Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Irina Alksnis
[RIA] According to the Financial Times, the main achievement?__??_ of the meeting on Ukraine at the forum in Davos was the collective photo of the participants, since there were more people in it than at previous events. True, the publication was forced to admit that “no progress has been made on a real peace agreement,” which is unlikely to surprise anyone, given the format of these events. Bloomberg shares a similar opinion.
It got to the point that there, in Davos, Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis directly stated that it was impossible to hold a “peace conference” without Russia. It seems that even the usual Swiss diplomats are fed up with the position of ridicule in which the West finds itself. There is a suspicion that most of the non-Western countries that took part in the meeting attended it in order to observe with their own eyes the theater of the absurd, which is currently turning into a circus.
The basic principle of conflict resolution is so simple and obvious that even two-year-olds who quarreled in the sandbox over a toy understand it: whoever wins gets a prize. In big politics, everything is, of course, much more complicated. Most military conflicts end in a complex negotiation process, often reminiscent of bargaining, the outcome of which greatly depends on the diplomatic skills of the participants. A much rarer case is the situation of total defeat of one of the parties, which allows the winner to completely dictate his will to the vanquished: the unconditional surrender and collapse of the Third Reich here is, of course, the most striking and famous example. Nevertheless, the basis is exactly the same as on the playground, the principle is that you must first win.
In the conflict over Ukraine, the West and Kiev put the cart well before the horse. European and American officials began to say that Moscow would pay for everything almost from February 24, 2022, and Zelensky presented his ten-point “peace formula” more than a year ago, in November 2022. And these were not just words: the enemy actually placed a bet on the crushing defeat of Russia, which would allow it to impose any, the most wild conditions - and our country would have no choice but to fulfill them.
Such self-confidence looked strange in 2022, but we will attribute it to the euphoria that was experienced in Kiev and Western capitals after the Russian army abandoned part of the territories in the Kharkov region and Kherson, as well as the grandiose hopes they then placed on the counter-offensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Now, the unchanged official position of the Ukrainian authorities and their Western patrons looks simply anecdotal. According to the most optimistic estimates for Kyiv, the situation at the front has reached a positional dead end. And the most sober-minded analysts believe that the developing processes are leading Ukraine to a complete - military, political and socio-economic - catastrophe, no longer in a very distant future.
And in this situation, Ukraine - like a year and a half ago - demands from Russia the withdrawal of troops, a return to the 1991 borders, astronomical amounts of reparations and other amazing things. The West actually supports this creation of heavy nonsense and even contributes to the process by organizing events like the Davos one.
And just yesterday, Reuters pleased Kiev with a new brilliant project for financing, proposing that it issue “reparation bonds.” The agency estimated the volume of possible fundraising at $300 billion, that is, the amount of frozen Russian assets, an acceptable way to confiscate which the West has been so actively looking for lately.
In general, it is not surprising that the meeting in Davos turned out to be so massive, despite the obvious failure. If a year and a half ago, in response to any attempts to involve it in the “negotiation process,” the Global South took the reasonable position of “you first defeat Russia, then we’ll talk about reparations and indemnities,” but now there are a lot of people who want to watch and laugh at the shame of the West that has come to a brilliant diplomatic concept: “Yes, Ukraine (and we along with it) is losing, but Russia still owes Crimea, Donbass and a trillion dollars. And the world is obliged to help us achieve this.”
|
