Russia and Ukraine are due to meet in the United Arab Emirates in early November, with U.S. participation, in their first negotiations for some time. Podvorna, who studies the impact of the war on Europe and NATO at Germany’s Justus Liebig University in Giessen, said she doubted a ceasefire could even be signed.
“Negotiations are about interests, not about sticking to positions. The problem is that Putin’s interest is war, so every round of peace talks will be only a smokescreen”, she said.
She said Putin had repeatedly demanded that NATO retreat to its pre-1997 borders. “That means the alliance would ‘return’ Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and the Baltic states to the Russian sphere of influence”, she said.
Podvorna rejected the view, common in Poland, that the situation resembled a second Yalta, saying it was closer to a “second Munich”. At Munich in 1938, Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany forced Czechoslovakia, which was absent, to cede the Sudetenland to Germany.
“Putin and Trump might want to dress up in the costumes of Stalin and Roosevelt, but it will not work”, she said. “It is not possible today to decide the fate of states and nations over the heads of their citizens”.
She said U.S. President Donald Trump was not an impartial mediator, arguing that he was driven by the midterm elections, in which polls were unfavourable to his party. That, she said, explained the pressure on Kyiv.
“The Americans are pressing Ukraine to accept solutions that are unfavourable to it. They are playing very unfairly, but that does not mean Zelenskiy will fold his hands and agree to everything”, she said.
Podvorna said Ukraine’s position was stronger than in the early days of the war. “Ukraine in 2026 is not Ukraine of 2022”, she said, adding that its army was now the most powerful in Europe and the only one with combat experience.
She dismissed as “wishful thinking” the idea that Putin would settle for the Donbas region. “When we give him the Donbas, he will reach for central and western Ukraine. Next will be Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary”, she said.
Podvorna also warned that a cornered Putin might revive Soviet-era plans concerning western Ukraine’s two nuclear plants, Khmelnytskyi and Rivne, which lie about 190 km (118 miles) and 140 km from the Polish border respectively.
“Soviet military plans assumed they could be blown up in the event of a NATO invasion of Soviet territory. I fear the Kremlin remembers this and, if necessary, may carry out these old plans”, she said.
She called that scenario “highly hypothetical” and said it was far more likely that Moscow would threaten the plants to blackmail Poland and its allies into concessions. Ukrainian operator Energoatom has said Russian drones and missiles have repeatedly flown over both sites, which Kyiv sees as simulated attacks or nuclear blackmail.
Podvorna said she expected the war to last beyond 2026 and probably into next year, and that Ukraine would endure despite widespread fatigue.
“We have to fight because we have no other option”, she said.
(jh)
Source: PAP