Vladimir Putin has said he thinks the Ukraine war is winding down, hours after he had vowed to defeat Ukraine at Moscow’s most scaled-back Victory Day parade in years and even as two of his senior aides played down the notion of a quick end to the conflict.
“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 unlikely to be accepted in Ukraine and the EU.
However, two top Kremlin representatives played down any idea of a quick end to the war. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said this weekend that reaching a peace agreement on Ukraine would take a long time.
“It is clear that the American side is in a hurry, but the issue of a Ukrainian settlement is too complex, and reaching a peace agreement is a very long road with many complicated details,” Peskov said.
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The Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said negotiations would “probably resume”, but it was unclear when.
Ushakov told Russian media on Thursday Moscow saw no basis for a new round of trilateral talks with Ukraine and the US until Ukrainian forces withdrew from the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine – a condition Kyiv has rejected.
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.
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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 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 while a child was wounded and infrastructure damaged in Russian attacks on the south-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region.
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 Zelenskiy 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, Zelenskiy called Schröder “disgusting” for meeting Putin and speaking in the Russian leader’s favour.
Zelenskiy 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”.
– Guardian, with Reuters and Agence France-Presse
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