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EnergiesNet.com 06 08 2022

What’s the point of talking to Vladimir Putin? It’s a question that divides European leaders amid the terrible human and economic costs of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Advocates of diplomacy stress the need to halt the fighting to save lives and ease a potential global food crisis triggered by Russian blockades of Ukraine’s grain ports. Soaring energy prices as the European Union seeks to break dependence on Russia’s oil and gas add to political pressures at home.

Opponents say engagement amounts to talking to a war criminal whose denial of any invasion plans showed his word is worthless. Why negotiate with a blackmailer?

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The tensions are palpable and geographic. French President Emmanuel Macron’s call not to “humiliate” Russia earned rebukes from Ukraine and rueful head-shaking from the EU’s eastern states that remember Moscow’s rule in the former Communist bloc.

Macron has spoken repeatedly with Putin, to little obvious effect. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who warned yesterday that isolating Russia isn’t possible, was also phoning the Russian president to urge a ceasefire until Putin stopped taking her calls, as Arne Delfs reports.

Grain Shipments

Ukraine normally sells more abroad each season than the whole EU

Putin has tied a resumption of grain exports to a lifting of crippling sanctions on his economy. His foreign minister is in Turkey today for talks on restarting shipments. Ukraine wasn’t invited, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Russia shows no sign of abandoning attempts to annex parts of eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian leader says he seeks victory on the battlefield while remaining open to peace talks with Putin.

For the Kremlin, the lesson of Putin’s 2014 seizure of Crimea is that diplomacy eventually lets him keep what he can take.

bloomberg.com 06 08 2022