War will likely last ‘decades’: Russia
MOSCOW: A top ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin said the Ukraine war could last for decades, with long periods of fighting interspersed by truces.
Former president Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Putin’s powerful security council, also said negotiations with Ukraine were ‘‘impossible’’ as long as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was in power.
‘‘This conflict will last a very long time, most likely decades,’’ he said.
‘‘As long as there is such a power in place, there will be, say, three years of truce, two years of conflict, and everything will be repeated.’’
Medvedev also said the West was seriously underestimating the risk of a nuclear war over Ukraine, saying Russia would launch a preemptive strike if Ukraine got nuclear weapons.
‘‘There are irreversible laws of war. If it comes to nuclear weapons, there will have to be a preemptive strike.’’
Allowing Ukraine nuclear weapons, a step no Western state has publicly proposed, would mean ‘‘a missile with a nuclear charge coming to them’’.
Medvedev, who once cast himself as a liberal moderniser, now presents himself as a fiercely antiWestern Kremlin hawk.
Diplomats say his views give an indication of thinking at the top levels of the
Kremlin elite.
Meanwhile in Ukraine, Russia’s Wagner private army started handing over its positions in Bakhmut to regular Russian troops yesterday, after declaring full control of the devastated eastern Ukrainian city following the longest and bloodiest battle of the war.
Moscow says capturing Bakhmut opens the way to advances in the eastern industrial region known as the Donbas.
Kyiv says the battle drew Russian forces into the city, inflicting high casualties and weakening Moscow’s defensive line elsewhere.
Wagner founder Yevgeny Prighozin, who has repeatedly accused Russia’s regular military of abandoning ground captured earlier by his men, said Wagner would be ready to return to the city if needed.
‘‘From today at five in the morning, May 25 until June 1, most of the [Wagner] units will rebase to camps in the rear,’’ Prighozin said in a video, wearing battle gear and standing beside a wardamaged residential block.
He says 20,000 of his fighters died taking Bakhmut.
Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said Wagner had handed over positions on the city’s outskirts but ‘‘inside the city itself Wagner fighters remain’’.
Also yesterday, Russia moved ahead with a plan to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in neighbouring ally Belarus, signing a deal about the storage of the warheads.
It would be the Kremlin’s first deployment of such bombs outside Russia since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.
‘‘The movement of the nuclear weapons has already begun,’’ Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko told reporters in Moscow, where he was attending talks with other leaders of exSoviet states. — Reuters