(PresidentialHill.com)- Late last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that Moscow and Kiev had made progress in their peace talks. The Kremlin suggested that despite the progress, however, the war in the country will only end when the West takes action to address a myriad of concerns that Moscow has.
That presumably means that Russia wants the West to commit to never allowing Ukraine to join NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
During a meeting at the Kremlin with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Putin indicated that Western sanctions won’t be enough to stop Russia’s economic and military development, and that the country will end up stronger than it was before even when locked out of Western economies.
He also said that negotiations with Ukraine were continuing to take place every day.
“There are certain positive shifts, negotiators on our side tell me,” the Russian president said. “I will talk about all of this later.”
What those shifts are, however, we just don’t know.
The comments came after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with Dmytro Kuleba, his Ukrainian counterpart, in Turkey on Thursday. They were the highest-level talks to take place since Putin started his brutal, bloody invasion of Ukraine – but no breakthrough was made during the discussions.
It seems that, at this stage, the only thing Russia will accept is Ukraine agreeing to its conditions – which includes never joining NATO, adjusting the nation’s constitution to block it from joining other political blocs, and recognizing the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk.
If Putin believes a “positive shift” has occurred, then perhaps Ukraine is preparing to give in to those demands…
