Doing so would require the Russian leader to “accept the failure of sitting down with a president he considers a joke from a country that doesn’t exist”
Source: Why Putin is not ready to meet with Zelensky, and may never be | CNN
fta:
So if this meeting happens – as Orysia Lutsevich, the director of Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia program puts it – Putin “will have to accept the failure of sitting down with a president he considers a joke from a country that doesn’t exist”.
It would also, she argued, be a huge reversal in tone that would be tough to explain to the Russian people. “(Putin) so much brainwashed Russians on state television that Zelensky’s a Nazi, that (Ukraine’s) a puppet state of the West … that Zelensky’s illegitimate, why is he suddenly talking to him?”
