The bloodshed in Eastern Europe will continue for months. War weariness is emerging - in the West. That suits Putin, he can keep the war going for a long time. A split in the West would be fatal.
It is well known that the Russian army and its warlords in the Kremlin did a amateurish job in the first weeks of the war. There was no question of any military strategy. Russia lost tons of tanks and other equipment, tens of thousands of soldiers died. Vladimir Putin doesn't care. He is not interested in the suffering of millions of people or the destruction of entire cities. He wants to conquer as much of Ukraine as possible, whatever the cost.
The duration of the war also doesn't matter to Putin, as long as the slaughtering benefits him. The dictator has the synchronized state media completely under control. They won't ask what Russia actually wants with completely bombed out cities in which Ukrainians "live" - including Russian-speaking ones - who don't greet their "liberators" with flowers, but despise them. A ceasefire is not in Putin's interests as long as he can hope that continuing the war will give him an advantage in negotiations. If he was interested in peace, he would never have started the war.
Even if not everyone in this country has understood it: Putin's preferred means of politics is war, killing people who stand in his way. He will continue to spread lies to justify continued bloodshed. He knows: The sad pictures that are produced do not end up on Russian state television, and if they do, others are responsible for them. But they reach the western free world. Seeing films and photos of ruined landscapes, people crying on the run and in basements every day, attacks the soul of all those who have one. That makes you tired of war.
The war has led to a mood in the West that has become known in this country through the public appeal by women's rights activist Alice Schwarzer and her comrades-in-arms to stop supplying arms to Ukraine so that there can be peace. A beautiful and understandable dream far from reality, because Putin would use any weakness of the Ukrainian army due to a lack of equipment to conquer the whole country. The danger of a nuclear war would not be averted, because the ruler in the Kremlin (or a successor) would then arm himself and set his sights on the Baltic States. The nightmare of the Russian empire ends only with a military defeat.
What is happening in Germany on a small scale is experienced in the West on a large scale. The great unity of the democratic world as a response to the Russian war of conquest is crumbling - also a work of Putin, who managed to break out individual countries like Hungary and Turkey from the EU and NATO. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is preventing Sweden and Finland from joining NATO solely for reasons of domestic policy.
Hungary bears responsibility for the fact that the European Union did not agree on a full oil embargo against Russia. Only oil deliveries from tankers are affected. The raw material can continue to flow via pipelines. The move will work, but due to the exceptions, not to the extent that it could and would be necessary to hit the Moscow despot's treasury hard.
During his visit to Warsaw, US President Joe Biden implored the West to "have staying power. We must remain united - today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and in the years and decades to come." However, he suspected that it would not be easy and, above all, expensive. "It's a price we have to pay."
We'll see. Putin will do everything possible to inflate this price. Look at his poisoned offer to avoid a looming food crisis in the world, for which Russia alone is responsible and which Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov - like Putin, an unemotional egomaniac - describes as a "little problem." Russia wants to allow grain and fertilizer deliveries when the West lifts sanctions against its country.
If the West agreed to this perfidious blackmail, it would prove weak in Putin's eyes. He himself would pose as a savior in the famine. Images of emaciated children dying are just fine with the warmongers in the Kremlin because they increase the emotional pressure to give in to Russia and abandon Ukraine. Putin will have nothing against the flood of refugees as a result of a famine. They destabilize the West - because people will not move to Russia.
The fatal dispute over the arms deliveries and ambiguity as to what goal the West is actually pursuing with its Ukraine-Russia policy also help Putin. French President Emmanuel Macron "does not want to humiliate Russia so that the day the fighting stops, we can use diplomatic means to build a launch pad" - a launch pad for who and for what? The consideration given to a war criminal like Putin, who has broken every international agreement and lied to his negotiating partners, is amazing.
Fighting will only stop when Russia is militarily defeated. And that can only be done through rapid and extensive deliveries of weapons. If the Ukrainian army gets tanks and other equipment too late, the Russians will have taken territory that they will not give back.
The war will continue for weeks and months, the next winter is guaranteed to come. Let's see if we have enough gas and if we have the prices at gas stations and for heating oil under control. Many a politician facing an election will take this into account when making decisions. War fatigue is already emerging - but only in the West. A butcher like Putin will go on and let people die. If the West lets Ukraine down, it is betraying its values. Then the world will finally be different.
