Following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to skip peace talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Istanbul this week, James Gilmore, former ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told Newsmax on Friday that he doesn’t believe there’s “any interest on the Russian side of actually striking any kind of deal that’s suitable.”
“First of all, just about the meeting itself, this is a meeting that actually Putin proposed and Zelenskyy said, ‘Fine, I’ll be happy to meet with you across the table, man-to-man, and we’ll do this.’ But Putin didn’t want to meet with Zelenskyy,” Gilmore said on Newsmax’s “Wake Up America.” “A war criminal doesn’t want to sit across the table from the leader of an independent state and that’s what Zelenskyy is. So when Putin decided he wasn’t actually going to go, that’s no surprise to me. But, naturally, Zelenskyy would have been there. In fact, I think he set out to be there.
“This is a meeting that should have occurred, but, at the end of the day, let’s look and see what’s really going on here,” he continued. “And what’s really going on is that Putin has a game plan. He’s [been] executing it now for years and that plan is the complete subjugation of Ukraine and putting it back into the Russian Empire, and then using that as a stepping stone to reassemble the old Russian Empire.
“From my point of view, America has to ask, is that in the best interest of the United States? As a soldier during the Cold War, and a diplomat in Vienna, that is not in the best interests of the United States and I think we need to understand that going forward.”
Asked how the war between Russia and Ukraine — now in its third year — ultimately ends, Gilmore said the answer “depends on how much support the United States is prepared to offer” Kyiv.
“They’ve already demonstrated that they can resist the Russian onslaught,” Gilmore said of the Ukrainians. “They’ve demonstrated that now for years. I think a conquest of Ukraine by Russia is not likely, maybe not even possible. But, nonetheless, I think what Putin is demanding is all the property that he has militarily and aggressively occupied, plus more and a demand that Ukraine be neutralized and that sanctions be lifted, which I think they’re desperate for.
“These are unreasonable demands for a conqueror, an aggressor, a war criminal, to make on an independent country, but that’s what he’s doing,” he continued. “If we want to settle this war overnight, we can just give in to all that, but I don’t think the United States and the Western allies and Ukraine are going to give in to that. So, I think this is going to continue for a while. It’s unlikely to be negotiated very quickly.”
Gilmore said the key to bringing Putin to the negotiating table lies in threatening massive economic sanctions, in conjunction with other Western allies, because “the war has been devastating for Russia.”
“They’ve lost now apparently almost a million people in wounded and dead. Their inflation is terrible. Their economy is wrecked. They’re dependent on oil and the price of oil has been going down largely because of American policy,” he said. “So I think, personally, that Russia can’t sustain this if we just hold the course.”
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