By Yigal Levin
Zelensky said that during the talks in Abu Dhabi, it became clear that the Russian delegation believes it controls more territory than it actually does.
General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who attended the meeting, confirmed that the Russians were lying and that the Ukrainian map of the battlefield was closer to reality.
Now it is clear why the American general was brought into the talks in the first place. They needed a competent military official who could assess the situation objectively and point out that the Russians were talking bullshit.
As expected, the negotiations are going nowhere, unless we count attempts to arrange a prisoner exchange involving around 1,000–1,500 people from each side.
Which is a good thing in its own right. It is always good when soldiers return home, especially from Russian captivity.
But yes, we can see that freezing the conflict is proving difficult, to put it mildly, partly because the Russians are living in a fantasy world.
A world in which they have already coloured in dozens of square kilometres of territory on their maps, including entire settlements that they do not even come close to controlling.
Sometimes you can dictate such terms from a position of strength, but Russia is not in that position.
After all, what difference does it make whether you actually control Kherson or even Kyiv if your enemy has surrendered and collapsed?
But the situation is nowhere near that. Ukraine has not collapsed and is nowhere close to capitulation. On the contrary, it is intensifying its long-range strikes deep inside Russia and conducting successful offensive operations on the front line.
The very fact that Russia agreed to attend negotiations where bargaining is taking place shows that the Kremlin effectively acknowledges its own weakness.
Nobody goes where the Kremlin tells them to go — Zelensky, for example, is not travelling to Moscow. Yet the Russians obediently turn up wherever those supposedly hated Westerners summon them.
Russia has become trapped in its own lies. If Moscow eventually agrees to freeze the conflict, it will have to acknowledge reality and remove its claims to numerous territories from the map.
Because ceasefire negotiations always come down to specifics: the line of separation must be precisely defined and formally recorded in the relevant documents.
