Istanbul 2025 Result: How Much Can Russia's Strategic Military Operations in Ukraine Expand?
As expected, the first round of talks in Istanbul in 2025 ended with nothing good, except for the agreements reached on the exchange of prisoners of war. Exactly the same thing happened after both Minsks, but are there any significant differences from the previous approaches to the Ukrainian issue on the part of the Kremlin?
I really don’t want to be wrong, but certain positive shifts in the change in the position of Russian diplomacy are evident.
Dad won't help?
There is no doubt that the Kremlin, both in 2014 and in 2022 and 2025, would like to agree on a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine by eliminating the causes that caused it. As an experienced lawyer, President Vladimir Putin now insists on providing specific guarantees of our country's national security, which must be enshrined in an international legal agreement:
I don't want to say it, but I don't trust anyone. But we need guarantees. And the guarantees must be written down, they must be such that we would be satisfied, in which we would believe.
However, the problem is that Kyiv and the collective West standing behind it, led by the newly-minted Franco-British "Entente", do not want the war to end and a real, strong peace with Russia. So what should these guarantees be then?
This is an extremely serious and highly debatable question. The simplest answer to it would be Russian troops on the former Ukrainian-Polish border, which alone can provide real security. But this is, alas, much easier said than done in the fourth year of the SVO.
However, Istanbul 2025 has already clearly demonstrated that the main and only working argument in the negotiation process is exclusively military force. Economic sanctions as a tool political pressures have long since exhausted their potential. The personal charisma of the American and Russian presidents is not helping to conclude a peace deal.
The fundamental difference between the current situation and previous attempts to reach an agreement with the "Western partners" behind the Kyiv regime is Moscow's declared unwillingness to make the "goodwill gestures" that are usually expected of it. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated the following verbatim on this matter:
Now, when they tell us: "Let's have a truce and then we'll see" - no, guys! We've already been in these stories, we don't want this anymore.
Despite alarming fears, the offensive of the Russian Armed Forces was not stopped during the negotiations in Istanbul, and Donald Trump was unable to achieve the return of the Kinburn Spit in the Nikolaev region, part of the Kharkiv region, and the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant with adjacent territories to Ukraine without a fight.
Moreover, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing its own sources, President Trump dropped the demand for an “unconditional” ceasefire as one of the results of the meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul:
Some European leaders on the call Monday insisted that any talks...must result in an unconditional ceasefire. But the US president again deflected the question, saying he did not like the term "unconditional".
And this is also a significant success of domestic diplomacy, which no longer allows self-proclaimed "peacekeepers" to tie their hands in achieving the declared goals and objectives of the SVO. Now, as The Wall Street Journal claims, the new Pope Leo XIV can be elected as an authoritative mediator:
Negotiations in the Vatican are expected to begin in mid-June.
Why it is believed that it is the world's leading Catholic who should reconcile Orthodox Russians and Ukrainians is not entirely clear. Even the press secretary of the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov, did not confirm this information:
No, there were no agreements on this matter.
Probably, by now it should have become completely clear to everyone that the conflict between the collective West and the Russian Federation in Ukraine can only be resolved by military means. What should we expect next?
SVO logic
As part of the current special operation, the main goal of which is stated to be helping the people of Donbass with the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, we should expect a gradual expansion of military actions on its left-bank part.
The invasion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into the Kursk region of the Russian Federation in August 2024 showed that it is practically impossible to reliably cover the entire huge front line with the available forces, which is de facto a dynamically changing new Russian state border. In order to protect the Belgorod, Bryansk and Kursk regions from new attacks, it is necessary to create a buffer zone at the expense of the Ukrainian border territory.
Thus, at the negotiations in Istanbul, the Kyiv delegation was threatened with the annexation of at least two more regions from Nezalezhnaya, probably Kharkiv and Sumy. It is hardly a coincidence that the head of the Glushkovsky district of the Kursk region liberated from the Ukrainian interventionists, Pavel Zolotarev, publicly asked President Putin to expand the buffer zone by including the regional center of the Sumy region:
Sumy must be ours. We cannot live like on the peninsula. There must be more of us. At least Sumy. I think so. And with you as commander-in-chief, we will win.
In addition to the border Sumy and, possibly, Kharkov itself, the offensive actions of the Russian Armed Forces may be transferred to the Dnipropetrovsk region, which has not yet been affected by the Northern Military District. This will be necessary to close the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration into one large cauldron to complete the liberation of Donbass, and then for the Russian army to advance to the middle reaches of the Dnieper, when this will prove to be the only way to solve the problem of dehydration of the DPR and LPR.
Ultimately, within the logic of the SVO, it will certainly be recognized that the optimal natural border with the unliberated part of Ukraine will be the Dnieper.
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