Trump's strategy is missed. “Putin is focused on eternal war”

Donald Trump assumes that the threat of sanctions will force Vladimir Putin to make concessions. This is a missed strategy. The war in Ukraine has become an obsession with the Russian regime, and its leader assumes that it can last forever – writes the commentator on the New York Times on the eve of the peak in Alaska Masha Gessen.

Some theories regarding sanctions assume that economic, severe consequences of sanctions – unemployment, inflation, deficiencies of goods – lead to social dissatisfaction and even riots. Others say that the impoverished elites are prompted to organize a coup, or at least to put pressure on the government and forcing it to change politics. The problem with such theories is that they are wrong, especially in relation to Russia – notes the author.

Power and the elite in Russia do not worry about intermittently ordinary people, because the elites always remain wealthy. Society is not willing to organize protests. On the one hand, due to the fear that the elites, which are the distribution of work and goods, will take them even more, and the other – because their knowledge of the world is built on the message flowing from the media controlled by the power. Finally, at some stage of life problems, people stop being interested in politics at all because they are fighting for survival – says Gessen.

He adds that it is equally missed to assume that sanctions will prompt the Russian elite to rebel. Superboga Russians, who had previously lived in the West, who were cut off after the invasion of Ukraine, access to Western markets and the assets were frozen, “moved to such places as Dubai, or returned to Moscow. (…) that the economic cake to divide is shrinking, it does (…).

Such conditions of Russian reality is difficult to understand even Western political scientists, and for Trump it is almost impossible, because it assumes that “everyone's behavior is motivated by money.”

Meanwhile, for Putin, the war has become a political, psychological and economic priority – emphasizes Gessen. He reminds that the Kremlin pointed out the West several times that Piotr's war and Sweden began in 1700 and lasted 21 years.

Such a “constant war” that can continue for decades is currently in Ukraine. The negotiations of Trump, which is organized by a large “show”, will not put her end, because the only thing Putin is afraid of is a military failure – the author concludes. (PAP)

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