NEW YORK, August 15. /TASS/. Russia is unlikely to suffer a defeat in Ukraine so the US needs to force Kiev to make concessions in order to find a peaceful solution to the conflict, Michael Cohen, Christopher Preble and Monica Duffy Toft from the Center for Strategic Studies at Massachusetts-based Tufts University said in an op-ed for the Foreign Affairs.

According to the analysts, "Moscow will almost certainly not be defeated in Ukraine," so the US "must think about the price for peace" and a compromise that will "leave the world a more stable place, even if it appears" that Russia has been given what it wants. The alternative to that would be "fighting an endless war to a bloody stalemate in Ukraine," the experts stressed.

They pointed to Washington’s misplaced "belief that victory in war is a zero-sum game." In this regard, they mentioned the US failure in Afghanistan, noting that by demanding the total military and political defeat of the Taliban (outlawed in Russia - TASS), the US forced the movement to continue fighting. Washington made the same mistake in Iraq, the experts noted.

Earlier, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban conducted a ten-day peace mission. He held talks with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in Kiev on July 2, and met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow three days later. On July 8, the Hungarian premier made a trip to Beijing to discuss the Ukraine issue with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He also visited Washington, holding talks with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of a NATO summit, and met with ex-US President Donald Trump in Florida to discuss ways to settle the Ukrainian crisis. Orban said later that Trump would solve the problem if re-elected US president in November.