The Austrian Chancellor visited the President on Monday Vladimir Putin of Russia, the first Western leader to see him in person since the invasion of Ukraine, and said he came away feeling not only pessimistic about the prospects for peace, but also fearing that Putin would try drastically intensify the brutality of war.
Describing Putin as dismissive of the atrocities in Ukraine, the visiting foreign minister, Karl Nehammersaid it was clear that Russian forces were mobilizing for a large scale attack in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the next phase of a war now in its seventh week.
Emergency workers at the site of a destroyed building on Sunday in Mariupol, Ukraine. Photo Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters
“The battle that is being threatened cannot be underestimated for its violence,” Nehammer told a news conference after the 75-minute meeting at Putin’s residence outside Moscow that the visitor described as forceful and direct.
The Austrian chancellor said he had told the Russian president that as long as people died in Ukraine, “sanctions against Russia will remain and will be further tightened.”
Foreign Minister Karl Nehammer of Austria during a news conference after meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday at the Russian leader’s residence near Moscow. Photo Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
The Kremlin, downplaying the importance of the meeting in a short statement, said only that “it wasn’t much by modern standards.”
Even when Nehammer was visiting, Russian forces were shelling Ukrainian cities and towns, and the president Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said “tens of thousands are dead” in Mariupol, the besieged southern city that has seen the most intense destruction of the war.
And Putin, despite Russia’s military mistakes in the war and all Western efforts to isolate him, appeared to be in control of the crisis.
It has severely repressed any dissent and has benefited from widespread domestic support, continued revenue from oil and gas sales to Europe, implicit backing from China, and the refusal of much of the world to join sanctions against Russia.
Many commentators in the West had criticized the Austrian chancellor (his country is a member of the European Union but not NATO) for visiting Moscow, apparently playing into Putin’s narrative that US-led efforts to isolate Russia would necessarily end. in a failure.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine delivering a virtual speech before the South Korean Parliament on Monday. Pool photo of Chung Sung-Jun
Nehammer told reporters afterward that Had treated to confront Putin with the horrors of war and the war crimes that Russian troops are accused of having committed in the kyiv suburb of Bucha and elsewhere.
He said he had also told Putin about the destroyed Russian tanks he saw on a recent visit to Ukraine, to make clear the huge loss of life Russia was suffering.
Nehammer said that Putin had discarded accusations of war crimes for having been staged for Ukraine.
Response
In the end, Putin told him:
“It would be better if” (the war) “ended soon,” Nehammer said, but the meaning of those words was unclear, as they could indicate that Putin was ready for more peace talks. or that he could be preparing a swift and brutal assault on Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukraine’s military since 2014.
“We can have no illusions: President Putin has fully embraced the logic of war and is acting accordingly,” Nehammer said.
“That’s why I think it’s so important. compare it permanently with the facts of the war.
How much more brutal the war could become was pointed out in an interview with Eduard Basurin, a separatist commander, broadcast on Russian state television.
Basurin said that with Ukrainian forces stationed in underground fortifications at a steel plant in Mariupol, storming the redoubt made no sense.
Instead, he said, Russian forces needed to first block off exits and then “turn to chemical troops that they will find a way to get the moles out of their holes.”
Putin was silent on Monday but was expected to speak publicly on Tuesday, when he will travel to the Vostochny spaceport in Russia’s far east with President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, his ally, to mark the annual Cosmonauts’ Day.
Putin has increasingly framed the February 24 invasion of Ukraine as not against Ukraine, but against the West, specifically the United States, as the supposed sponsor of the Zelensky government and its aspirations to escape Russia’s sphere of influence as former soviet republic.
Sergey LavrovRussia’s foreign minister said in a Russian television interview that aired Monday that what the Kremlin calls its “special operation” in Ukraine is aimed at push back American influence, which the Russian government characterizes as the root of the world’s ills.
“Our special military operation is designed to put an end to the reckless expansion and the reckless course towards the total dominance of the United States,” Lavrov said.
The United States and the EU have imposed increasingly harsh economic sanctions on Russia over the invasion and are sending weapons to Ukraine’s military.
But they do not want to be drawn into a war with Russia.
And the EU continues reluctant to ban the oil and natural gas Russians, which remain fundamental to the bloc’s economic health.
EU foreign ministers met in Luxembourg on Monday and the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, said that “nothing is off the tableincluding sanctions on oil and gas.
While the ministers discussed a possible elimination of Russian oil, more easily replaced by suppliers other than gas, the meeting also laid bare the bloc’s divisions.
Austria, Hungary and Germany they opposed, for now, any attempt to restrict Russian gas imports.
Still, EU leaders were expected to approve a further €500 million ($544 million) in funding to pay member states for sending arms to Ukraine, which would mean a total of €1.5 billion so far. , almost equivalent to the 1.7 billion dollars in weapons that he has authorized.
Russian troops, who withdrew from northern Ukraine after a failed effort last month to reach the capital kyiv, have been resupplying and regrouping in Russia and Belarus in order to join the battle in eastern Ukraine.
But Western officials said Monday that the effort may still take some time.
Ukrainian officials have been warning since last week that civilians in eastern Ukraine must flee while they can.
Zelensky warned that tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were preparing a new assault there.
If the southern port city of Mariupol eventually falls, Russian troops may move north to meet Russian troops trying to move south from Izyum and try to encircle the bulk of Ukraine’s army, which is concentrated further east. said Mathieu Boulègue, an expert on the Russian military at Chatham House, the London research institution.
Easier said than done, Boulègue said, as battered Russian troops await reinforcements.
The Ukrainians, he said, were trying to block the Russians and organize a counterattack which would be more complicated than the fighting around kyiv, which had forced the Russians to withdraw.
Given the reports of Russian atrocities in bushing, Kramatorsk, Mariupol and other cities, negotiations between the governments of Ukraine and Russia are suspended
But few believe the antagonists are ready for real talks, because Putin needs to show more military progress and because the Ukrainians believe they can still repel the Russians, said Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador to NATO.
“The Ukrainians believe they have a chance not only to prevent Russia from gaining more ground in the east, but also to push them out of there, while Putin needs to find something he can sell as a victory,” Daalder said.
“So the diplomacy does not go anywhere”.
When talks on a deal finally do take place, Putin will inevitably be a part of them, said François Heisbourg, a French defense expert.
Diplomats deal with government leaders, no matter how unpleasant be, he said.
The West also hopes that the mounting economic pain will encourage Putin to scale back the war and end it.
Russia is already in a “deep recession” and its economy is expected to contract 11% this year, the World Bank reported.
But the impact is also severe in Ukraine.
The bank forecast that Ukraine’s economy would contract by 45% this year due to the Russian invasion and the effect of a “deep humanitarian crisis”.
Putin originally named one of the war’s goals as the “denazificationUkraine, falsely labeling as Nazis those who resist Russian domination.
An article Monday in a Russian state newspaper, Parlamentskaya Gazeta, written by an aide to the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, expanded on that concept to define the enemy as “Ukrainian neo-Nazism”.
The struggle also included a “cold war” against enemies of the state inside Russia, the article said, adding:
“The denazification of Ukraine is impossible without a parallel denazification of Russia.”
It was the latest sign that even as the war in Ukraine continues, Putin is preparing his security apparatus for a growing intolerance of dissent.
The crackdown has accelerated in recent weeks, with pro-war Russians turning over teachers and neighbors who speak out against the war.
On Friday, Russia closed some of the last remaining independent civil society institutions, including the Carnegie Moscow Center and the Moscow offices of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
He expanded the practice of naming critics of the government as “foreign agents”, adding a popular musician to the list for the first time: rapper Ivan Dryomin, 25, who goes by the name of Face.
Steven Erlanger reported from Brussels and Anton Troianovski from Istanbul. The reports were contributed by Monika Pronczuk in Brussels.
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