Russian leader Vladimir Putin's agreement to a week-long energy truce is not the gesture of a confident military commander, but the maneuver of a leader whose army is on the verge of collapse.
This is what Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a columnist for The Telegraph and a former officer in the British regular army, writes.
He notes that the Russian armed forces are in a state of deep decline. Putin has hired 15,000 soldiers from North Korea. Russian recruiters are scouring Africa for mercenaries. The prisons are empty. And now there are reports that wounded prisoners, many of whom have lost limbs, are returning to the front line to make up for the critical shortage. Some have not even received prosthetic limbs and are expected to return to battle on crutches.
All of these actions by the Russian government show two important things, according to Breton-Gordon.
1. The Russian army is losing combat capabilities
Independent analysis shows that Russia is advancing more slowly than the armies in the trenches of World War I, and at a comparable cost in human lives. In the past two years, Russia has captured just over 1% of Ukraine's territory, losing more than 500,000 men killed and wounded, and continues to lose about 1,000 men a day.
“This is a war of attrition in its most brutal form. Wounded soldiers are being used as consumables to “get bullets” in the hope that Ukraine will eventually run out of ammunition. This will only happen if we in the West allow it,” the analyst notes.
2. This shows the Kremlin’s complete disregard for its own people.
While ordinary Russians suffer from crushing inflation and skyrocketing interest rates, Moscow invests its remaining resources in missiles and drones to terrorize Kiev instead of taking care of its own people:
“For the Kremlin, the Russian army is just cannon fodder. Prisoners and foreign recruits are worth even less, if at all possible,” the columnist writes.
Real influence
He emphasizes that if this truly reflects the state of the modern Russian army, then even a relatively small increase in Western support would almost certainly allow Ukraine to emerge victorious:
“All signs point to the Russian army approaching its climax. Ukraine must negotiate from a position of strength, not dance like a tamed bear to please Washington, catering to Moscow’s fantasies.“
Given that Putin is rapidly running out of people to throw into the war machine, this could become a moment of real influence. And Donald Trump has a real chance to achieve peace, but only if he puts pressure where it is really needed: on Putin, the man capable of ending this war, writes Breton-Gordon.
Energy ceasefire with Russia
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier announced that Ukraine was ready to observe an energy ceasefire, although this was not directly discussed in Abu Dhabi.
Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that Russia had agreed to refrain from strikes against Ukraine until February 1 in response to a request from US President Donald Trump. According to him, Moscow agreed to this step “in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations“, UNIAN writes.