‘There Will Be No Minsk-3’

A politician considered to be the main Kremlin ideologist behind Vladimir Putin’s rule has rejected the prospect of peace talks to end the war in Ukraine started by Russia as described his country as an “impatient participant in a great struggle.”

Vladislav Surkov was first deputy chief of the Russian presidential administration from 1999 to 2011 and is seen as a secretive strategist who helped Putin cement his hold on power. He was dismissed from his adviser role in 2020 and reportedly placed under house arrest in April 2022.

In an op-ed for the Russian publication Aktualny Kommentari (Current Comments), Surkov poured scorn on the impact of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and said there should be no new version of the Minsk agreements that initially sought to end hostilities in Ukraine’s Donbas region which followed Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. The first Minsk Protocol, was drafted in 2014 but failed to stop the fighting. The next one signed in February 2015 was known as Minsk 2.

“There will be no Minsk-3,” he wrote, “Russia is no longer a mediator, patiently sorting out neighborly squabbles. Russia is now an impatient participant in the great struggle, which will take its toll. Understand [this] pagans.”

Both Russia and Ukraine have laid out conditions for a ceasefire in recent months, but many experts doubt whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or Vladimir Putin seriously wants to end the conflict as things currently stand.

Newsweek has contacted the Kremlin and the Ukrainian Defense Ministry for comment.

Surkov also said that Ukraine’s counteroffensive was not planned “according to the rules of science to win, but according to the recipes of provincial fortune-telling.”

He said that the push aiming to recapture Russian-held territory that began in June had failed, and now the command of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is hoping for “an unknown miracle weapon.”

This referred to comments by Ukraine’s commander Valeriy Zaluzhny that the war had reached a “stalemate” and for that to change there needed to be a major technological breakthrough “like the gunpowder which the Chinese invented.” His comments were later rejected by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Surkov wrote in the op-ed published on Wednesday that in the war, “there will be no miracle” as he disparaged how “magical thinking, impressionability and excessive poetry are the main features of the Ukrainian soul.”

“Ukrainians are beginning to become disillusioned with their sorcerers. And really, who will help them?” he wrote, adding that “next year will be a year of degradation and disorganization of the Ukrainian fake ‘state.'”