Western partners have fallen into putin’s trap and are refusing to admit that russia is the problem — Ukraine’s former top diplomat

The key problem is that Ukraine’s Western partners have fallen into putin’s trap and are following his script. They’re looking for the war’s root causes in the wrong place, refusing to admit russia is the problem, Volodymyr Ohryzko, Foreign Affairs Minister of Ukraine in 2007-2009, said in an interview with espreso.tv.

Based on what putin said before the meeting with Witkoff and Kushner, in Bishkek, yesterday and today in moscow, I do not get the impression that he is going to make any concessions to Ukraine. He constantly repeats the same banal phrase: ‘I am for peace, but taking into account all our desires – we must get everything that we prescribed in these so-called root causes of the conflict.’ And the root cause of the conflict is russia.

In his opinion, the destruction of russia will be the elimination of the root causes of the conflict. Everything else is nonsense, delusion, what putin imposes on everyone and, by the way, successfully, because instead of discussing the real root cause of the war, we are talking about some political delusion.

And putin imposes this on Europe, the US, on us, and we, like foolish children, follow his script. For me, this is a huge mystery. Today, journalists asked me: ‘What is our key problem? Territories?’ No, not territories. The key problem is that our Western partners have fallen into putin’s trap and are following his script. They are looking for the root causes not where they are, unwilling to see that the root cause is russia itself. This is what we need to talk about. Unfortunately, we are playing games that putin skillfully imposes on us.