Russia and the US did not make progress toward a peace deal for Ukraine during their talks, a senior aide to Vladimir Putin has said, hours after the Russian president issued threats that Russia was ready for war with Europe.
In remarks to Russian media, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said that after a five-hour meeting with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the two sides were “neither further nor closer to resolving the crisis in Ukraine. There is a lot of work to be done.”
The downbeat assessment of Tuesday night’s diplomacy follows combative opening statements from Putin as Witkoff and Kushnerarrived for talks at the Kremlin, in which he accused European powers of sabotaging peace in Ukraine and that “European demands” on ending the war were “not acceptable to Russia”.
“When you are weak, pretend you are strong.” Pretty much sums it up.
This is actually reasonable in warfare and encouraged by Sun Tzu, but once the deception is exposed, there is little advantage in clinging to it.
But there’s also nothing to gain by admitting and stopping the deception. As long as there’s one useful idiot who can be deceived, you cna keep it going.
And unfortunately there’s a lot of useful idiots.
Russia exposed the deception by completely fucking up the invasion of Ukraine.
Someone needs to bust out the old iraq propaganda minister meme.