By Ben Aris in Berlin
Russian President Vladimir Putin called for a ceasefire in the Ukrainian war, freezing the current frontline, if Ukraine is willing to withdraw from thefour regions annexed by Russia last year and agrees to give up its Nato membership ambitions, the Russian leader said in a televised address on June 14.
Kyiv immediately rejected the offer.
Putin said Russia is ready to end the war in Ukraine with a negotiated ceasefire, but he is prepared to continue fighting if Kyiv and the West do not respond to his offer.
Of the four regions in question of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Russia has never fully occupied Donetsk or Luhansk and was forced to withdraw from Kherson in 2023 in the face of a Ukrainian assault that cut its army there off from supplies on the other side of the Dnipro river.
However, Kyiv did concede toabandon its Nato ambitions during the ceasefire talks in March 2022 in Belarus and return to its pre-2014 constitutional stance of neutrality.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on X that the Russian leader was trying to derail the upcoming Ukrainian-initiated peace summit in Switzerland by sending out 'phoney signals' about his alleged readiness to halt the war.
'Putin currently has no desire to end his aggression against Ukraine. Only the principled and united voice of the global majority can force him to choose peace over war,' Kuleba said.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, said Putin wanted Western democracies to accept defeat.
Frustration
Putin told a small group of advisers he is frustrated with Western-backed attempts to obstruct the start of peace talks and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's decision to rule out talks, Reuters reported citing Kremlin sources.
'Putin can fight for as long as it takes, but Putin is also ready for a ceasefire – to freeze the war,' a senior Russian source with knowledge of high-level Kremlin conversations told Reuters.
Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have said several times recent that Russia is “ready to negotiate” but that Ukraine will have to acknowledge “realities on the ground,” taken to mean that the Kremlin expects Bankova to cede the territories currently occupied by Russia – some 20% of Ukraine’s territory – to Russian control.
Putin has also said that he is willing to enter into talks on the basis of theIstanbul peace deal agreed in 2022, but later abandoned by Zelenskiy when former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made it clear to him that the West would not offer Ukraine bilateral security deals that were part of Ukraine’s plan to end the fighting.
Asked about the Reuters report at a news conference in Belarus on Friday, Putin said peace talks should resume. 'Let them restart,' he said, adding that negotiations should be based on 'the realities on the ground' and on a plan agreed during a previous attempt to reach a deal in the early weeks of the war. 'Not on the basis of what one side wants,' he added.
Playing to his advantage
Putin appears to be trying to bring the war to an early end, capitalising on the deteriorating situation in Ukraine. The six month hiatus in US support that came to an end with a new US$61bn aid package on April 20 left Ukraine defenceless in the face of an intense barrage of Russian missiles that destroyed three quarters of Ukraine’s power sector.
At the same time thestalemate that marked most of the fighting in 2023 has given way to slow but steady Russian advances this year, with Russian troops capturing some 700 square kilometres of territory, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Ukraine is also running desperately low on manpower and has been press ganging men into service to make up the numbers fallen or wounded in the fighting. For its part, Russia has been running a successful volunteer recruitment campaign that has added an estimated 30,000 fresh troops a month and the Russian army is estimated to be15% larger than it was during the invasion of Ukraine just over two years ago.
Putin is hoping that the growing difficulty Kyiv is facing in raising funds and the West’s ongoing reluctance to do more thanprevent Ukraine from losing, without giving it the weapons it needs to win will conspire to persuade Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to call a halt to hostilities.
Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in response to a request for comment, said the country did not want “eternal war.” Kremlin sources told Reuters that the gains made so far were sufficient for Putin to be able to sell the ceasefire as a victory to the population. Russians initially condemned the decision to invade Ukraine, but have fallen into line since, accepting the Kremlin’s line that Russia is under attack by Nato. Russian patriotism is currently at an all-time high as a result.
Although Russia has taken the initiative in the war since the fall ofAvdiivka on February 17, it has not been able to inflict decisive defeats on the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), which have made good use of its increasingly large drone fleet to make the no mans land at the line of contact a kill zone for advancing Russian forces. Russia is reportedly losing 1,200 men a day killed or wounded in action, or some 30,000 a month, equivalent to the numbers currently being recruited.
Given that Putin is facing a costly war of attrition, three Reuters sources said Putin understood any dramatic new advances would require another nationwide mobilisation, which he didn't want, with one source, who knows the Russian president, saying his popularity dipped after the first mobilisation in September 2022.
However, as bne IntelliNews columnist Mark Galeotti pointed out in a recent opinion piece, “victory” for either side remains ill-defined and the maximalist positions of both the Kremlin and Bankova means there is no overlap in their negotiating positions and so no basis for talks.
The prospect of a ceasefire, or even peace talks, currently seems remote. Zelenskiy has repeatedly said 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 in 2022 that formally declared any talks with Putin 'impossible.'
One of Reuters’ sources predicted no agreement could happen while Zelenskiy was in power unless Russia bypassed him and struck a deal with Washington. However, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking in Kyiv last week, told reporters he did not believe Putin was interested in serious negotiations.
Another factor influencing the Kremlin chief's view that the war should end is that the longer it drags on, the more battle-hardened veterans return to Russia, dissatisfied with post-war job and income prospects, potentially creating tensions in society, said one of the sources, who has worked with Putin.
Five sources told Reuters that Putin had told advisers he had no designs on Nato territory, reflecting his public comments on the matter. Two of the sources cited Russian concerns about the growing danger of escalation with the West, including nuclear escalation, over the Ukraine standoff.
