Is Russia looking for a face saving way out of Putin's Ukraine war?

 Hot Air:

You trust the Kremlin’s spokesman to be candid about Russia’s intentions, don’t you?

“Some progress has been made,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said during a press briefing, referring to three rounds of talks with Kyiv…

She also said Moscow does not intend to occupy Ukraine or overthrow its government.

The army’s aim is “not to occupy Ukraine, or the destruction of its statehood, or the overthrow of the government. It is not directed against the civilian population,” Zakharova said.

The Russian army has been shelling cities like Kharkiv and starving cities like Mariupol for days. The claim that its offensive isn’t directed against civilians is a breathtaking lie even by Russian standards.

But even so, this is the second time in three days that they’ve retreated from Putin’s early pledge to “denazify” Ukraine by replacing its leadership with puppets from Moscow. Why do that? If this is a test of wills between east and west, why would Russia risk signaling a loss of resolve by stepping back from Putin’s initial demands?

All I can think is that the Kremlin has absorbed the hard reality that there’s no good outcome for them in Ukraine and thus a face-saving peace deal with the existing government is their only chance for a semi-respectable exit. If they kill Zelensky now, the fury among Ukrainians might make near-term negotiations impossible. Zelensky might be the only leader in Ukraine at this point with the moral authority to get his constituents to accept a difficult peace deal, in fact. If he dies and his successor approves the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas by Russia, Ukrainians might regard those concessions as illegitimate, a giveaway by a quisling which the lionhearted Zelensky never would have condoned. That could lead to the country breaking up followed by a long insurgency among Ukrainians who consider the new government in Kiev some sort of Vichy regime.

So maybe Russia needs Zelensky around at this point to do a deal. Or, alternately, maybe they’re secretly still angling to kill him and hoping to accuse his own security detail of having done the deed once it happens, as ludicrous as that may be. “Surely Russia isn’t to blame. We said we weren’t trying to topple their government, didn’t we?” Remember the Putinist version of Occam’s Razor: The more sinister explanation is usually the correct one.

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The Russians have no compunction against war crimes or lying about them.  They are losing this war and do not seem to know how to get out of it.