Russia finds the “peace deals” thrown at it unacceptable, so they’ll just keep grinding it out, taking additional territory. From Simplicius at simplicius76.substack.com:
Today Putin and Trump held a long-awaited phone call, which ended up lasting over two hours, by all accounts. Despite both sides drumming up the call’s significance as a good step forward toward normalizing relations, it achieved nothing. The reason: Putin again repeated to Trump that “root causes” of the conflict must be addressed, and shortly after, Zelensky declared in a press conference that Ukraine will never demilitarize and never give up its territories; the impasse stands as before.
Trump did decline to order a new round of sanctions on Russia, but Rubio days ago threatened Russia with a kind of ‘involuntary’ sanctions, as if to absolve himself:
Putin’s statement:
Interestingly, NYT’s new article managed to interview nearly a dozen real Russian soldiers on their views of negotiations and a potential ceasefire.
Every single one of the soldiers, according to NYT, expressed disagreement with any ceasefires and wanted Russia to capture more regions of Ukraine so that the future generation of troops “doesn’t have to fight this war again.”
