Quotes
Ukraine is a personal obsession for Putin, but crushing Ukraine is also a means to accomplish his grand goal – to show to the world how the West is incapable of defending itself or what it stands for.”
Warning ... he told Politico
No, he has already lost, because let's not forget his original aims in February 2022; he was taking Kyiv in five days, he was destroying Ukraine as a sovereign independent country that was able to make its own decisions in foreign and domestic policy, and on both of those counts very clearly, Vladimir Putin has utterly failed."
Doubling-down on his assessment Mr Kara-Murza continued
Every wave of escalation from the West is going to be decisively responded to,
he said
Even if we're to lay to one side the prediction that Donald Trump will cut assistance to Ukraine, which for the Ukrainian army would essentially be a death sentence, it is becoming clearer that he and his team will, in any case, conduct an audit of the assistance provided to Kyiv,
he saidPeople in Europe can be pissed off with me, but I kept saying, and I will keep saying, that the truth is today, Russia has a friend ready to send its soldiers to die for Russia war,
Kuleba said, compared to Ukraine's allies, whom he said have not sent the weapons the country needsYou cannot win a war where Russia clearly knows what its strategic goal is in every detail; [where] Ukraine knows what its strategic goal is in every detail; but [where] the West, without whom Ukraine cannot win, does not know what it is fighting for. This is the real tragedy of this war,
Kuleba said
The Russians keep the Donbas, they keep Crimea, no NATO membership. Can Zelenskyy sign? He cannot because of the Constitution. And because it will be the end of Zelenskyy politically,
Kuleba said flatly
The front line in the Donbas will collapse and the Russians will be at the gates of Dnipro, Poltava and Zaporizhzhia,
he warnedWe must do everything to ensure that the war ends next year through diplomatic means.”
In a radio interview with Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne he addedZelenskyy has to let strong people back into his government.”
Kuleba declined to comment on his resignation, but did sayBut it depends on the European capacity and readiness to increase dramatically its own production of weapons within a short period of time,
he addedPutin still believes he can snuff out Ukrainian statehood and crush Ukraine as an independent democracy, and he thinks he’s one step away from exposing the West as weak,
he saidIf they find a way to continue supplies and increase them, that will buy Ukraine more time,
he saidIf you ask me what was the biggest mistake of the West in the past year, I would say the fierce public denunciation by European leaders of [French President] Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to send troops to Ukraine. I have no doubt that Putin loved it,
he said
This is aggression against the very principles that are in the heart of the international system, which are necessary for trying to maintain peace and stability,
Blinken concludedThere are no new strategies, everyone wants to change their tune on the go,
Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera
These days, we want peace, not victory,
said Valentyna Krasovets, a 68-year-old Kyiv resident whose nephew was killed on the southeastern front line in September 2023.jpg)
We approached his team with a plan that could benefit us and the West, and he liked it,
he said referring to the proposal Zelenskyy presented to Trump during their meeting in New York in SeptemberI don’t want to lose more family. I am too old to wake up to air raid sirens every night,
she told Al JazeeraIt can be a reputational profit, a political profit or an economic profit,
he told the Interfax Ukraine news agency on Thursday