Views: 5
Vladimir Putin is prepared to halt his bloodshed in Ukraine in one condition – locking in Russia’s current battlefield gains, it has been reported.
A ceasefire – while offering a temporary respite from the fighting – would result in abandoning as many as 11 million people who could be living under occupation, and 20% of Ukrainian sovereign territory.
Four Russian sources, cited by Reuters, who are familiar with discussions in Putin’s entourage, claimed the president had expressed frustration about what he views as Western-backed attempts to hinder negotiations.
‘Putin can fight for as long as it takes, but Putin is also ready for a ceasefire freeze the war,’ said one of them, a senior Russian source who has worked with him and has knowledge of top level conversations in the Kremlin.
Like the others cited in this story, he spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of it.
Vladimir Putin during his press conference at the Harbin Institute of Technology, May 17, 2024, in Harbin, China
All of them insisted that freezing the war along current lines is a non-negotiable for the despot as it would leave him in possession of substantial chunks of four Ukrainian regions, but without full control of any.
‘Putin will say that we won, that Nato attacked us and we kept our sovereignty, that we have a land corridor to Crimea, which is true,’ one of the sources added, giving their own analysis.
But a ceasefire would fall short of the goals Putin set at the start, when he said that four of Ukraine’s regions – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – now belonged to Russia in their entirety.
Dmitry Peskov, the president’s press secretary, insisted that there could be no question of handing back the four regions which were now permanently part of Russia according to its own constitution.
Such a trajectory to the Russian invasion has long been a dreaded scenario, both for Ukraine and Nato.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly said that peace on Putin’s terms is a non-starter.
He has vowed to retake lost territory, including Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
He signed a decree back in 2022 that formally declared any talks with the Russian warlord ‘impossible’.