WHAT PUTIN AND ZELENSKY WANT BUT CANNOT GET
The two leaders are still talking past each other
The battered Russian troops call it the “Horseshoe,” a brutally reinforced area in the hilly northern corner of the Donbas region that blocks the army’s entry from the east to the vast central plains of Ukraine—a path that could lead the Russian army, if it were able to overcome an expected counterattack, deep into central Ukraine and even theoretically to the outskirts of Kiev.
The Horseshoe is bloodied high ground and fortified by trenches, bunkers, and concrete barriers that have kept the Russian army at bay, at great cost in lives and materials. A well-informed American official told me that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, continues to urge his generals to do an all-out assault and take the area and give Putin what he wants to end the war: total control of the Donbas, which consists of two provinces—Donetsk and Luhansk—that are rich in coal, iron ore, lithium, titanium, and rare earth metals. And Russian history. Russian speakers make up 70 per cent of the region. Russia’s generals, I was told by the official, have so far refused to make another attack on the Horseshoe, citing prior failures, heavy casualties to combat soldiers, and destruction of their tanks and other heavy weapons.
With winter approaching, Putin will not be able to mount a ground offensive until spring and again seek to take all of Donbas, whose Ukrainian-controlled areas have been under heavy Russian drone and missile assault since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. Press reports of the most recent non-summit have emphasized that Putin agreed to freeze all combat along the rest of the front if he is granted control of all of Donbas. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, despite pressure from the United States, insisted, as he has throughout the history of peace talks with Russia, that he would not alter, as the US official put it to me, “his long-standing position to keep up the empty hope and objective of ‘taking back all of the Ukraine.’”
The irony, or “reality,” as the official put it, is that “Russia has been trying unsuccessfully to capture this sliver of territory for a year and failed with great loss of life by his troops without success.” Zelensky’s gambit, he added wryly, “Might work. Might not.”
Clearly, there is no learning curve in this war.
