Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 12 – The failure
of Vladimir Putin to get a sit down with Donald Trump represents “the agony of
[the Kremlin’s] ‘Putin is Ours’ special operation” and is leading some in Putin’s
entourage to think about some kind of “hybrid capitulation” that both the US
and the Russian people will accept, according to Andrey Piontkovsky.
Ever more people in the Russian
capital, the commentator says, recognize that Putin’s play for Trump has “turned
out to be a very big mistake. Had Clinton won, everything would have ended with
another rest. In any case, the attitude of the US toward the Putin regime would
be much more positive” (apostrophe.ua/article/politics/2017-11-11/v-moskve-dumayut-ob-uhode-iz-ukrainyi-idut-ochen-sereznyie-protsessyi---andrey-piontkovskiy/15473).
That is because, Piontkovsky
continues, the closeness between Putin and Trump at a time of Russian
aggressiveness has mobilized “the majority of the military-political
establishment” against Moscow. As a
result, “Trump and [US Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson are not players on the
Ukrainian issue.”
Others are setting the American
agenda, and if Trump tries to be more upbeat, he will either be reined in or
ignored, the Russian analyst suggests.
All this has been clear since the July Black Hat Information Security
conference at which participants stressed that “Putin has practically declared
a hybrid war against the West and above all against the US.”
The US had no choice but to respond,
those taking part said, Piontkovsky argues; and that is what has happened in the
months since that time, with Congress pushing for more military assistance to
Europe and Ukraine and taking a tougher line on sanctions and other
restrictions on Russian activities.
The US
and the West more generally has been “very slow” in reacting to Russian
aggression, but now that it has, it is behaving more consistently and in a far
tougher way than the Kremlin thought was possible, Piontkovsky says. But what is obvious is that the Kremlin does
not have the resources to respond. Its reliance on boldness alone has now run
out of steam.
Many
in Putin’s entourage can see this, and they can see something else: Under the
new sanctions package, their personal wealth largely kept abroad is now at
risk. And they are thinking, Piontkovsky
insists, on how they can keep that wealth without losing power in Russia by appearing
to cave in to the US on Ukraine.
Unfortunately
for them, there is no obvious way forward as long as Putin is in power.
They
would be ready to withdraw from the Donbass if “the West would close its eyes
on Crimea. But the West has made its position clear: “’we will never recognize
the annexation of Crimea,’” just as the West never recognized the forcible
annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania by Stalin.
Putin
isn’t going to agree to US peacekeepers on the Russian border as some have proposed,
and he isn’t going to escalate in any serious way the military conflict in
Ukraine because if he does the West will provide Kyiv with lethal weapons, take
Russia off the SWIFT system, and impose other tools from its “large arsenal of
sanctions.”
Consequently, what is being talked about in Moscow, is
the possibility of some form of “hybrid capitulation – to find a formula for
Moscow which the West would accept as capitulation” and drop plans for
individual sanctions ‘but which the Kremlin could sell to its own population by
TV as the latest victory.”
Whether
this is possible with Putin or even possible at all remain open questions.
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