“The situation that we are seeing around the preparations for the Normandy format summit look unprecedented from the diplomatic point of view. …
“Volodymyr Zelenskyy needs the meeting to demonstrate to his voters that he is doing everything he can to achieve peace. Emmanuel Macron needs the meeting as a confirmation of his claim to be a European leader. It is less needed by Angela Merkel – although the chancellor has an interest in the hope that the Normandy format will lead to peace – she is well aware that the summit in Paris will not bring peace any closer.
“Vladimir Putin does not need this meeting. At all. The Russian president is not interested in peace with Ukraine. He is interested in stabilizing relations with the West, but not at the price of withdrawing from Ukrainian lands. And this stabilization of relations doesn’t depend at all on the results of the Normandy format summit, and not even on the end of the war against Ukraine, but on the results of the presidential elections in the U.S.A. and the parliamentary elections in Germany. Unlike Zelenskyy and Macron, Putin is capable of looking ahead – simply because he has a lot of time left.
“That’s why the Russian president is ‘squeezing’ as much as he possibly can from the preparations of the Normandy summit. Pushing Zelenskyy to more and more concessions, Putin is counting on an intensification of the confrontation between the Ukrainian head of state and civil society – independent of whether or not Zelenskyy himself will become the leader of Ukrainian collaborators or not. Putin is pushing Macron to pressure Zelenskyy. He’s seeking votes favorable for Gazprom in the Bundestag. With his behavior, Putin is saying: ‘if you need this meeting, make concessions. And I will judge whether you’re doing it right.’
“And with his latest maneuvers he’s put his ‘partners’ in an idiotic situation. But this is not evidence of his strength. It is evidence of our weakness.”
– Ukrainian political analyst Vitaliy Portnikov, writing on the espresso.tv website, as translated by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Daily Briefing. (The article is available in the original Ukrainian here: https://espreso.tv/article/2019/11/18/vitaliy_portnykov_gra_navkolo_samitu_svidchennya_nashoyi_slabkosti.)