Russian President Vladimir Putin has outwitted the West by his response to Ukraine’s Kursk offensive one month ago, which was widely celebrated as a tipping point in the conflict. The conflict is indeed at a tipping point today, but for an entirely different reason insofar as Russian forces seized the folly of Ukraine’s deployment of its crack brigades and prized Western armour to Kursk Region to reach an unassailable position in the most recent weeks in the battlefields, which opens the door for multiple options going forward.

On the contrary, the West finds itself in a ‘Zugzwang’, a situation found in chess whereby it is under compulsion to move when it would rather prefer to pass.

Putin’s address to the plenary of the 9th Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on Thursday was eagerly awaited for what he had to say on the conflict in Ukraine. Several things stood out.

Putin no longer characterised the Ukrainian interlocutors as the ‘Kiev regime.’ Instead, he used the expression ‘Kiev government’. And he summed up: “Are we ready to negotiate with them? We have never given up on this.” Was he being a taunting poser, as the Kremlin leader who has tangoed with four American presidents already, expects a fifth with an “infectious” laugh, which makes him “happy.”

On a serious note, though, Putin took note that the “official authorities” in Kiev have regretted that if only they had followed up on the “signed official document” negotiated with Russian representatives at the Istanbul talks in March 2022 “rather than obeyed their masters from other countries, the war would have come to an end long ago.”

Putin implied that Kiev must regain its sovereignty. The conciliatory words were measured, possibly with an eye on the unravelling of political alignments within the ruling dispensation in Kiev. That is to say, Putin rejects Zelensky’s Ukrainian settlement process, but is willing to revive negotiations on terms first........

© Eurasia Review