As talk of a possible war in Ukraine reached a peak and fears of an invasion of the country mounted in the past week, one world leader has remained decidedly off topic: Russian President Vladimir Putin.
No, Putin was not on vacation. The Kremlin leader kept a busy schedule but made few public comments about the international crisis that has reached its peak.
Last Wednesday, the United States and NATO delivered their written responses to Russian security demands, offering Moscow what U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described as a diplomatic way out of a dangerous path of mobilization in towards war.
And then, silence. On Thursday, Putin spent the day making a solemn public visit to the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, to mark the anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad, named after St. of his older brother Viktor, who died as a child during the siege.
On Friday, Putin presided over a national security meeting. But again, the Kremlin only gave a palliative reading and released a brief snippet of Putin discussing a new foreign policy document.
While Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made some brief assessments of the letter – saying the Russians “had no positive reaction” on the main point of contention, the Kremlin’s call for a halt to NATO expansion East – it became clear that the world would have to wait for a more meaningful response from Putin.
And Putin can wait. While Western leaders have struggled a lot because of the Ukraine crisis, Putin is a man who faces very little domestic political pressure.
His government’s opposition has been sidelined or imprisoned, he has flexible state media and doesn’t need to think about any re-election campaigns in the near future. He does not need to consult an unruly parliament on foreign affairs.
That makes him the man to talk to. On Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke in a call with Putin about the crisis in Ukraine, and the Elysée, the French president’s official residence, claimed that Putin told Macron that “he was the only one with whom he could have an argument.” so deep”.
In summary, the Kremlin call signaled Putin’s dissatisfaction with the US and NATO responses, saying the letters “did not take into account Russia’s fundamental concerns of how to prevent NATO expansion, refuse to deploy attack near Russian borders, as well as returning the bloc’s military strength and infrastructure [Otan] in Europe to the 1997 positions,” but the statement gave little indication of how and when Putin planned to respond formally.
Macron, who is preparing for a presidential campaign, was not alone in dealing with the crisis.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson – weakened after accusations of Downing Street parties during the lockdown and an animal rescue in Afghanistan – revealed plans on Friday to speak with Putin and travel to the region in his attempt to defuse the crisis. .
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made a separate proposal to engage Putin, inviting the Russian president to attend a summit and offering to mediate between Russia and Ukraine.
The Kremlin said Putin accepted, pending the resolution of the “epidemiological situation”, and no date has been set – although Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters on Thursday that he was told by the Kremlin that the meeting will be after Putin returns from the Beijing Olympics, which start on February 4.
So, does Putin have all the cards? Will he try to buy time with the Winter Olympics, where he will be invited by Chinese President Xi Jinping? Is he an experienced strategist or a bad one?
Trying to guess Putin’s master plan may be a hobby for experts, but the Russian president has made his intentions very clear for a long time.
No need to read Putin’s mind. His words speak for themselves.
In 2007, Putin aired his main grievances at the Munich Security Forum. Your argument? The expansion of the NATO alliance to include former members of the Warsaw Pact and the Baltic States was an act of attack directed at Russia.
“I think it’s obvious that the expansion of NATO has nothing to do with modernizing the Alliance itself or guaranteeing security in Europe,” he said.
“On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: Who is this expansion aimed at?”
And then there was the deployment of US anti-missile defense assets in Europe. In Putin’s view, missile defense — which Washington has called a counterpoint to rebel states like Iran and North Korea — was actually designed to undermine Russia’s nuclear deterrent.
More ominously, Putin said the following: “I am confident that future historians will not describe our conference as one in which the Second Cold War was declared. But they could.”
This conflict – we can call it the Cold War Mild, or Cold War 2.0 – has gained momentum since then, through successive crises: Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war in Donbas; the Kremlin’s intervention in Syria’s civil war in 2015; Russian interference in the 2016 US elections; the 2018 Salisbury poisonings in England; and so on.
Putin also built a justification for the war this summer when he published a historic 5,000-word essay arguing, in essence, that Ukrainians and Russians were one nation.
Independent Ukraine, in his view, was an “artificial division” of two peoples – and therefore not a real state.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin and his government “will not be hasty to judge”. Now that the Second Cold War is threatening to get very hot, the world must wait to see if Putin’s next move signals a turn for the worse in global affairs.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
