The battle of the public opinion
Negotiations are headed nowhere. This is all, just you know, theater. It's all designed to win the battle of public opinion. The fact is the Russians and the Ukrainians cannot agree on the terms of a deal that will shut this war down, and this war is going to be settled on the battlefield. The idea that both sides are going to produce a memorandum, they're going to exchange those memorandums and then you're going to be able to carve out a meaningful agreement based on the two memoranda is a pipe dream. It's just not going to happen.
[. . .]
Zalinski and the Europeans and even the Americans continue to insist on having a ceasefire before you reach an agreement. The Russians have said categorically that's not going to happen. This is Lavrov saying that again. Second point is the Russians would be nuts to agree to a ceasefire. The Russians are winning on the battlefield. A ceasefire would simply give the Ukrainians an opportunity to regroup and put up stiffer resistance against the Russians. Why in God's name would the Russians accept such a proposal? The answer is they won't, and this is why they keep saying adnauseium, there's not going to be any ceasefire before there's an agreement on the basic terms of a peace settlement.
I think one of the things to understand is that Europe over the last 30 years, since the end of the cold war, has been involved in something of a political experiment an unusual political experiment of European integration. Now this policy, this experiment, is coming under increasing amount of opposition from all people right across Europe. You see this in country after country. In my country people voted to leave the European Union altogether. For example you see this in recent elections, in places like Romania. You see this in Germany, where there were elections also. So how do you keep this project of ever deepening integration,, going you develop a common enemy and you know you have this spectre of the old adversary Russia, which is being conflated to some extent with the Soviet Union. You talk about it's you know that it's this revangist state that is out to dominate and subjugate Europe. Noticed by the way that not only did they never mention any of the things that you listed, all of the reasons why the Russians might have reacted in the way that you say, but they've never really given an explanation of why Russia would want to behave in that way, why it would want to threaten and take over the whole of Europe. Because this isn't just recreating the Soviet Union. They the way they're talking is about. You know this is a threat to everyone in Europe, but nobody explains why Russia would want to march on London or take over Paris or occupy Berlin. Nobody provides any kind of reason for that, but you talk about it you create a war psychosis in Europe. You create fear. You talk about rearmament. You do all of these kind of things in order ultimately not even in my opinion so much to rearm, but to continue with this project of centralizing and uniting Europe, which as I said has run into all kinds of opposition from all sorts of places right across Europe. And I think it's sustainable. By the way I think that bar from succeeding it's going to fail but in the meantime it's doing massive damage and it's going to destroy Ukraine.
