The Russian president sets Russia’s conditions for peace
The Russian President Vladimir Putin is open to discussing a ceasefire deal in Ukraine with US President-elect Donald Trump, but rules out major territorial concessions and insists Kiev abandon its ambitions to join NATO, informed Russian sources said on Wednesday.
In the first detailed coverage of what Putin might accept in any deal Trump proposes, five Russian sources said the Kremlin “might broadly agree to a freeze in the conflict along the front lines”.
Three of the sources said there may be room for negotiation over the exact division of the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson.
Two officials said Russia might also be open to withdrawing from relatively small areas of territory it controls in the Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions of northern and southern Ukraine.
But two other sources said President Joe Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to fire US ATACMS missiles deep into Russia could complicate and delay any settlement and make Russian demands more stringent.
Moscow announced that Kiev had used these missiles for the first time to bomb Russian territory, and denounced the move as a major escalation.
“If a ceasefire isn’t agreed upon, Russia will continue fighting,” the two sources said.
Trump’s return to the White House, who has pledged to end the conflict quickly, comes at a time when Russia’s star is on the rise in Ukraine.
Moscow controls territory in Ukraine the size of the US state of Virginia and is advancing at its fastest pace since the early days of the invasion in 2022.
Stephen Cheung, Trump’s communications director, had previously said that the next US president is the only person who can bring the two sides together to negotiate peace, work to end the war and stop the fighting.
While Moscow says the four regions are an integral part of its territory and are protected by its nuclear umbrella, its forces actually control 70 to 80% of the area, with about 26,000 square kilometers still under Ukrainian control, according to open-source data from the front lines.
Putin said this month that any ceasefire agreement must reflect the realities on the ground, but he expressed reservations about a short-term truce that would allow the West to rearm Ukraine.
On June 14, Putin set out his initial conditions for ending the war immediately: Ukraine must abandon its ambitions to join NATO and withdraw all its forces from the four Ukrainian regions that Russia claims as its own and controls most of them.
While Russia won’t accept Ukraine joining the alliance or the presence of alliance forces on Ukrainian territory, it’s open to discussing security guarantees for Kyiv, according to the five officials.
Other concessions the Kremlin could press for from Kyiv include Ukraine agreeing to reduce the size of its armed forces and committing not to impose restrictions on the use of the Russian language, the officials said.
Russia controls 18% of Ukraine, including all of Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, 80% of Donbas, the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, more than 70% of Zaporizhia and Kherson regions, and just under 3% of Kharkiv region and part of Mykolaiv.
In total, Russia controls more than 110,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, while Ukraine controls about 650 square kilometers of Russia’s Kursk region.
