Putin is a threat to everybody but he is losing the war badly and is humiliated – a swift peace deal is in his interests
IT is now nearly five weeks since Vladimir Putin started his wicked war with Ukraine. And he is losing.
His best troops are being defeated and his young conscripts are dying in large numbers — 16,000, we are told — at the hands of hard-fighting Ukrainian troops.
His forces have been fought to a standstill. They are not going forward, anywhere. Towns that were under Russian control — such as Irpin, near Kyiv, and Trostyanets, to the east — have been seized back.
Putin’s exhausted army can only bomb civilian areas and terrorise women and children. They’re good at that. But they’ve shown themselves hopeless at just about everything else.
The quick victory that Putin presumed never came.
Instead, he found that even his elite forces — his airborne troops — failed to hold on to their first objectives.
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They took Hostomel airfield just outside Kyiv but were immediately thrown out after fierce Ukrainian counter-attacks.
Humiliations for Putin
Then Putin switched to a manoeuvre war — pushing his armoured columns out from Russia, Belarus and the Crimea to capture Ukraine’s key cities.
Only one significant city was captured — Kherson, in the south.
Every day there were brave demonstrations in Kherson where unarmed civilians would confront Russian soldiers and their tanks, making it really clear the Russians were not welcome.
In other cities — in Sumy and Kharkiv, in Chernihiv and Konotop — the Russians are stuck outside their objectives.
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They haven’t even managed to surround Kyiv yet, after more than two weeks of trying.
Which leaves them with no strategy apart from pummelling civilian areas to rubble to break the Ukrainian spirit.
But like the rest of the world, the Russians might be taking a lesson from Mariupol — the southern city holding them up from controlling the whole coastal route from Russia to the Crimea.
In Putin’s original plan, Mariupol should have fallen within hours after Russian troops crossed the border. But now the city has held out for 34 days. Totally surrounded, pounded to rubble, no food, water or power, more than 100,000 people trapped, and what’s left of their defence forces fighting in the streets. Any rescuing forces more than 60 miles away.
We can all see what’s going to happen in Mariupol — and still they will not surrender.
Russia’s 4th Guards Tank Division — one of the legendary “hero units” at Stalingrad and the battles to reach Berlin during the last war — was routed when the Ukrainians recaptured the strategically important town of Trostyanets just four days ago.
For Putin, the military humiliations keep on coming.
So he may now be revising his objectives and starting to think of settling for something less — a lot less — than his original plan to “remove” Ukraine from the map of Europe.
Some of his henchmen are suggesting he concentrates now on the Donbas region in the south east, which Russia already partially seized, illegally, in 2014.
Maybe they should just grab the whole Donbas region and be content with that.
At least then Putin could claim some sort of victory from his lousy war.
Another potential objective — raised by a Ukrainian brigadier — is that Putin was to partition the country, much like Korea after World War Two.
This would hand the Russian leader a significant chunk of the land he is trying to seize.
But it would be too much for Ukraine’s President Zelensky.
Zelensky is being very clever in showing he is up for talks.
In a revealing interview with Russian journalists at the weekend, he has stated he is willing to adopt a neutral — and “non-nuclear” — status as part of a deal.
Zelensky's chess move
Putin, frustrated by Ukraine’s drift towards the EU and Nato, wants these things.
Zelensky would also be open to “compromise” on the Donbas region.
All of this would be subject to a referendum, and Russian troops with-drawing to their pre-February 24 positions while it took place.
It is a significant chess move by Zelesnky — who has proved to be an extraordinarily brave and effective wartime leader — as the two sides continue to talk in Turkey.
But will this be enough for Putin? A swift deal would be in his interests — as indeed it may be for some states in Nato, as Zelensky has suggested.
Punitive sanctions
The sooner something is agreed, arguably the sooner Russia can come out from under some of the more punitive sanctions currently crippling its economy.
In theory, anyway.
Zelensky sees a range of different strains of support within the Western alliance — which range from keeping a long war going to further “exhaust” Russia, to tying up a deal so Russian can return to the world marketplace, to backing Ukraine to achieve nothing but a victory.
Western allies will publicly back whatever position Zelensky takes.
Because they know there can be no going back to dealing with Putin the way we did before. No more coaxing or turning a blind eye.
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US President Joe Biden’s statement that Putin must go may have landed him in political hot water but it will be a feeling shared almost universally by other leaders.
Putin is a threat to everybody, and the West has to meet that threat with the courage of the people of Mariupol.
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