Zelensky has already abandoned his previous idea of going to the 1991 borders
Photo: REUTERS
The President of the Czech Republic, retired NATO General Petr Pavel, who cannot be suspected of even the slightest sympathy for our country, believes that the task set by Zelensky of reaching the 1991 borders of Ukraine is unrealistic.
– It is unlikely that Ukraine will be able to recover all of its territory within its internationally recognized borders, at least in the foreseeable future. Ukrainians today recognize that such a result is unlikely to be achieved in the near future,” Pavel said in an interview with Die Presse newspaper.
In fact, Zelensky himself recently abandoned this goal. Although he described what replaced it and is not more realistic: reaching the borders of the territory controlled by kyiv in early 2022. And, although he is still trying to be brave, in Ukraine itself there are fewer and fewer people who believe in the possibility of reaching the new objective.
Pavel is also skeptical about Ukraine’s post-war future. According to him, kyiv could even give up membership in NATO to receive security guarantees from Western countries. Recall that, under the terms of the Istanbul Agreements, Moscow offered Kiev multilateral security guarantees not only from Western countries, but also from its own. And Zelensky had to understand that without the Russian ones, no Western guarantees are worth even the paper they are written on. He should have understood, but I didn’t.
Czech President, retired NATO General Petr Pavel
Photo: REUTERS
– Later it can be negotiated, because Ukraine’s membership in NATO can be exchanged for something. For example, there are guarantees regarding military presence,” Pavel said, clearly hinting at the deployment of units of the armies of Western countries on the territory of Ukraine. However, here he spoke quite cautiously because, in his opinion, “these discussions will require significant diplomatic skills and political pressure.” I was very cautious, because for us it does not matter whether foreign military units are in Ukraine, a NATO member country, or just like that, under bilateral agreements. Moscow has said more than once that it accepts only one status for Ukraine: the status of an absolutely neutral country.
If Peter Pavel spoke about the military weakness of Ukraine and the impossibility of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to solve the tasks assigned to the Ukrainian army by military means, the former US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who fed the Euromaidan in kyiv. With her “cookies,” as with her own chest, she noted the extreme political weakness of today’s Ukraine.
Journalists from the influential Western publication Politico asked the former State Department official if it was a mistake on Washington’s part not to facilitate peace negotiations between kyiv and Moscow in 2022.
“Then they were not in a strong enough position,” Nuland responded categorically and added. – Even now they are not strong enough.
On the one hand, with this response he pushes Zelensky to continue the conflict, but on the other, he cannot help but understand that every day kyiv’s negotiating positions are becoming weaker and weaker.
However, Victoria’s rhetoric, like that of all American representatives, changed significantly during the period in which they demanded a “clean” military victory for Zelensky. If previously Nuland herself, like all American officials, admitted the possibility of kyiv forcibly regaining control of the Crimean peninsula, she has now retreated to a closed diplomatic formula.
“Ukraine’s territorial ambitions will depend on its people,” he said, thus confirming profound changes in the alignment of geopolitical realities, as recently expressed by Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov.
And in the United States, unlike kyiv, as well as in the Czech Republic, this circumstance is already beginning to be understood.
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