What is the price of peace in Ukraine? For Zelensky, the cost is calculated in how much land his country will lose and what political humiliations it is prepared to bear. For ordinary Ukrainians, the price is measured in the blood of their loved ones fighting on the front lines. But for Donald Trump, there is another currency involved: that of minerals, oil and cold cash.
As the Telegraph revealed yesterday, Trump is preparing to offer Putin financial incentives to end the war – including access to untapped oil and gas fields off the coast of Alaska and rare earth minerals in Ukraine. Another sweetener Washington intends to put on the table is the lifting of US sanctions on parts and equipment needed to service Western-made planes owned by Russian airlines.
But if Trump believes that Putin can be bribed into ending his bloody three-year war on Ukraine he is severely mistaken.
In truth Putin does not care about money, nor about the wellbeing of his country’s economy, nor about the personal fortunes of Russia’s elite. If he did, he would not have started the war in the first place. Over his quarter century in power Putin has gone from pragmatic economic cooperation with the West to a mystical sense of himself as defender of the Motherland and self-anointed re-uniter of the Russian peoples.
For his first two decades in office, Putin carefully cultivated friendships with Germany’s leaders and built vast gas pipelines that came to provide a third of Europe’s energy. At the same time US and European companies poured billions into Russia in the form of car factories, breweries, big-box megastores and shopping malls.
But by 2022 Putin’s priorities had changed. The cost of his fateful invasion of Ukraine would be the destruction of Gazprom’s European business, the collapse of foreign investment, flight of some 1,500 Western companies, and the exclusion of Russian banks from international financial systems. Swathes of wealthy Russians were ruined and many oligarchs found their foreign assets frozen. But Putin didn’t care. The mission of preventing Ukraine from becoming a dangerous Western Trojan horse under Russia’s southern belly was more important to him than such trivial considerations as whether his people would shop at Ikea, eat at McDonald’s or drive Volkswagen cars. When it comes to Putin’s self-appointed mission to restore Russia’s historical greatness, war is more important than money.
What is the price of peace in Ukraine? For Zelensky, the cost is calculated in how much land his country will lose and what political humiliations it is prepared to bear. For ordinary Ukrainians, the price is measured in the blood of their loved ones fighting on the front lines. But for Donald Trump, there is another currency involved: that of minerals, oil and cold cash.
As the Telegraph revealed yesterday, Trump is preparing to offer Putin financial incentives to end the war – including access to untapped oil and gas fields off the coast of Alaska and rare earth minerals in Ukraine. Another sweetener Washington intends to put on the table is the lifting of US sanctions on parts and equipment needed to service Western-made planes owned by Russian airlines.
But if Trump believes that Putin can be bribed into ending his bloody three-year war on Ukraine he is severely mistaken.
In truth Putin does not care about money, nor about the wellbeing of his country’s economy, nor about the personal fortunes of Russia’s elite. If he did, he would not have started the war in the first place. Over his quarter century in power Putin has gone from pragmatic economic cooperation with the West to a mystical sense of himself as defender of the Motherland and self-anointed re-uniter of the Russian peoples.
For his first two decades in office, Putin carefully cultivated friendships with Germany’s leaders and built vast gas pipelines that came to provide a third of Europe’s energy. At the same time US and European companies poured billions into Russia in the form of car factories, breweries, big-box megastores and shopping malls.
But by 2022 Putin’s priorities had changed. The cost of his fateful invasion of Ukraine would be the destruction of Gazprom’s European business, the collapse of foreign investment, flight of some 1,500 Western companies, and the exclusion of Russian banks from international financial systems. Swathes of wealthy Russians were ruined and many oligarchs found their foreign assets frozen. But Putin didn’t care. The mission of preventing Ukraine from becoming a dangerous Western Trojan horse under Russia’s southern belly was more important to him than such trivial considerations as whether his people would shop at Ikea, eat at McDonald’s or drive Volkswagen cars. When it comes to Putin’s self-appointed mission to restore Russia’s historical greatness, war is more important than money.