The Russian leader is “convinced he can simply outlast Ukraine and its supporters — sending more and more Russians to their deaths, and inflicting more and more suffering on Ukrainian civilians,” Mr. Blinken said. “He thinks even if he loses the short game, he can still win the long game.”
Still, Mr. Blinken added, the United States would support any peace initiative “that helps bring President Putin to the table to engage in meaningful diplomacy,” the secretary of state said. He added that such efforts must include Russian accountability for wartime atrocities and payments for Ukraine’s reconstruction.
Mr. Blinken said, as he has before, that a peace deal would have to “affirm the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence.” But, also as before, he did not specify whether the U.S. believes that Russia must withdraw from all Ukrainian territory — including the strategic Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014 and which many analysts believe Mr. Putin will never surrender.
Mr. Blinken also said that a genuine peace deal could open the door to the lifting of Western sanctions on Russia “connected to concrete actions, especially military withdrawal.” And he reiterated that “the U.S. does not seek to overthrow the Russian government.”
Earlier on Friday, Mr. Blinken met with Finland’s departing prime minister, Sanna Marin, and the country’s foreign minister, Pekka Haavisto.
Mr. Blinken marveled at Finland’s accession into NATO, suggesting that it amounted a colossal blunder by Mr. Putin, who previously had relatively friendly relations with Helsinki. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he noted, just one in four Finns supported the country’s joining NATO. After the invasion, three in four Finns supported NATO membership, he said.
