Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe as well as the director of Brookings’ Arms Control Initiative told ticker that Ukraine is not playing out the way that the Kremlin had planned or hoped.
“The Russians, who originally appeared to have capturing key the capital of Ukraine, are now withdrawing. They were beaten, and it now looks like the Russians have downsized their military objective,” he says,
“They’re now talking about trying to capture some more territory in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. And it looks like that they are taking forces that had originally been intended to assault Kyiv. They’re now trying to swing those to the east to reinforce their presence there.”
Is war entering a new phase?
Can Ukraine and Russia come together and potentially work towards a ceasefire at some stage?
Pifer says Ukraine President Zelensky is “putting out the sense that he’s prepared to look for compromises.”
“For example, He (Zelensky) said, he’s prepared to set aside Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO and accept neutrality. But so far, you’ve seen no real movement from the Kremlin.”
“It’s hard to have a negotiation when Moscow appears still intent on a military solution.”
Zelensky is calling for more military assistance, and Pifer says the west has been getting weapons to the Ukrainians, that the Ukrainians can use very quickly without a lot of training.
“But if this settles down into a long drawn out war that starts stretching weeks and months, you know, maybe it’s time for the west to begin to thinking about more sophisticated weapons,” he told tickerNEWS
He notes that it might take some time to train the Ukrainians, “but sophisticated weapons could give them more wear with all because it really may be incumbent on the Ukrainian military to continue to inflict more losses on the Russian military.”
He says it may be the key to getting Russia to negotiate seriously.
Pifer hopes that the west now looks to see that “maybe it is time to be providing the Ukrainians more.”
“We don’t want to be looking back three or four months from now, and seeing hundreds of towns go through what Bush had gone through and see major cities like Kyiv And Odessa go through what Mariupol suffered,” he says
“And so maybe it is time to do some things, to give the Ukrainians even more military capability, so that they can push back against the Russians, ideally, drive them out, or at least bring the Russians to the negotiating table in a serious way.”
