As indicated by the title of this week’s column, I want to talk to you about the issue of ‘peace negotiations’. I’ve now been asked many times why Ukrainians aren’t pushing for ‘peace talks’. And the shortest and most honest answer is: Russia doesn’t want peace. It’s as simple as that.

And, yes, I am aware that Vladimir Putin is repeating to anyone who will listen about how he’s ready to negotiate, and Volodymyr Zelensky is not, and how Russia never refused negotiations, and other tall tales. But we should take a step back from Russia’s multibillion-dollar propaganda machine’s feedlot and look at the facts and logic.

Putin’s credibility

Putin has proven to be a habitual liar, a terrorist and a war criminal who can’t even travel freely after being charged by the International Criminal Court for the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.

It is a rather obvious question, but does a good-faith negotiation with someone who has driven a truck through multiple international agreements make sense at all? On countless occasions, Putin has assured the world that Russia is and always was committed to respecting Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Trusting Russia as a “peaceful democracy” — that still launched wars in 1994, 1997, 1999, 2008, 2014, 2015 and 2022 is just unwise. 

(There are multiple videos available, with a side-by-side comparison of Putin’s speeches, promises and the horrific reality that followed — it is all well documented.)

Does anyone trust Putin when he says his soldiers do not attack civilians and civilian infrastructure? Multiple levelled cities, towns and villages, electrical installations and even a destroyed hydroelectric power station with a massive lake bear witness to his lies.

The well-documented exhumations in multiple cities with hundreds and hundreds of bodies in mass graves, the reports on torture chambers we found in the territories we managed to liberate, the bombed hospitals (up to as far back as 31 December 2022, there were “more than 700 attacks on medical facilities and medical personnel since the war began” — source, Physicians for Human Rights), how does one square with the intent of “peaceful negotiations”? 

There’s a reason one doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. 

Continuous attacks

Ukraine is brutally attacked every single day.

Every day and every night, civilians are attacked. The Russian army had difficulty fighting the Ukrainian army in the open fields so they opted for killing, torturing and attacking civilians. To kill children on Christmas Day in a small town in Ukraine is not to seek peace. 

Prioritising genocide

The Russian economy and the supply systems do not function well these days. They even ended 2023 with an egg crisis. You can easily find the information online, but in a nutshell: 

“Eggs have come to symbolise the economic disruption that Russia is facing, with prices jumping 42% in the 12 months prior to November 2023, per data from the country’s statistics agency Rosstat”. 

The infrastructure crisis is also biting, and this one is absolutely crazy. Russian officials keep threatening Western Europe with a deep winter freeze if they halt the gas supply. Funny story — that is all currently happening in Russia. 

The heating systems are struggling, and some people are literally building bonfires to warm themselves. There are multiple videos of people saying “We’re freezing! Help us!” 

I do urge you to search this by yourself, there’s a lot to learn from this, but, here are a few bits from media to give you a general idea: 

According to a Meduza report on 9 January:

“Problems were observed in Yekaterinburg, Penza, Elektrostal, Podolsk, Dmitrov, Beloozersk, Solnechnogorsk, Shchelkovo, Voskresensk, Khimki, Lyubertsy, Nakhodka… and this list is not complete. 

“The outages, which affected over 20,000 people in the town of Podolsk, began when a heating main in the Klimovsk plant burst on January 4. In the days that followed, temperatures in the area dipped below -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit), leaving residents struggling to stay warm.

“Over 100,000 Moscow region residents have lost heat this year. The man being blamed for the largest outage has a criminal past”.

You get the picture… but do search for videos and photos — the visuals of the apartment buildings fully snowed in and frozen over, with burst pipes, would be worrying for any president loving his people But then again, we’re talking about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. 

The wives of the Russian soldiers are now being arrested during protests, and a new crisis gripped Russia last week when protests and violent clashes with police erupted in Bashkortostan. The people of Russia are beginning to rise against the Putin regime. The residents of Bashkortostan are now calling on their people to come back from war in Ukraine and to fight for their own against the Kremlin’s control over their lives. 

This crisis began because a judge sentenced indigenous rights activist Fail Alsynov to four years’ jail for “inciting ethnic hatred during a speech” at a rally in the spring of 2023. He had taken a strong stance against the mining of a mountain considered sacred to the Bashkir people, a Turkic ethnic group concentrated in Bashkortostan and closely related to the Tatars. 

Predictably, he was jailed and protesters brutally attacked — nothing new for a “democracy” that claims it respects all minorities and indigenous rights. Please search Alsynov’s name and read more about him. 

These are not the only incidents and examples of Putin’s violent politics, but there is an abundance of videos and other information online.

Putin can’t fix most of these problems if the money keeps being spent on aggression against Ukrainians. 

Bribing the press worldwide

Russia keeps bribing the press around the world to spread lies about Ukraine. Its propaganda machine is nothing new, but we keep discovering the reach of its blood-soaked cash every day. Somehow “independent” foreign journalists continue to be exposed for being paid by the Russian propagandists. You just have to follow the money. See this recent report from The Guardian: 

The revelation that the broadcaster Hubert Seipel accepted payments from an oligarch is causing worry in Germany that Russia is using an old playbook to promote its interests. 

Again, I urge you to search for articles and read about this. Once more: do you think the Russians really want to negotiate for peace? 

Continuous threat

I can go on, and on. And on. It is by now obvious what Putin’s plan is for Ukraine — a long-term occupation. They don’t want peace “negotiations”, they need a break to prepare their army for a new attack.

I just ask you to read this post from a top government official, and former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now Deputy Chair of the Security Council of the Russian Federation: 

“The existence of Ukraine is deadly for its residents. I mean not only the current state, the Bandera political regime. I’m talking about any, absolutely any Ukraine.

“The presence of an independent state on historical Russian territories will be a constant reason for the resumption of military actions. It’s too late. Whoever is at the helm of the cancerous entity called Ukraine, it won’t add legitimacy to its rule and the legal standing of the “country” itself. 

“Therefore, the likelihood of a new clash will persist indefinitely. Almost always. Moreover, there is a hundred percent chance of a new conflict, no matter what safety agreements the West signs with the puppet Kyiv regime. Neither Ukraine’s association with the EU nor its entry into Nato will prevent it. This can happen in ten or fifty years.

“That’s why the existence of Ukraine is fatal for Ukrainians. 

“Ultimately, they are practical people. No matter how much they may wish death to Russians now. No matter how much they may hate the Russian leadership. No matter how much they aspire to the mythical EU and Nato. Choosing between eternal war and inevitable death and life, the absolute majority of Ukrainians (except perhaps for a minimal number of radical nationalists) will ultimately choose life. They will understand that life in a larger common state, which they may not love so much now, is better than death. Their death and the death of their loved ones. And the sooner Ukrainians realise this, the better”. 

Let me repeat: they don’t want peaceful negotiations. They need a break so they can continue killing.

The next time I’m going to explain why they desperately need a break — we’ll talk about their “unsinkable” warships that went down this year and their multiple “unbeatable” fighter planes that hit the ground recently. DM