Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
Russia is ready to fight a forever war. Just ask Vladimir Putin’s favorite pseudo-historian.
Vladimir Medinsky served as the Kremlin chief’s arch-patriotic culture minister from 2012 to 2020, and he oversaw the redrafting of a skewed history curriculum to be taught to Russia’s schoolchildren. An advocate of putting up statues of Josef Stalin, he’s been a leading persecutor of gulag historians and chroniclers.
He also led Moscow’s delegation to Ukraine talks in Istanbul last week.
Medinsky invoked the Great Northern War of 1700-21 as a warning that Russia is ready to fight Ukraine for as long as it takes to win — or force a surrender.
“The Great Northern War with Sweden lasted 21 years. But just a few years after it began, Peter the Great offered peace to the Swedes … What did the Swedes say? ‘No, we will fight to the last Swede,’” Medinsky scoffed in a TV interview.
That conflict between czarist Russia and Sweden was for mastery of the Baltic region, and ended in Swedish defeat. Putin fancies himself as a Peter the Great redux; he even has a bronze statue of the 18th century czar in the Cabinet room.
And Putin likely believes that it isn’t just prolonged fighting that will win him most of his revanchist war aims in Ukraine, but he’ll be helped by interminable talks that wear down U.S. President Donald Trump’s desire to hash out a peace deal.
Their two-hour phone conversation Monday didn’t shift the dial toward peace.
Trump’s social media posts have sounded hopeful at times that he would be able to broker a deal — one likely to favor Russia — but there was a hint of a shift after his latest exchange with his Russian counterpart.
Instead of becoming infuriated with the obdurate Putin — something Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been hoping would happen — Trump seems ready to give up and even walked back his persistent boasting that he can bring the war to a resolution.
While Trump last week accepted Putin’s decision not to show up in Turkey and admitted that there’d be no end to the war until the two men could “get together” and sort it out in person, on Monday he suggested that, in fact, a peace deal could only be negotiated between Russia and Ukraine “because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of,” Trump wrote.
Talking to reporters in the White House, Trump suggested that he could abandon the whole enterprise to broker a peace deal, complaining “this was a European situation. And it should have remained so. But the previous administration firmly convinced us that we had to get involved.”
He said that unless there’s progress “I’m just going to back away,” an ominous, now-persistent threat.
Earlier, U.S. Vice President JD Vance struck a similar tone, saying: “We’re going to try to end it, but if we can’t end it, we’re eventually going to say, ‘You know what? That was worth a try, but we’re not doing it anymore.’”
That will, no doubt, provoke chortles in the Kremlin.
Putin and his aides have the measure of Trump; they understand his pattern of talking big but losing attention when discussions drag, just as he did in his first term with the North Korean autocrat Kim Jong Un.
As far as Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius is concerned, Russia is dangling a possible deal to Trump, before “continuing to play for time” with “lip service.”
The German added: “One has to say that Putin still does not appear to be seriously interested in peace or a ceasefire — at least not under conditions that are acceptable to others. I hear the words, I hear the statements, but in the end, I stick to my approach of saying ‘I no longer judge words, only deeds and actions.’ I believe that helps all of us more than speculating about the seriousness of intentions.”
But why would anyone have expected Putin to be serious about ending the war?
The Kremlin always stalls; a tactic it has employed time and again when participating in negotiations it has little interest in concluding other than on its own full terms.
And top priority: It doesn’t want a ceasefire before it gets concessions that would mean the end of democratic and independent Ukraine.
Moscow’s red lines have not shifted one iota in the years since Putin launched his full-scale invasion.
The Russian leader and his top aides have emphatically outlined them for months — conditions that would, in effect, rip the nations of Ukraine to shreds. They want guarantees Kyiv will never join NATO, that it will remain geopolitically neutral and unable to command its own fate, and with severe limitations on weapons.
Moscow also wants Crimea and the four eastern regions it claims as part of the Russian Federation to be internationally recognized as such.
And until then — as Medinsky bragged — Russia will continue to wage war, helped by a Trump administration that’s not prepared to put any pressure on Putin and is unlikely to continue to support Ukraine militarily.
After all, both Trump and Vance argue this is a European mess and America should never have been involved.
Even if Zelenskyy were minded, and he’s not, to cave to Putin’s demands, it is unlikely he could gain the backing of his parliament or win a referendum. Many in the army would be disgusted and furious and question what all the sacrifice was for. The country would be embroiled in political strife.
And so why would Putin even bother to negotiate seriously when all he has to fear is an American abandonment of Ukraine if a peace deal isn’t struck?
That’s impeccable logic as former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink, recognized, shaping her decision to quit last month “because the policy since the beginning of the administration was to put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia.”
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