What does Putin want and will Russia end its war?

When Vladimir Putin shattered peace in Europe by waging war against a democracy of 44 million people, his justification was that the modern Western-leaning Ukraine was a constant threat and that Russia could not feel “safe, develop and exist”.

But after weeks of bombing, thousands of deaths and an exodus of millions of refugees, the question remains: what is their war goal and is there a way out?

The goals he set for himself at the start of the invasion of Russia seem to have been diluted over the course of a war he assumed would be quickly won. He could not even admit that it was an invasion or a war, preferring the fiction of a “special military operation”.

But what is clear is that he sees this as a turning point in Russian history. “Russia’s future and its future place in the world are at stake,” says foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin.

The Russian leader’s initial goal was to invade Ukraine and topple its government, forever ending his desire to join the Western defensive alliance, NATO.

He told the Russian people that his goal was to “demilitarize and denazify Ukraine,” to protect people subjected to what he called eight years of intimidation and genocide by the Ukrainian government. “It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory. We do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force, ”he insisted.

But there were no Nazis and no genocide, and Russia has imposed brutal force on dozens of towns and cities and has united Ukrainians in opposition to its occupation.

The bombing continues, but the latest reports from the peace talks suggest that Russia is no longer seeking to topple the government and is instead aiming for a neutral Ukraine.

Since Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, it has gradually drifted towards the West, both the EU and NATO.

Russia’s leader intends to reverse that, seeing the fall of the Soviet Union as the “disintegration of historical Russia.”

He has stated that the Russians and the Ukrainians are one people. “Ukraine never had a genuine state tradition,” he claimed, denying Ukraine its history.

In 2013, he pressured Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych not to sign an agreement with the European Union, sparking protests that ultimately expelled the Ukrainian in February 2014.

Russia retaliated in 2014 by seizing Ukraine’s southern region of Crimea and sparking a rebellion in the east, backing separatists who have fought Ukrainian forces in an eight-year war that has claimed 14,000 lives. .

There was a ceasefire and a 2015 Minsk peace agreement that was never implemented. Just before his invasion, President Putin tore up the peace agreement and recognized two Russian-backed states as independent from Ukraine.

When he sent in the troops, he accused NATO of threatening “our historical future as a nation”, claiming baselessly that NATO countries wanted to take the war to Crimea.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak believes a ceasefire could begin in the coming days because Russian forces are stuck in their current positions.

Both sides have spoken positively of the progress in the negotiations and Podolyak says that the Russian president has softened his demands.

At the start of the war, the Russian leader wanted Ukraine to recognize Crimea as part of Russia and recognize the independence of the separatist-led east. Ukraine would have to change its constitution to ensure that it would not join NATO and the EU.

The future status of Crimea and the Russian-backed petty states in Luhansk and Donetsk is still far from resolved, but may not be a deal breaker if the two sides agree to address that issue at a later date.

Russia seems to have accepted that it cannot depose Ukraine’s leadership and replace it with a puppet government, as in Belarus. President Volodymyr Zelensky said at the start of the war that he had been warned that “the enemy has designated me as target number one; my family is target number two.”

“It feels like [Putin] will have to accept a much more limited list,” says Tatiana Stanovaya of the analytics firm RPolitik and the Carnegie Moscow Center.

That’s because Russia is considering a “neutral and demilitarized” Ukraine with its own army and navy, along the lines of Austria or Sweden, which are members of the EU. Austria is neutral, but Sweden is not. In fact, it is not aligned and participates in NATO exercises.

Not everyone is convinced that Russia is negotiating in good faith. France’s foreign minister says Moscow should declare a ceasefire first, because talks are not held “with a gun to your head.”

Ukraine’s requirements are clear, says the presidential adviser: a ceasefire and the withdrawal of Russian troops, but also legally binding security guarantees that would give Ukraine protection from a group of allied countries that would actively prevent attacks and ” would take an active part on the Ukrainian side in the conflict.

Securing Russian military withdrawal to pre-war positions will not only be a demand for Ukraine, it will also be a red line for the West, which will refuse to accept another of Russia’s “frozen conflicts,” says Marc Weller, professor of international law and former UN mediation expert.

Ukraine has also softened its stance since Russia’s invasion, and President Zelensky said Ukrainians now understood that NATO would not admit them to membership: “It is a truth and it must be recognized.”

“We are working on documents that the presidents will be able to discuss further and sign. Obviously this will come soon because it is the only way to end this war,” Podolyak told US broadcaster PBS.

If anything, the Russian president has redoubled his hatred of the West and its 30-member defensive military alliance. He may be considering a compromise with Ukraine, but for him, the West has one goal: to divide society in Russia and ultimately destroy it.

Before the war, he demanded that NATO turn back the clock to 1997 and reverse its eastward expansion, withdrawing its forces and military infrastructure from member states that joined the alliance since 1997 and not deploying “strike weapons near the borders of Russia. That means Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries.

In the eyes of President Putin, the West promised in 1990 that NATO would expand “not an inch east,” but did so anyway.

However, that was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, so the promise made to then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev only referred to East Germany in the context of a reunified Germany. Gorbachev later said that “the issue of NATO expansion was never discussed” at the time.

Having witnessed Putin’s willingness to raze European cities to achieve his goals, Western leaders are now under no illusions.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz believes that Russia’s president “wants to take over Europe according to his world view” and President Joe Biden has called him a war criminal. Both Scholz and Frenchman Emmanuel Macron have spoken of a continent at a turning point in its history.

Before the war, Russia demanded that all US nuclear weapons beyond its national territories be banned. The United States had offered to start talks on limiting short- and medium-range missiles, as well as on a new treaty on intercontinental missiles, but there is little chance of that happening for now.

Tatiana Stanovaya fears a spiral into a new Cold War confrontation: “I have very strong feelings that we must prepare for a new ultimatum to the West that will be more militarized and aggressive than we could have imagined.”

President Putin has been stunned by the scale of the Western response to his invasion. He knew that NATO members would never set foot in Ukraine, but he could not have guessed the extent of the sanctions that are already having a dramatic effect on Russia’s economy, and he is furious.

The EU, US, UK and Canada attacked Russia’s economy in various ways:

No peace agreement with Ukraine will end these sanctions, and Vladimir Putin knows it. Instead, he has turned against the Russians who have opposed the war.

Nearly 15,000 anti-war protesters have been jailed and virtually all independent media have been silenced.

There is no significant political opposition left, as they have either fled the country or, in the case of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, been jailed.

“The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors,” says the President of Russia.