Unfazed by Trump, Putin digs in on Ukraine war goals

New Straits Times

4 days ago

PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin intends to keep fighting in Ukraine until the West engages on his terms for peace, unfazed by United States President Donald Trump's threats of tougher sanctions, and his territorial demands may widen as Russian forces advance, said three sources close to the Kremlin.
Putin, who ordered Russian troops into Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting in the country's east between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops, believed that Russia's economy and its military were strong enough to weather any additional Western measures, said the sources.
Trump on Monday expressed frustration with Putin's refusal to agree to a ceasefire and announced a wave of weapons supplies to Ukraine, including Patriot surface-to-air missile systems.
He also threatened further sanctions on Russia unless a peace deal was reached within 50 days.
Three Russian sources familiar with top-level Kremlin thinking, said Putin would not stop the war under pressure from the West and believed that Russia — which has survived the toughest sanctions imposed by the West — could endure further economic hardship, including threatened US tariffs targeting buyers of Russian oil.
"Putin thinks no one has seriously engaged with him on the details of peace in Ukraine — including the Americans — so he will continue until he gets what he wants," said one source.
"Putin values the relationship with Trump and had good discussions with (Steve) Witkoff, but the interests of Russia come above all else," the person added.
Putin's conditions for peace included a legally binding pledge that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) would not expand eastwards, Ukrainian neutrality and limits on its armed forces, protection for Russian speakers who lived there, and acceptance of Russia's territorial gains, said the sources.
He was also willing to discuss a security guarantee for Ukraine involving major powers, though it was far from clear how this would work, they added.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine will never recognise Russia's sovereignty over its conquered regions and that Kyiv retains the sovereign right to decide whether it wants to join Nato.
A second source said Putin considered Moscow's goals far more important than any potential economic losses from Western pressure, and he was not concerned by US threats to impose tariffs on China and India for buying Russian oil.
Two of the sources said Russia had the upper hand on the battlefield and its economy, geared towards war, was exceeding the production of the US-led Nato alliance in key munitions, like artillery shells.
Russia, which already controls nearly one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, has advanced some 1,415 sq km in the past three months, according to data from the DeepStateMap, an open-source intelligence map of the conflict.
Russia currently controls Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, plus all of the eastern region of Luhansk, more than 70 per cent of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and fragments of Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Putin's public position is that those first five regions — Crimea and the four regions of eastern Ukraine — are now part of Russia and Kyiv must withdraw before there can be peace.
Putin could fight on until Ukraine's defences collapsed and widen his territorial ambitions to include more of Ukraine, said the sources.
The US says 1.2 million people have been injured or killed in the war.
Trump, since returning to the White House in January after promising a swift end to the war, has sought to repair ties with Russia, speaking at least six times by telephone with Putin.
Putin portrays the war as a watershed moment in Moscow's relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union by enlarging Nato and encroaching on what he considers Moscow's sphere of influence, including Ukraine and Georgia.
Despite existing sanctions and the cost of fighting Europe's biggest conflict since World War 2, Russia's US$2 trillion economy has performed far better than many in Russia or the West expected. The economic ministry forecasts a slowdown to 2.5 per cent annual growth in 2025 from 4.3 per cent last year.
Looking ahead, one of the sources said there was likely to be an escalation of the crisis in coming months. And, he predicted, the war would continue.