ISW: Putin prepares Russians for ten years of war in Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin is preparing his country for the possibility that the war in Ukraine could last another ten years, a US think tank said.

More than two years after the start of the war launched by Putin in February 2022, Moscow is holding out the prospect of peace talks with Ukraine and calling on the war-torn country to cede territories occupied by Russian forces.

In its latest analysis of the conflict in Ukraine on Wednesday, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) focused on an interview that former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev gave to the newspaper Arguments and facts, as well as the reception of his statements by the pro-Kremlin media.

In the interview published late Tuesday, Medvedev, now deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, claimed that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had “not in vain” expressed the hope that Ukraine could join the military alliance within the next ten years.

“That is, never,” Medvedev said, adding that by 2034, “none of the heads of state of today’s NATO countries will be in their posts, and some will not even be in the world.”

“It is quite possible that the infamous Land 404 will no longer exist,” he said.

“Country 404” is a “pejorative use of the computer error code 404, which is intended to create the impression that Ukraine is not a real country,” the ISW explained.

“Russian state news agencies have editorialized comments by Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev, claiming that he said the Ukrainian state would cease to exist by 2034. This is likely to support the Kremlin’s efforts to prepare the Russian public for a long war in Ukraine while promising that Russia will achieve its goal of destroying Ukrainian statehood within a decade,” the think tank said.

Although Medvedev did not explicitly say that Ukraine would cease to exist by 2034, according to ISW, several media outlets, “including the Kremlin news agency TASS,” ran headlines such as “Medvedev admitted that Ukraine will cease to exist in 2034” and “Medvedev predicted Ukraine’s disappearance by 2034.”

Newsweek has contacted the Russian and Ukrainian Foreign Ministries by email.

The ISW said Medvedev’s claim that Russia would be able to “destroy” Ukraine by 2034 was “a promise to the Russian public that Russia would be able to win the war and achieve its goal of destroying Ukrainian statehood within a decade.”

This narrative “creates careful information conditions and societal expectations for a war that will last another decade but will end with the ‘victory’ desired by Russia,” the think tank said.

It also undermines recent attempts by Kremlin officials to convey that Russia is ready for peace talks with Ukraine to end the war, and “stresses that the only end stage of the war desired by the Kremlin is the complete destruction of the Ukrainian state and people.”

The Kremlin has set out several conditions that Russia considers non-negotiable. These include Ukraine agreeing to the annexation of four of its regions – Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia – in September 2022. Putin had previously called referendums that the international community deemed illegal.

On June 14, Putin also said that Ukraine must abandon any plans to join the NATO military alliance.

Ukraine has declared that a peace agreement must invalidate the September 2022 annexation of its territory and the Crimean peninsula, which Putin claimed in 2014.

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