Subject: Re: Let’s See If This Pans Out for Putin
The Russians are just going to leave on their own. It's going to take some kind of negotiation.

The Russians aren't going to just leave on their own, which is why Ukraine's regular military forces are attacking them constantly in one of the more active wars going on in the planet. In response to that, at some point the Russians are likely to come to the determination that they will need to withdraw.

That's when you start the actual negotiation over the terms and circumstances of their withdrawal. You can have constant lines of communication at lower levels and discussions about smaller, discrete aspects of the conflict. But until Russia reaches the point where withdrawal from Ukraine is on the table, high-level negotiations will be fruitless. Or worse - they'll be opportunities for Russia to gain propaganda victories and will diminish the diplomatic isolation that goes hand in hand with economic isolation.

The thread title was asking if this would pan out for Putin, and it's gone better than he possibly could have imagined. The imagery from the summit - having a literal red carpet rolled out for him - could not have been better. He got to make all of his points, both directly to the President and publicly on an enormous global stage, and had virtually no pushback or negative rhetoric to complicate it. And it looks like the President, who is...."mercurial" in his policy positions, was sufficiently enamored by the suggestion that this is all Obama and Biden's fault that he took to social media and made even more helpful statements.

That's why you usually don't reward someone with a head-of-state level summit unless they're willing to agree to something in exchange for the unalloyed benefit of getting to have that meeting. Dictators love the opportunity to create the illusion that they're not pariahs or war criminals or anathema to the global world order - giving that to them for "free" is foolish.