The Kremlin wants peace, but the war of wages. Despite the intensification of the negotiations to end the Russian invasion and after an unprecedented summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska, Russia continues to bombard the Ukrainian cities.
On Wednesday night, this Thursday, August 21, the Russian Army launched 574 drones and 40 missiles, a figure that has not been reached from a wave of strikes of more than 700 projectiles in early July. “The enemy attacked 614 aerial attack weapons,” said the Ukraine Telegram Air Force, ensuring that he had shot 546 drones and 31 missiles.
These attacks killed two people, one in Kherson and another in Lviv, in the west of the country, an area generally less directed by the bombing, local authorities said. The explosions also resonated in Kyiv during the night.
“Putin doesn’t want to stop the war and I never wanted it”
How to interpret this war resurgence, amid the conversations carried out under the leadership of the United States? “Vladimir Putin hoped to get everything he wanted from the summit in Alaska and that Donald Trump tear kyiv a kind of capitulation in the process, this is not what happened”, the decipators of BFMTV Ulrich Bounat, geopolitical analyst and specialist in the center and east of Europe.
By continuing his assault against Ukraine, the Kremlin “sends the message that the negotiations will last and the more he will attack Ukraine. So kyiv should, according to the Russians, leave their weapons now instead of trying to resist their power,” continues Ulrich Bounat.
Nicolas Tenzer, geostrategy teacher in Sciences Po and Russia specialist, believes in BFMTV that these strikes are new evidence that “Putin does not want to stop war and I never wanted it.”
An analysis shared by the French government. The Russian attacks carried out on Wednesday night to Thursday “illustrate the lack of Russian will to participate seriously in favor of peace conversations,” a spokesman for French diplomacy said Thursday. “While Russia says he is ready to negotiate, he continues at the same time his mortal attacks against the Ukrainian territory,” added Quai d’Orsay.
The Putin-Zelensky Summit moves away
In this context, the possibility of a summit between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, wanted by Donald Trump in two weeks, seems to get away. The Ukrainian president said that a meeting with his counterpart would only be possible after having determined the main lines of an agreement with Westernists on security guarantees for Ukraine.
But for his part, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday that any deployment of a European military quota in Ukraine, mentioned by Washington as one of these possible security guarantees, would be “unacceptable” for Moscow.
The Russian diplomat has a little more doubt about the possibility of a meeting of Zelensky-Poutine by questioning the legitimacy of Ukrainian President. According to him, the summit can only take place “only that, when it is time to sign future agreements, the question of the legitimacy of the person signed in the name of Ukraine has been resolved.” The head of Russian diplomacy finally accused Ukraine of not wanting a “fair and sustainable settlement” of the conflict opened by Moscow in 2022.
“Currently, the signs sent by Russia are simply indecent. They are trying to escape the need to organize a meeting,” Volodymyr Zelensky reacted in their daily direction on social networks.
“We are at a complete dead point,” summarizes General Jérôme Pellistrandi, editor -in the main review of the National Defense and the Defense Consultant for BFMTV.
“I do not see how we can organize the slightest discussion in these conditions, except that Zelensky comes to sign his surrender,” says our expert.
A Ukrainian “response” backed by Trump?
For French diplomacy, Russian night attack “testify (…) to the need to maintain and strengthen pressure on Russia.” “The Russians led this attack as if nothing had changed, as if a global action was not carried out to end this war. This requires an answer,” said Volodymyr Zelensky, looking at Washington, and added that an American electronics company had been bombarded.
At the Alaska Summit, Donald Trump had not been able to obtain a fire from Vladimir Putin and had stored behind the Russian request to “directly conclude a peace agreement that would end the war.” But the inflexibility of the Kremlin in the negotiations and the war that continues in the front seems to undermine its position.
The day after the new Russian bombings, the US president published an enigmatic message on his social network. “It’s very difficult, if not impossible, winning a war without attacking the invading country,” he wrote. “Joe Biden, dishonest and approximately incompetent, did not allow Ukraine to retaliate, just defending himself,” added the Republican, without saying if he had more supporting kyiv’s army.
The US president published in the process a assembly compared to his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska and an exchange between Richard Nixon and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in the middle of the cold war.
Donald Trump, who alternates the threats and the approach with the Kremlin, will turn against his Russian counterpart? Jacques Faure, former French ambassador to Ukraine, says in BFMTV “hoping that what Russia has done tonight makes it think.”
Source: BFM TV
