By taking the New Year’s call from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Vladimir Putin hopes to deepen the split between those like the Ukrainian president who feel they must come hat in hand to the master in the Kremlin and those who have been fighting for five years against the Russian president’s efforts to occupy and destroy Ukraine, Vitaly Portnikov says.
And if that split becomes deep enough, the Ukrainian commentator says, the Kremlin leader hopes that it will spark a civil war in Ukraine, something that will not only justify Mr. Putin’s own actions but allow him to achieve his long-held and unchanging goal of destroying Ukrainian statehood.
Mr. Zelenskyy said he called Mr. Putin in order to follow up on the recent exchange of prisoners, but he could have called about that on another occasion when the conversation, the first new year’s exchange between the presidents of the two countries in years, would not have been so freighted with political meaning, Mr. Portnikov says.