For me, the most telling statement of the day was from Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov. He took part in the St Petersburg talks.<\/p>\n
Ushakov said that Steve Witkoff had told President Putin about the discussions in Oslo and (as Witkoff viewed them) “new approaches from the Europeans and Kyiv”.<\/p>\n
The Kremlin adviser was clearly unimpressed by what he heard.<\/p>\n
“In terms of resolving the Ukraine crisis, there wasn’t much there that was useful,” commented Ushakov.<\/p>\n
Later Russian state TV asked him about the prospects for peace.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know how close we are getting,” Yuri Ushakov said, “but things are moving in that direction.”<\/p>\n
All rather vague.<\/p>\n
It seems that President Putin doesn’t feel under pressure right now to end the war.<\/p>\n
He knows that Ukraine’s air defences are under severe strain.<\/p>\n
He knows that winter is coming and may well view the cold weather as an opportunity to pound Ukraine into submission.<\/p>\n
He knows, too, that there is a US president in the White House who clearly wants a bigger, better, more profitable relationship with Moscow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For me, the most telling statement of the day was from Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":809631,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-809630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/809631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}