“Only if the counteroffensive is strategic”: expert explained what changes on the battlefield would force Russia to negotiate

Political analyst Ruslan Bortnik said that despite Ukraine’s successes on the front, the Kremlin will not enter negotiations — for that the AFU would have to carry out a strategic counteroffensive and create a real threat of Russia’s defeat, Politeka reports.

He discussed this in his blog.
“There was an expectation that Moscow would go to the negotiating table once its position deteriorated. I have said this many times on air. What did Bortnik say? Bortnik said that if the negotiating position worsens, Russia will not negotiate. It will add military effort in order to once again even out or improve its negotiating position. It’s a pointless back-and-forth. The same applies to Ukraine. If Ukraine’s negotiating position worsened militarily, Ukraine put in a lot — even more — effort to improve its negotiating position,” Ruslan Bortnik explains.
Therefore, he notes, there is no point in hoping that negotiations will start after a quick counteroffensive — that will not happen; at best the other side will simply refuse to negotiate, at worst it will launch its own counteroffensive. According to the expert, this scenario can work only if the counteroffensive has a strategic character and the opponent faces a real threat of military defeat — but in the current situation that is not the case.
“That is precisely why the expectation that Ukrainian successes on the battlefield would force Moscow to negotiate did not come true. Moscow, on the contrary, retreated into its shell, declared the annexation of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk, carried out mobilization and said it would fight for as long as necessary,” Ruslan Bortnik states.
In the expert’s view, the 2023 AFU counteroffensive partially failed because of complacency after early successes, partly due to lack of political experience, and partly because partners let them down by providing less weaponry than promised. As a result, he concludes, that little straw that would have broken the camel’s back was lacking in the summer of 2023 somewhere near Rabotyn.

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