RUSSIA SQUEAKS FOR MORE
July 20, 2022 -Durt Fibo

Today Lavrov blabs: “Now the geography is different, it’s far from being just the DPR and LPR, it’s also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and a number of other territories,” by which he means the entire Black Sea coast all the way over and up and to Moldova. On March 10, at the first talks in Turkey, Lavrov waited for concessions from Ukraine Foreign Minister Kuleba, then finally confessed he had come to the negotiations without any mandate to speak for Putin. On March 25, at the later Istanbul talks, Russia’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky bumped the number of Putin’s demands up from 4 to 6. Nonetheless, during those negotiations, Ukraine offered to drop its interest in NATO membership and declare official neutrality. Russia in turn said it would reduce its military operations around Kyiv and Chernihiv, but that, as we all see, was Putin’s way of slinking away from losing fronts and gaining time to regroup, redeploy, and resupply its forces before mounting the offensives currently active.