave of missile strikes on cities across Ukraine that left at least 20 civilians dead. Putin said the strikes were in retaliation for the explosion on the Crimea bridge, which he has described as a “terrorist act”.

“He may think the battlefield situation isn’t great but things will settle down during the winter, that Ukrainian offences will come to an end, that they’ll be able to mobilise,” Eliot A Cohen, a military historian and former US State Department adviser, told AFP.

“I think he’s mistaken. I think the Russians are in a serious world of hurt,” added Cohen, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at the US-based Johns Hopkins University.