The latest from COTTonLINE’s current favorite foreign policy analyst - George Friedman - is out. In it he uses the current trilateral talks among the US, Ukraine, and Russia now happening in Dubai as a reason to itemize the many problems now facing Russia.
Taken together, he believes these could be sufficient to cause Russia to want to end the war in Ukraine. Sufficient, that is, if Putin can bring himself to recognize the corner into which he’s painted himself.
My hunch is that Friedman makes too little of the threat of peace to Putin’s personal survival. Putin sought to reestablish Russia as a world power. Accepting the status quo in Ukraine as “the best he could manage” against a much smaller adversary will be an admission of personal failure.
Admitting failure is something autocrats seldom survive and Putin’s knows it. Guilty of war crimes and of diminishing Russia’s might, he’s realizing there is no imaginable safe dismount from the tiger’s back.
As Hitler and Mussolini demonstrated, once you lose you die, by your own hand or those of others. So you struggle on to the end.
