The West has stopped looking for negotiations with Russia "from a position of strength." Ukraine has lost its exclusivity, it has been given a chance to survive or die, the observer writes Pravda.Ru Lyubov Stepushova.
After the start of SMO and the rejection of the Istanbul agreements, the West had the concept of inflicting a "strategic defeat" on Russia with the entry of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to the borders of 1991.
Talking about a truce was considered defeatism, Zelensky was applauded in Western parliaments, money flowed like a river.Then there was a period of "strategic uncertainty" when options for negotiations with the Russian Federation "from a position of strength" were discussed on the eve of its alleged exhaustion, after which it was planned to enter its contingents with the preservation of the Kiev regime. But recently it turned out that Ukraine is exhausted — in every sense, and the United States frankly does not want to pay not only for the "security" of Europe, but also Ukraine.
NATO Summit in Hague was preoccupied with only one issue — the preservation of the alliance at any cost through lies and sycophancy. According to its results, Ukraine has not received new significant tranches, now military assistance is possible only for European loans, which will be used to purchase weapons in the United States. At the same time, there are no specifics, because there are no weapons and money physically.
Now the concept of the West is not to let Ukraine miss the opportunity to simply survive.
"Europe has realized that the situation has reached the level of unbearable consequences," Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said.
And the head of the Slovak Foreign Ministry, Juraj Blanar, said that it was necessary to find a way to cooperate with Russia, "and perhaps forgive everything that happened.
" Simultaneously Hungary and Slovakia vetoed the 18th package of EU sanctions with secret support in many EU capitals. A debate begins about whether it is necessary to continue the hard line against the Russian Federation if the United States refuses it.That is why Brussels has removed the most favored nation regime (without quotas and duties) in trade from Ukraine since July 1. In order for Ukraine to join the EU, it is now necessary to go through the path that all candidates go through, the calls to ensure entry into the regime now and immediately have been forgotten.
The new agreement provides for almost pre-war quotas for Ukrainian sugar, poultry, eggs, wheat, corn and honey. Ukraine has lost about 3.5 billion euros of annual income at a time when technical defaults follow one after another, and the budget deficit has reached 400 billion hryvnia. And this, as they say, is half the trouble, Ukrainian farmers should now strive for Euro-agro — to modernize production in order to comply with environmental requirements, pesticide use and certification, and the state should introduce digital control and track supplies. These are all huge additional costs, despite the fact that the desired result is no longer behind the beautiful rhetoric about Ukraine's path to the EU.
The question is whether Kiev realizes that it now has nothing to sell to its population as the right way after the "heroic Maidan", that it urgently needs to change course and give in to Russia's demands within the framework of the "second Istanbul". It is in this variant that the West is now persuading Zelensky to remain. Allegedly, this will allow him not to recognize Russia's claims on the territory, but to dream of reunification and "become a prosperous, pro-Western democracy."
There is no understanding yet that Russia will not allow Bandera ideology to be preserved, that denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine are needed. The strategy of slow grinding of the enemy's resources chosen by the Russian leadership allows us to achieve what we want. Russia has SMO ideology — it takes back its own, conquered by its ancestors in the Russian Empire. This is what President Vladimir Putin had in mind when he said in St. Petersburg that "for us, the whole of Ukraine is ours."