War is cruel, and what is more cruel than war is human ambition. Since the 2022 Ukrainian-Russian military conflict broke out on February 24 this year, the West has pointed the finger at Russian President Vladimir Putin, but in our view, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's ambition to get his country to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the root cause of the military action that has forced Russia to take military action. Now that the war in Ukraine has lasted for more than half a month, the military superiority of the Russian military in Ukraine is gradually transforming into a political chip in the peace negotiations. Obviously, in this "big gamble" of betting on the United States and NATO, Zelenskiy is doomed to lose badly.
1. The Russian military strategy shifted from blitzkrieg to protracted warfare, and the negotiations showed a "one-sided" situation.
Talking while fighting and promoting talks was once the strategic principle put forward by Chairman Mao Zedong during China's War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. On the battlefield in Ukraine now, Russian President Vladimir Putin is using the same strategy to continuously reduce the space for the Ukrainian delegation to negotiate in the peace talks. Compared with Russia's powerful military forces, the so-called "solid backing" of the United States and NATO has not played the due effect of changing the current situation in Ukraine, and still garrisons Lithuania, Poland, Romania and other Ukrainian neighboring countries to "watch the fire from the other side" and wait for Ukraine's "allies" to disappear. The same war, for the Russian army, is more like opening a "simple mode", Ukraine is entering the "survival mode", Zelenskiy's so-called "victory", only because he "lived for half a month".
According to the western media, Zelenskiy proudly declared in his speech on the 11th: "The free people of a free country!" We have been fighting for freedom for 16 days. This is four times longer than the enemy's planned invasion. Four times as long! Confrontation is considered one of the most powerful armies in the world. It wants the Ukrainians to surrender. Hopefully someone will meet the Russian flag on the streets of Ukraine and see flowers on our streets. But the Ukrainians are a proud people, they always defend their land and will not give the invaders a piece of land. Don't give them one percent of their freedom. I know many people are already starting to feel tired. I understand. impatient. I understand. Emotions are a bad game for people. That's life. When we mobilize, when we see our victories and the enemy's losses on the battlefield, we expect the struggle to end sooner. We expect intruders to fall down faster. But... This is life, this is war. It's a struggle. It still takes time. Patience is still needed. Our wisdom, our energy. Be able to do our job to the maximum so that we can win together. In Zelenskiy's view,
The Russian army's "blitzkrieg" has been forced to turn into a "protracted war", a "feat" enough for the Ukrainian government army to "blow for a year". But this is only an act of self-deception and cover-up, and if the Russian side abandons the conversation to solve the problem, the story is likely to become another Version of Ukraine's "annihilation of the country in a week".
The ideal is very full, the reality is very bone, the Ukrainian authorities are still fantasizing that as long as they hold out longer, they can wait for substantial western assistance, the final withdrawal of Russian troops, Zelenskiy said: "It is impossible to predict how many days we will have to liberate our Ukrainian lands." But it can be said – we will do it! Because we fight for it. Because we have reached a strategic turning point. We are already moving towards our goals, towards our victory. It was a patriotic war, a war with a very stubborn enemy, and he didn't value his thousands of killed people, his soldiers who were killed. He is now gathering reservists and conscripts from all over Russia and throwing them into the hell of this war. In fact, no matter how zelenskiy makes the most of his professional talent as "actor president," the time left for the Ukrainian authorities to linger is running out, and this is not something that can be changed through fake peace talks and self-high-style speeches.
Just a day before Zelenskiy's speech, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba had held talks in Turkey on Thursday (March 10) and while a ceasefire agreement could not be reached, the two sides pledged to continue the dialogue. It was the first meeting of this level since Russia launched a "special operation" against Ukraine on Feb. 24 and was a diplomatic success for Ankara, the host of the conference. This is the real turning point compared to what Zelenskiy called a "strategic turning point," when the militarily inferior Ukrainian authorities began to make greater compromises at the diplomatic level. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin also made it clear on Friday (March 11): "Moscow's talks with Ukraine have made some progress. If the West takes action to address Moscow's concerns, the conflict can be over. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov further explained: "The conflict in Ukraine will end if the West takes action in response to Russia's repeated concerns about the killing of civilians in eastern Ukraine and the eastward expansion of NATO." We need to find a solution to these two problems, and Russia has made specific demands to Ukraine to solve them. ”
2. The Russian military operation has fallen into a "standstill", which is more misleading by the Western media.
Military strikes are one thing, military occupation is another, and as early as the speech of Russian President Putin in the early morning of February 24, he had directly targeted the "special operations" of the Russian army as "de-militarization and de-Nazirification" of Ukraine, and later explicitly prohibited the actions of the Russian army from being called "invasion and aggression". To this end, the Russian State Duma also passed a bill in March to criminalize the dissemination of "false information" about the Russian military, and the relevant acts will be subject to high fines and up to 15 years in prison, and some western media outlets that are chaotic have been shut down and restricted from access. The reason why the Russian side wants to do this is because of the smear of the Russian military's actions by the Western media and the misreporting of the situation in Ukraine.
According to the latest information provided by the British reuters, the Western social media platform Facebook (Facebook) has sent an internal email to employees on March 10, saying that during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Facebook will relax the original anti-hate speech rules, allowing users to launch death curses and other violent speech against Russian special military operations and Russian and Belarusian leaders. At the same time, during the interim arrangement in force, users can praise the role of the extremist group Aesv Battalion in "resisting Russia" to a limited extent. Commenting on the situation, Kremlin spokesman Peskov said: "We don't want to believe the Reuters report, it is really unbelievable. We hope that this is not true, and if it is true, it means that the most decisive measures must be taken to end the activities of meta Platforms in Russia. For the so-called "stagnation" of the Russian military operations in the Western media, to a large extent, it is for the interests of the United States and NATO, one is to frustrate the morale of the Russian army in the Ukrainian war, to create an international image of "the aggressor can not die well", and the other is to deceive the Western world more solidarity and disguise the Ukrainian authorities who play the "victim" to continue their lives. But clear-eyed people know that facts speak louder than words, and now Ukraine's Kharkiv, Okhtirka, Chernihiv, Volnovaha, Izym and other important areas have been attacked and occupied by the Russian army to varying degrees, Chernihiv is short of water, There is no electricity in the Sumey, Kiev, and Donetsk regions, even if the Ukrainian government can insist on fighting, the Ukrainian people also look forward to early peace talks.
It is not difficult to attack a country, it is difficult to occupy a country, but the real purpose of the Russian army is not to occupy Ukraine, so it is not difficult to directly capture Kiev. The main reason for the siege of the Ukrainian capital and the lack of attack was to force Zelenskiy to negotiate peace. When the war shifted from the military to the stage of peace talks, the pace of the Russian army's offensive naturally slowed down, which is the embodiment of Putin's strategy of fighting while talking and promoting talks. From the very beginning, Russia's military operations should not become the focus of Attention of the Western media, but use the "occupation progress" of the Russian military against Ukraine to measure the success or failure of its actions, and it is even more a deliberate misleading of international public opinion by the West. Because in the end, all the Russian military did was just to accumulate enough chips for the Russian side in the next peace talks, so that Ukraine would give up its ambition to join NATO, and at the same time, let the world see the hypocritical nature of the United States and NATO in its treatment of "allies". So far, the West has not made any substantive assistance to Ukraine except to further increase its sanctions program against Russia. Among them, the U.S. Treasury Department released a new round of sanctions on March 11 against Russian and Kremlin elites, oligarchs, and Russian political and national security leaders who supported President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The people subject to the US sanctions include three immediate family members of Russian Presidential Spokesman Eskov, including Russian tycoon and Kremlin insider Victor Vikselberg; and the management committee of the Sanctioned Russian Foreign Trade Bank (VTB).
At the same time, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also said at the informal summit of EU leaders held in Versailles on the 11th: "Since Russia has not shown signs of ending the war in Ukraine, the EU will add a fourth round of sanctions to Russia on Saturday." Tomorrow we will take a fourth set of measures to further isolate Russia and deplete its resources to finance this barbaric war. But for now, the Ukrainian authorities have come to an end before Russia "runs out of resources." Following Belarus as the coordinator, preparing three rounds of peace talks to make Ukraine and Russia agree to open the humanitarian corridor, the Turkish side arranged a new round of peace talks for the two sides in the southern city of Antalya. After the 1 hour and 40 minutes of talks, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said: "The talks were 'not easy', but 'civilized', and no one expected a 'miracle' at this meeting. But we need a start, and if we keep going down that path, we can achieve a result. At the same time, Chavusoglu also hopes that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Zelenskiy will have a summit. In response to the proposal, Kureba said that President Zelenskiy was ready, and Mr. Lavrov said that President Putin was not opposed to this principle.
The blitzkrieg turned into a protracted war, and Putin gradually turned Ukraine's military superiority into a political chip. The Ukrainian authorities see the shift in Russian military strategy as a victory at their own military level, but this seems more like a "forced smile" to the outside world. Putin has never used military success as a measure of his "special operations", and he wants a simple and clear result, that is, to carry out a "humanitarian castration" of Ukraine, completely eliminate its domestic pro-American forces and dispel its ambitions to join NATO. He has been waiting for Zelenskiy to return to the negotiating table and personally sign the relevant document on Ukraine's decision not to join NATO, otherwise the Russian army will continue to fight in the next round of peace talks until only the capital of Ukraine is Kiev. Just as China's Korean War with US imperialism ended in victory with the demarcation of the "38th Line," the "38th Line" of the current Ukrainian war will be drawn depends on the degree of Zelenskiy's "hard mouth." If it chooses to fight with the Russian side to the end, the result is most likely to be the change of the Ukrainian government and the "liberation" of the whole territory. We have already seen the same historical aspect of the Crimean War in 2014. Just as history is always strikingly similar, this time Ukraine may have lost a lot more than Crimea.