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During a visit to Kyiv just after taking over the presidency of the European Council on July
1, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and asked him to call a ceasefire. Zelenskiy flatly refused.
"As for a ceasefire, I have been very clear: we are at war and we cannot talk about a ceasefire just like that," he later clarified in an interview with Bloomberg on July 3. Zelenskiy claimed that Russia could use the truce to accumulate forces and resume military operations.
"This is why it [a ceasefire agreement] can only be reached on a transparent international platform in the presence of countries with trusted leaders," he went on to say, adding that it’s not enough to stop the fighting; a clear plan for what comes next needs to be worked out. And that means bilateral security guarantees for Ukraine. Zelenskiy clearly doesn’t trust Russian President Vladimir Putin as far as he can throw him but, sotto voce, he also doesn’t trust his Western partners to give Kyiv the full support it needs to win and provide for its security.
Orban then outraged the EU elite by flying to Moscow on July 5 to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on what he described on social media as: “peace mission continues, second stop – Moscow.”
The recently appointed EU foreign policy chief and Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas angrily tweeted:” In Moscow, Viktor Orban in no way represents the EU or the EU’s positions. He is exploiting the EU presidency position to sow confusion. The EU is united, clearly behind Ukraine and against Russian aggression,” she said, clearly highlighting how the European unity is cracking.
Zelenskiy may not have a choice. Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent to the Kremlin buildings) is under mounting pressure and is finding it increasingly difficult to fight this war. Zelenskiy may be forced into talks as soon as December.
“By the end of the year it will become clear whether Ukraine is able to survive the winter with the largely destroyed power grid and whether it has managed to stabilise the front line. The last few “silver bullets” at its disposal – F16s, longer-range strikes, harder sanctions – may or may not help it make it through,” says Leonid Ragozin, a bne IntelliNews columnist and independent journalist. “On top of that, [Donald] Trump’s election win will likely become reality. He will have his own peace plan, like it or not.”
Russia’s position is much stronger. Sanctions have comprehensively failed to bring Russia to its knees and the economy is now the fastest growing of all the major developed markets in the world. Rather than collapsing, Russia just overtook Japan to become the fourth largest economy in the world, according to the World Bank, and is also now classed as a high-income country. Moreover, the military Keynesianism bump that has boosted Russia’s growth to 3.6% last year has primed the pump and kicked off a virtuous circle of investment, wage rises, spending and growth. The changes are going from
a spending bump and are becoming structural, according to an opinion piece in the Financial Times by Elina Ribakova, non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The nature of Putinomics has fundamentally changed from pay down debt and hoard cash to releasing a wave of pent up investment that is aimed not only at the military industrial complex but civilian production too, as Putin laid out in his recent guns and butter speech. Despite Russia’s economic problems like high inflation, a shortage of labour and falling productivity, it
has enough money and production capacity to fight this war for years. And Russia has three times the population of Ukraine, giving it a deep pool of potential recruits to draw from.
Long-time critics of the war in Ukraine like Jeffery Sachs and John Mearsheimer have said the war was unwinnable from the start and question US motivations for supporting Ukraine. While these views have been unpopular they are slowly starting to resonate more, The Hill recently reported as the conflict drags into its third year.
Things are not going Ukraine’s way.
The fighting is locked into a destructive stalemate, and Ukraine is short of men, money and materiel – all problems that are likely to get worse as the year wears on.
Russia is also under pressure despite having the upper hand on the battlefield. The Kremlin seems prepared to draw a line under the conflict, as despite taking the initiative following
Pressures are mounting on Ukrainian President Zelenskiy that could force him into a ceasefire deal with Russia, but don't hold your breath. / bne IntelliNews
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