Timothy Ash: Putin is game playing with Easter truce offer

by Timothy Ash, a British economist covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa

Source: Timothy Ash on Substack

Game playing by Putin with the announcement of an Easter truce – just as Kyiv is hit by another drone attack. No doubt he is trying to outmanoeuvre Zelenskyy in front of Trump – make Zelenskyy appear unreasonable and give Trump pretext then to pull all US support for Ukraine.

Worth highlighting here that there have been 28-odd ceasefires since Russian troops first crossed Ukraine’s borders back in 2014 and Russia never abided by any of them including most recently back in Bakhmut.

We saw Putin play the truce/ceasefire game around the various Minsk negotiations and again he never abided by any of them.

Likely, Putin’s latest move comes as Trump threatens to walk away from peace talks if the sides don’t appear serious.

I am just debating if all this is being coordinated between the Trump and Putin teams to make Ukraine look bad, leave them isolated and let Trump do what he really wants to do and ally with Putin against China et al. Trump is desperate to normalise relations with Russia – get back to business.

Notable that in recent days we have seen Russia reveal what it sees as the basis for a permanent deal on Ukraine. And this is:

• Russia gets to keep and annex all five Ukrainian territories it currently wholly or partially occupies – so Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson.
• No NATO membership for Ukraine;
• No foreign troops in Ukraine (aside from the Russian ones!);
• No US military support for Ukraine;
• Lifting of sanctions on Russia;
• Russia gets back its frozen assets.

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