Vladimir Putin has said he thinks the Ukraine war is winding down, in remarks that came a few hours after he had vowed to defeat Ukraine at Moscow’s most scaled-back Victory Day parade in years.
“I think that the matter is coming to an end,” Putin said of Europe’s deadliest conflict since the second world war. He said he would be willing to negotiate new security arrangements for Europe, and that his preferred negotiating partner would be Germany’s former chancellor Gerhard Schröder – a choice likely to be met with skepticism in Ukraine and the EU.
This week the European Council president, António Costa, said he believed there was potential for the EU to negotiate with Russia and to discuss the future of the security architecture of Europe.
Ukrainian officials said on Sunday there had been Russian drone strikes and nearly 150 battlefield clashes over the past 24 hours, despite a US-brokered three-day ceasefire between Kyiv and Moscow announced on the eve of the Moscow parade. Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday that Russia had shot down 57 Ukrainian drones.
On Saturday, Moscow was blanketed in heavy security, with internet services switched off across the city, as Ukraine continued to rattle Russia with long-range drone and missile strikes – forcing parade organisers to strip the event of its usual pageantry.
The customary display of missiles and armoured vehicles, a fixture of the parade since Putin introduced military hardware in 2017, was absent entirely. The Kremlin took widespread measures to protect the parade – which celebrated the allies’ victory over Nazi Germany in the second world war – after recent long-range Ukrainian drone strikes on a range of targets.
In Ukraine, one person was killed and three people were wounded in Russian strikes on the south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region, its governor, Ivan Fedorov, said on Sunday morning.
The governor of the north-eastern Kharkiv region, Oleh Syniehubov, said eight people including two children were wounded in drone attacks on the regional capital and nearby settlements.
Seven people including a child have been wounded in the southern Kherson region by Russian drone and artillery strikes since early Saturday, according to the regional governor, Oleksandr Prokudin.
A child was wounded and infrastructure damaged in Russian attacks on the south-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, said the regional governor, Oleksandr Hanzha.
With no victory in sight and no timeline for an end to the war, the mood in Russia is souring. On the battlefield, the picture is similarly grinding. Russian troops are near a standstill, with neither side appearing close to a breakthrough.
Advances have slowed in recent months, both armies showing signs of exhaustion and sustaining heavy casualties while continuing to strike each other’s energy infrastructure.
Putin, who has led Russia as president or prime minister since the last day of 1999, faces a wave of anxiety in Moscow about the war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, left swathes of Ukraine in ruins and drained Russia’s economy. Russia’s relations with Europe are worse than at any time since the depths of the cold war.
Russian forces have so far been unable to take the whole of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where Kyiv’s forces have been pushed back to a line of fortress cities. Russian advances have slowed this year, though Moscow controls just under one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.
On Saturday, Putin criticised western support for Kyiv. “They [the west] started ratcheting up the confrontation with Russia, which continues to this day,” he said. “I think it [the war] is heading to an end but it’s still a serious matter. They spent months waiting for Russia to suffer a crushing defeat, for its statehood to collapse. It didn’t work out. And then they got stuck in that groove and now they can’t get out of it.”
Putin said he was ready to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a third country once all conditions for a potential peace agreement were settled – holding to his usual position on a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart. “This should be the final point, not the negotiations themselves,” he said.
Asked if he was willing to engage in talks with the Europeans, Putin said: “For me personally, the former chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Mr Schröder, is preferable.”
Many in Ukraine and Europe will be sceptical of involving Schröder given his background as a close friend of Putin and history of ties to Russian business and projects, such as the Nord Stream gas pipelines. In 2022, after the war broke out, Zelenskyy called Schröder “disgusting” for meeting Putin and speaking in the Russian leader’s favour.
Russia, Ukraine and Donald Trump announced on Friday that a three-day ceasefire between both sides would come into effect from Saturday. The Kremlin said there were no plans to prolong the truce.
Zelenskyy – after earlier issuing a “decree” allowing the Moscow parade to go ahead – observed Saturday as Europe Day, which is celebrated as a foundational day of the EU. He said Ukraine was an “inseparable part of the European family”.
With Reuters and Agence France-Presse
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