 Putin will strike Moldova and the Baltic states, says ex-Georgia president. Vladimir Putin will strike Moldova and the Baltic states if he is given Ukrainian land in exchange for peace, Georgia's imprisoned former president has warned. Mikhail Sarkashvili, who led Georgia when it was invaded by Russia in 2008, told the Telegraph that the Russian president will not cease his expansionist ambitions if peace in Ukraine is bought with territorial concessions. If Russia manages to freeze its control over part of Ukraine, of course the war will spread to other parts of Ukraine, Moldova and Baltic countries shortly after his temporary freeze, he said. That's why such a deal would never be viable, he added. Zelensky's peace plan is a rock-solid basis for any negotiated settlement, Sarkashvili said. Without respect for Ukraine's sovereign and territorial integrity, there can be no peace but only further escalation of the conflict. Sarkashvili believes that the West's failure to punish Putin for the invasion emboldened him to seize Crimea in 2014 and invade Ukraine in 2022 and convinced the Russian dictator that the West is weak, impatient and can always be outlasted. In 2008, our partners limited their reaction to denouncing the Russian actions, but soon the world's attention was diverted by the world economic crisis. He said, That's the lesson Putin learned, that if the world is in turmoil, the attention of democratic countries becomes diluted and their reactions weaken. He added, The very last words Putin told me during our last meeting were, Your Western friends promise you lots of nice things, but they never deliver. I don't promise you anything nice, but I always deliver. Putin sees all these conflicts as episodes of his main conflict with the United States, the Anglo-Saxon world and Western democracy in general and he is convinced that he can outlast and outsmart the Westerners. Can Zelensky trust him? Absolutely not. Nobody can.