His army is accumulating setbacks, cracks are appearing in Russia itself, but nothing seems to stop Vladimir Putin’s “forward flight” into Ukraine. Between negotiations, which are impossible at this stage, and nuclear threats from the Russian president, no scenario for ending the war is emerging.
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With the annexation of Ukrainian territories, the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Russians and the fiery rhetoric of the Kremlin, “we are moving further away from a solution than we are approaching it”, summarizes the researcher Marie Dumoulin, from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
For France, Vladimir Putin is launched in a “leak forward”. The United States, them, warn against a “nuclear apocalypse”, and wonder about the options of Vladimir Putin.
“How can he get out of this? How can he position himself so that he neither loses face nor loses a significant portion of his power in Russia?” President Joe Biden said Thursday, illustrating the questions that haunt Western chancelleries about the goals of the Russian president and the way to end the war.
“The only way out of this conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine,” said Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin from Prague, opposed like the countries of Eastern Europe to any compromise with Vladimir’s Russia. Cheese fries.
But the Russian withdrawal is not on the agenda.
No short term negotiations
Peace negotiations are unthinkable in the current context, and the future is being played out on the military front, where Ukraine has resumed the offensive.
“We are still in a time of war”, acknowledged Thursday in an interview with Eastern European newspapers Emmanuel Macron, long suspected of having pushed for negotiations and of having been too conciliatory towards of Russia.
However, the war “will end with a peace treaty, but at the time and in the terms chosen by the Ukrainians”, he added – even if Paris repeats that a way out of the war will also have to take into account the European security imperatives.
On the Ukrainian side, “they will not stop before having reconquered the territories and having inflicted a military defeat on Russia,” said Ms. Dumoulin, back from Ukraine. While admitting to ignore “when the Ukrainians will consider having regained enough territory”, or if the reconquest of Crimea will still be on the table.
‘Wounded and dangerous’
Qualified by diplomats as a “wounded bear”, and therefore increasingly dangerous, Vladimir Putin remains opaque, unreadable, and no one knows how seriously to take his “nuclear blackmail”.
“Today he is in difficulty, there is a war he cannot win, what would satisfy him? We don’t have an answer. But vertical climbing is a risk. A dictator cannot lose a war, because if he loses it means he is dead,” commented a French diplomatic source recently.
Many analysts are urging Europe and the United States not to give in to Vladimir Putin’s “nuclear blackmail” and to remain firm in their support for Ukraine.
The Russian president “is losing the conventional war he launched. He hopes that references to nuclear weapons will deter democracies from delivering weapons to Ukraine and buy him time to slow down the Ukrainian offensive,” writes American historian Timothy Snyder on his site.
“Russia is trying to buy time in the hope that European countries will collapse before it does,” said researcher Joris von Bladel in a note for the Belgian Royal Institute for International Relations.
Russian crunches?
A “way out”, literally, would be the collapse of Putin’s regime, say researchers.
They rely on recent signs of discontent among the Russian elite over defeats in Ukraine, including harsh criticism from Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov or the founder of the paramilitary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigojine.
Several officials and propagandists have also criticized the chaotic and haphazard way in which the partial mobilization is being carried out, which has pushed tens of thousands of Russians into exile.
The Russian elite, unlike Putin, does not see Ukraine as “an existential problem” for Russia, recalls Carnegie researcher Tatiana Stanovaya.
“The key question is whether Russian elites and society in general are prepared to follow him on his journey to hell, or whether Putin, by doubling down on his disastrous bet in Ukraine, has only paved the way for its own downfall,” she wrote for Foreign Policy this week.
According to the Washington Post on Friday, a member of Putin’s inner circle expressed his disagreement directly with him on how to wage the war in Ukraine. However, there are no signs that the regime is about to be overthrown, according to intelligence sources interviewed by the newspaper.
“We must not take our dreams for realities”, also tempers Marie Dumoulin, for whom the tensions between “clans internal to the system” do not call into question the Russian president himself.
“Nobody knows when it will happen, according to what scenario, and who will come after Putin,” she concludes.