Putin Says Every Peace Proposal Is Still on the Table, Then Promises Retaliation
Speaking to journalists in St Petersburg, the Russian president said Moscow had been ready to resume talks after last week’s parliamentary elections until Ukraine struck Moscow and, he claimed, polling stations, killing an election official. Asked about the proposals now circulating: “They are all on the table. It’s all possible… But after everything they have done, we will still have to think carefully about what we need to do in response.” Kyiv’s forces should “be made to feel Russia’s retaliatory strikes”.
Everything and nothing is on the table, which is the point of saying it that way. Washington has proposed technical-level trilateral talks with the United Arab Emirates mooted as a venue, and no date or location has been confirmed by anyone. Meanwhile the war escalates in the direction Moscow says it resents: Ukrainian drones struck the Ilsky refinery in Krasnodar overnight, one of southern Russia’s largest, according to the regional governor. Sergei Lavrov gave the Kremlin’s reading of European motives at the Security Council — Europe “just wants to get a pause, and it wants to use it to pump the Kyiv regime with weapons”. On the other side of the ledger, Mr Zelensky says the president has made a final decision to license Ukrainian production of Patriot missiles. Watch for a date.