WANT PEACE? GET READY FOR WAR

To save face from many lost battles against Ukraine, and to get what it needs from the international community, Russia needs a regime change.

- Mridula Ghosh/Kyiv

However, the imperialist circles led by President Putin are still quite dominant, and they have rallied a large number of people to their side. Therefore, many are sceptical whether Russia would honour any ceasefire.

Ask anyone in Ukraine how to stop the war, and they will say: let Putin order his soldiers to leave Ukraine's sovereign territory, and there will be no war. However, this straightforward solution finds no echo in the imperialist realm of warmongering Russia.

Why Russia needs peace

With the occupation of Crimea in February 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russia etched its name in history as an aggressor, violating the UN Charter, the Budapest Memorandum (security assurances granted to Ukraine for joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) and every conceivable international treaty. After 80 years, Russia unleashed a brutal war on mainland Europe, just as Germany and the Soviet Union did in 1939 when they attacked Poland, launching World War II.

Despite boasting that it would seize Kyiv in three days and subdue Ukraine in two weeks, Russia, the self-proclaimed second most powerful army in the world, has lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers and yet failed to secure victory. Equally humiliating is its reliance on North Korean troops and its decision to bring people from South Asian and African nations under false contracts to fight on the frontlines.

Russia's economy worsens daily under sanctions, though it deploys various tactics to evade them. Elite economic and political circles in Russia realise the war's futility, yearning for peace and lifting of sanctions. Yet, the leadership persists with nuclear sabre-rattling and reiterates outdated, unreasonable demands on sovereign Ukraine.

Peace for Ukraine is existential