Vladimir Putin has said the war in Ukraine has made Russia “much stronger” and denied that the fall of his key ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria has hurt Moscow’s standing, as he held a marathon year-end press conference and television call-in seeking to project confidence at home and abroad.
Casting the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as “illegitimate”, Mr Putin said he was ready to meet US president-elect Donald Trump and discuss peace proposals to end his full-scale invasion, but he repeated his hardline stance that Moscow would keep control of Crimea together with the four Ukrainian regions he laid claim to in 2022.
The closely orchestrated end-of-year event lasted four and a half hours and included phone-in questions from war bloggers, pensioners, as well as regional journalists vying for the microphone in a studio in Moscow.
Mr Putin appeared largely upbeat and confident, as his troops continued to make grinding progress in Ukraine. “Every day our fighters are reclaiming territory by the square kilometre,” he said.
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He said the Russian military was “advancing toward achieving our goals” in what he calls the special military operation in Ukraine.
Mr Putin said at one point that Moscow was “ready for negotiations and compromises” to end the fighting, but later he pointed to a maximalist position that would involve Ukraine not joining Nato, adopting a neutral status and undergoing some level of demilitarisation, while also demanding that the West lift its sanctions against Russia.
With the incoming Trump administration promising to swiftly end the war in Ukraine, Moscow and Kyiv are warily considering the prospect of talks.
Keith Kellogg, Mr Trump’s nominee for special envoy to the war in Ukraine, said this week that Trump had a vision for ending the war. But a viable path to a peace deal remains elusive as Putin shows no indication of backing down from his demands, which appear to be non-starters for Ukraine.
Despite media reports suggesting they had frequently kept in touch after Trump left office, Mr Putin claimed he had not spoken with Trump in four years but said he was “ready to meet with him at any time”.
Mr Putin also used his annual event – designed to project power and control by answering handpicked questions – to address a series of sensitive developments that have tarnished Russia’s reputation.
Speaking for the first time about the fall of his close ally Assad, which threatens Moscow’s foothold in the Middle East, Mr Putin rejected the idea that he had suffered a major geopolitical setback.
“The situation that has occurred in Syria is not a defeat for Russia,” Mr Putin insisted, stressing that Moscow had achieved its goal when it intervened on Assad’s side in 2015.
Mr Putin said he had not yet seen Mr Assad since his arrival in Moscow but that he was planning to do so.
Mr Putin also addressed the assassination of Lieut Gen Igor Kirillov in a blast in Moscow – a bold attack widely viewed as a triumph for Ukraine’s intelligence services. Mr Putin described the death of Kirillov as a “grave failure” of his intelligence services.
Recent polling has suggested that some people in the country are growing tired of the invasion, while the war economy has suddenly begun to show serious signs of strain.
A poll by the independent Levada Center found that the most popular questions for Mr Putin would be when the invasion of Ukraine would end and why prices were rising so quickly.
He said he had no regrets about his decision to launch the invasion in 2022, adding that in hindsight he would have started the war earlier and “better prepared”.
“Not only do I believe I saved [Russia], I believe that we’ve moved back from the edge of the abyss,” Mr Putin said. – Guardian
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