Russia and the US did not make progress toward a peace deal for Ukraine during their talks, a senior aide to Vladimir Putin has said, hours after the Russian president issued threats that Russia was ready for war with Europe.
In remarks to Russian media, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said that after a five-hour meeting with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the two sides were “neither further nor closer to resolving the crisis in Ukraine. There is a lot of work to be done.”
The downbeat assessment of Tuesday night’s diplomacy follows combative opening statements from Putin as Witkoff and Kushnerarrived for talks at the Kremlin, in which he accused European powers of sabotaging peace in Ukraine and that “European demands” on ending the war were “not acceptable to Russia”.
What indicatiors are those? All the third party analyses that I can find show that Russia is still the second most militarily powerful nation in the world, with a huge reserve of tanks, planes, missiles and manpower to fight with, with production only speeding up.
It’s not all peachy for Russia by any means, but to assume they are weak because of their failures in Ukraine is disingenuous. If they wanted to sacrifice their readiness against NATO, they could absolutely take Ukraine. But no one is going to make their homeland vulnerable for land expansion, it doesn’t make sense.
They aren’t ready against any major power, Europe, US or China.