With an international coalition including the United States continuing to deploy increasingly prohibitive diplomatic sanctions against Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin remains unfazed as he orders his troops to continue pounding Ukraine with violent military salvos.
So is there any diplomatic solution that would persuade Russia to back down? Rose Gottemoeller, a former Deputy Secretary General of NATO who now serves as a distinguished lecturer at Stanford University, told WWL Radio that the problem lies in Putin’s refusal to settle for anything less than everything he wants.
“At the moment, it’s all ‘Russia wins and Ukraine loses’ from the perspective of Vladimir Putin,” Gottemoeller said of Putin’s willingness to negotiate any sort of win-win outcome. “So, all of the offramps that we’ve been trying to offer him in terms of starting up some negotiations on issues of European security that concern him, all of these offramps he has rejected and continued with his maximalist demands. So I’m not seeing much territory for compromise at the moment.”
As for Putin’s endgame, Gottemoeller said the Russian ruler wants to restore all of the Russian language speakers in eastern Europe under one blanket rule once more, but that his goal is not shared by the sovereign nations he’s looking to reabsorb into “Mother Russia.”
“This is not going to work,” Gottemoeller said. “He can’t get his Slavic heartland because Ukraine is independent, and also it’s heading to the West. It wants to join the European Union, and it wants to join NATO.
And those are really good goals.”
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