'Putin is right: still negotiating with US on peace in Ukraine'

In a conversation with Tucker Carlson, Russian President Vladimir Putin made at least one valid point: peace talks with the United States over the war in Ukraine are still ongoing. There are good reasons for Putin to continue the dialogue, says Rob de Wijk of The Hague Center for Strategic Studies (HCSS). “It's interesting what happened here.”

In the interview with Carlson, Putin talked too often about the peace talks and simply put them aside, De Wijk believes. Indeed, there is a point when the Russian president claims that then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson blocked negotiations at an advanced stage of the war with Ukraine. “What Putin forgets to mention is that he himself froze the negotiations in the days of the raid.”

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Putin's own representative in the ongoing negotiations came to him with a set of possible outcomes, but he refused. Nevertheless, there are still discussions with the US behind the scenes, de Wijk says. “We don't know the details, but when we tried to unravel it, we found that those negotiations are still ongoing, based on an article in The New York Times and other sources that confirm that.”

Putin is ready to negotiate

De Wijk says that while Ukraine is not doing well at the moment, it indicates that Putin is waiting for peace talks. 'When you occupy a large area, you don't have to suffer if there is a party fight. If you look at that war-torn map now, it doesn't look too pretty for the Russians living there. So what's happening here is interesting and it shows that you have to look at an interview like this with different eyes.'

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The interview with Putin had no effect on American support for Putin, according to historian Arendt Jan Bogestijn. “Now, 26 percent of Americans have a positive image of Putin — up from one in four. It was 5 percent. We live in the age of Twitter, which is incredibly successful.' De Wijk qualified this effect somewhat, noting the support for the NSB in the Netherlands in the 1930s. 'If it's big, you have a problem.'