Ukraine-Russia peace talks are likely to fail because negotiating with Putin is like dealing with a ‘crocodile,’ Boris Johnson says

• UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared dealing with Putin to negotiations with a crocodile.
• Ukraine and Russia are unlikely to reach peace through negotiations given Putin’s “lack of good faith,” he said.
• Johnson said that Zelenskyy also has a “pretty maximalist position” on the war in the Donbas.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it’s unlikely that Ukraine and Russia can make peace through negotiations, comparing talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin to dealing with a “crocodile.”

“I really don’t see how the Ukrainians can easily sit down and come to some kind of accommodation. How can you negotiate with a crocodile when it’s got your leg in its jaws?” Johnson said Wednesday on a flight to India, The Guardian reported.

“I think it’s very hard to see how the Ukrainians can negotiate with Putin now, given his manifest lack of good faith and his strategy, which is evident, which is to try to engulf and capture as much of Ukraine as he can and then perhaps to have some kind of negotiation from a position of strength or even to launch another assault on Kyiv,” the prime minister said.

Johnson said that as a result, the UK and the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would have to continue their strategy of supplying arms to Ukraine, per The Guardian.

He also said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has taken a “pretty maximalist position” on the war in the Donbas with ambitions to expel all Russian troops in Donetsk and Luhansk, Reuters reported.  “Liberation” of the Donbas has long been one of Moscow’s war goals.

“But on Crimea they are not as maximalist,” he said, referring to the Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia in 2014.

Johnson added that on the other hand, Putin has shown a clear desire to seize more land in Ukraine and could make another push toward Kyiv, which Russian forces failed to take after weeks of assaulting the capital, per Reuters.

Peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow have stalled since diplomats from both sides met on March 29, in large part because Ukraine said it had discovered evidence of mass killings in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha after Russian forces left.

Johnson is traveling to India to liaise with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and discuss the possibility of India throwing its support behind Ukraine — an unlikely scenario given India’s existing ties to Russia, he said, per Reuters.

“I have already talked to Narendra Modi about Ukraine. And actually, the Indians have condemned what happened in Bucha,” he said. “But the UK in particular has to recognise that there is a historic relationship that India has with Russia. I think we have to be alive to that, and just point out where Putin is, I am afraid, letting Russia down badly.”