The Kremlin says no: Moscow doesn't want a new Ukrainian president, it wants war
The Kremlin on Monday rejected an offer from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who proposed a full sixty-day ceasefire so that a presidential election could be held in Ukraine. According to a report by the Russian news portal RBC, Zelensky said on Sunday: tell Putin to give two months, a full sixty-day ceasefire, and Ukraine will hold elections — to which Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's spokesman, replied the next day that Putin and other Russian leaders have repeatedly said that they do not want a ceasefire, that Moscow wants a lasting peace, and that it is doing everything to achieve it. The offer was made all the more pointed by the fact that Russia has for years argued precisely that Zelensky is an illegitimate leader whose mandate has expired, and with whom no substantive agreement can therefore be reached. Ukrainian law bans elections under martial law, which, in a country where missiles rain down on homes every day, is not a legal loophole but simply common sense.
Zelensky's offer is hardly understandable without Donald Trump's remark last week. The American president said it was time for Ukraine to have a new president, and blamed the Ukrainian leader for the rise in US fuel prices, even though those prices had jumped as a result of the Iran war he himself had launched. Zelensky responded at the time by saying that Ukrainians choose their own leader, but over the weekend he effectively took up the challenge: if the world wants an election, Ukraine is ready to hold one — the bombing just has to stop first. This put the ball in Moscow's court, where, as could be expected, it immediately got stuck.
The Kremlin's response is telling in itself. For months, Moscow has simultaneously demanded that Ukraine hold an election and rejected every kind of ceasefire that would even make that possible. In the Kremlin's vocabulary, "lasting peace" typically means that Ukraine should give up the occupied territories, its allies and its own defense — and the Russian leadership is unwilling to risk this even with a temporary ceasefire. All this comes, moreover, just as Trump announced an "energy ceasefire" between the Russian and Ukrainian sides, which he said Zelensky supported, although no one yet knows the details — and after the Russian attacks of recent days, including thirty deaths on Putin's birthday and the guided aerial bombs dropped on Zaporizhzhia, the credibility of the Kremlin's words has already been priced in fairly accurately by its actions. The same happened with Trump's grand announcement of an energy ceasefire: this morning Putin fired missiles at a power plant in Kharkiv.
Madness
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