Abysmal reporting.
CBC reporting on negotiations to end the U.S. proxy war on Russia in Ukraine attributes motives and objectives to President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation that are entirely uninformed by public statements he has made repeatedly, transcripts of which are readily available online at the Kremlin website.
How anyone can write or publish analysis attributing to Mr. Putin motives and objectives without apparently having read readouts or watched videos of him delivering even one of numerous speeches, interviews, meetings, or press availabilities in which he has clearly and repeatedly enunciated his position on these matters is beyond me.
The most famous is a speech he delivered to the Russian Foreign Ministry on June 14, 2024, clearly enunciating the root causes of Russia's Special Military Operation in Ukraine and the conditions necessary to end it.
A former Canadian ambassador to Russia is quoted in an August 16, 2025, CBC News article, "Trump leaves Alaska without a Ukraine peace deal – and Putin gets a win," as saying, "I met the guy [a deliberately undiplomatic and demeaning choice of words] in the 1990s, what he's always wanted was to recapture the status that the Soviet Union had in the world."
Mr. Putin was elected president of Russia the first time in May, 2000 – twenty-five years ago – at which time economic "shock therapy," inflicted on the Russian people by Western financial predators, had completely demolished the Russian economy.
The newly-elected president of Russia's sole preoccupation in that period was hardly to "recapture the status that the Soviet Union had in the world" but to bring his country, in which U.S. financial idiots had reduced men's life expectancy from 64 years in 1987 to 57 years in 1994, back from the brink of complete annihilation, which he succeeded in doing. In spades.
Russia in 2024 leapfrogged Germany and Japan to become the world's fourth largest economy by PPP (Purchasing Power Parity).
The CBC News article referenced above claims that President Putin, "has been a pariah among Western leaders since he launched his brutal assault on Ukraine," another outrageously uninformed fantasy.
The West's self-appointed rulers of planet Earth, anticipating that the previously-unknown Mr. Putin would be as incompetent and easy to push around as his predecessor, loved him from the day Boris Yeltsin appointed him acting president of Russia on December 31, 1999.
On February 10, 2007, with a speech at the Munich Security Conference that shook the U.S. hegemonic world order to its core, that perception changed instantly, and ever since, Mr. Putin has been the devil incarnate, Hitler, and the antichrist rolled into one in every statement, devoid of facts and based on nothing but imperial hubris, uttered about him in Western media.
Meanwhile, the global majority has moved on. A multipolar world order grounded in the U.N. Charter and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence is evolving while finance capital, militarism, and an intellectually vapid, unreflective, and ignorant ruling class have brought the West to the verge of precisely the situation – what Adam Curtis called the "Trauma Zone" – that confronted Mr. Putin in Russia when he became its president in 2000.
I see no one in the West with an iota of Mr. Putin's capability to turn this pathetic and completely unnecessary descent into oblivion around.
As for what Mr. Putin aims to achieve in his diplomacy with the U.S., his objective today is the same at it was in Munich in 2007; Minsk in February, 2015; the draft treaty he sent to Joe Biden and NATO on December 17, 2021; Istanbul in March, 2022; and Alaska in August, 2025: a security architecture for Europe that is not predicated on hostility to the Russian Federation.