By Bloomberg News
Ten months into the war in Ukraine, there has been an escalation on both sides, as Moscow accused Ukraine of drone attacks on targets deep inside Russian territory and Russia sent a new volley of missiles into Ukraine.
At the same time, there has been a flurry of diplomatic activity in recent weeks, a lot of it centered around French President Emmanuel Macron.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___On Monday, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Bobby Ghosh spoke with columnists Andreas Kluth and Clara Ferreira Marques on Twitter Spaces about the latest developments in the war.
Their conversation focused on the ways Macron, who was in the US last week as the guest of honor at a White House state dinner, has signaled more willingness than President Joe Biden to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a stance that has created friction within the Western alliance aiding Ukraine. They also discussed how changing weather could influence the direction of the conflict.
This is an edited excerpt of the conversation. A full recording is available here.
Bobby Ghosh: Are you detecting any change in tone in what Macron and more generally what European leaders are saying about Ukraine?
Andreas Kluth: In the time leading up to the invasion, Macron always expressed an attempt to understand the position of Putin. In that process, I think Macron has genuinely read him wrong.
We all know that the only way wars ever end, including this one, is in negotiations. The question is, when is that point? How and on what basis will those negotiations take place? Biden said he would be prepared to meet Putin on certain conditions. We’re far away from that. Macron has had a lower bar and has suggested that maybe Putin will need security guarantees from the West.
That inverts the role of aggressor and victim. It suggests that somehow Putin was forced [to invade] to respond to growing aggression and expansion by NATO. That has been the Kremlin narrative and the propaganda all along.
At a thousand levels, this doesn’t make sense, but Macron, by essentially saying, well, we’ll have to give him something, seems to be buying into that. And I think that is a terrible, terrible signal to send to NATO, to the West and in particular to the Ukrainians, who are trying to survive one of the worst winters maybe since the Holodomor famine.
Clara Ferreira Marques: It’s the playbook. The narrative was always that the Russians were under threat. They had no choice. It was NATO’s provocation. It’s a very useful, distracting tactic from what’s really going on on the ground.
Ghosh: This is what Putin has been counting on – dithering among the Europeans, and they’re hoping that if it gets colder and the European public groans about rising fuel costs that will add more pressure to the European leadership and that they will begin to back away from Ukraine.
Let’s talk a little bit about Russia fighting in winter. There is a long and storied history of Russia being saved by winter from Napoleon on down to Hitler, but Russia is in an offensive war. What does winter mean to the Russian forces?
Ferreira Marques: It’s probably the biggest question that everyone has. A couple of things to bear in mind: One is that the Ukrainians will not pull back on the offensive. They will keep pushing and that will not stop during the winter.
There are a lot of assumptions that this favors the Russians. I actually think it doesn’t, and for a very good reason. When we think about winter in Ukraine, the vision is the Nazis fighting the Soviets and the Second World War. Now that was a really extreme winter. In fact, especially in southern Ukraine, what you might see is sort of low-single-digit temperatures. They call it “wet cold” in military terms. It’s extremely uncomfortable. It’s also really dangerous because it’s very easy to get wet. And once you are wet, you very quickly are in hypothermia territory. So you need really good equipment. You also need really good discipline. Now, we know that the Russians don’t have very good equipment.
Kluth: The momentum is in the Ukrainians’ favor. If they can survive this winter, then I think we’re looking at how we get from there to an ultimate defeat of Putin.
Read more:
- How the Russia-Ukraine war can and cannot end
- Financial Times perspective: Putin’s wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine – atrocity and over-reach
- Russia’s invasion of Ukraine moves toward ‘War of Drones’ as winter looms
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