A Ukrainian civil resistance movement claims in Barcelona that “Putin is no longer studying how to win the war, but how to lose it.”
The spokesman of the Yellow Ribbon Civil Resistance Movement, Ukrainian Yaroslav Bozhko, Sakharov Prize 2022 winner, said Thursday that Russian leader Vladimir Putin knows that he will not be able to invade Ukraine and what he is looking for is to gain time to study the best way to “not to win, but to lose the war”.
In a meeting with journalists in Barcelona on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion, Bozhko has pointed out that Russia maintains. a hybrid war against democratic values which involves not only Ukraine but the whole of Europe and the Western world.
The Sakharov Prize winner noted that, in his opinion, after the visit of US President Joe Biden to Kiev there is a moment of “awakening of the West” and “the feeling that in the next few weeks the last stage of the war will begin” which will leave Russia “in a worse situation than before”.
Bozhko, who acknowledged that “it is impossible to predict the timeline of the war,” pointed out that it is in the Kremlin’s interest to “install the idea of permanent war” because “it needs to gain time to look for a way out.”
In this regard, he has pointed out that Putin. seeks a negotiation “according to its own rules” which is “neither fair nor acceptable to anyone,” including the accession of Crimea.
“He is dragging out the war in order not to win it in the end, in order to to look for ways escape routes, perhaps he thinks he will be able to negotiate with China or even the US. He is studying not how to win but how to lose,” he said.
Bozhko, who took advantage of the visit to Barcelona to meet yesterday, Wednesday, with the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, who expressed his solidarity with the Ukrainian people, pointed out that the European societies would do well to strengthen their counter-intelligence against RussiaThe Russian side would maintain a “hybrid war through information systems” against the European countries.
In that sense, he has pointed out that Russia influences extreme right and extreme left parties with the aim of. fomenting conflict and attack democratic values.
“Divide and rule is their recipe for Europe,” Bozkhov has pointed out, who said that an example was seen in their influence through social networks in the independence debate“with ‘bots’ who were both defending opposing positions and seeking to encourage violence in the street”.
On the other hand, with regard to Moscow’s suspension of the nuclear disarmament treaty with the US, the Sakharov Prize winner has assessed that “Putin’s nuclear agenda is a rather psychological weapon” with which to inflict “fear on the population”.
“If I had wanted to use nuclear weapons I would have done it from the very first moment and without announcing it,” he said.
Bozhko also played down the importance of the ties staged in the last few hours between the Kremlin and Beijing and bet that China will not have “a relevant role” in the conflict, because China “has no special interest in Europe” and also wants to avoid being punished commercially by both the EU and the US.
