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President Vladimir Putin offered no compromise on his terms for ending the war in Ukraine on Friday and accused the European Union of attempting “daylight robbery” of Russian assets.
Putin set out the Kremlin’s stance in the opening moments of his annual end-of-year news conference, a marathon call-in event that typically runs for some four hours.
He said he did not see readiness on the Ukrainian side to agree to a peace deal, but there were “certain signals” it was willing to engage in dialogue.
“The only thing I want to say is that we have always said this: we are ready and willing to end this conflict peacefully, based on the principles I outlined last June [2024] at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and by addressing the root causes that led to this crisis,” Putin said.
Putin was referring to a speech 18 months ago in which he demanded that Ukraine abandon its ambition of joining the NATO military alliance and withdraw entirely from four regions that Russia has claimed as its own territory.
Putin also has repeatedly said that Ukraine must limit the size of its army and give official status to the Russian language, demands he has made from the onset of the conflict.
Russia says it controls about 19 per cent of Ukraine, including the Crimea peninsula which it annexed in 2014, as well as most of the eastern Donbas region, much of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, and slivers of four other regions.
Ukraine says it will never accept Crimea, Donbas, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as now parts of Russia.
EU frozen assets plan ‘daylight robbery’: Putin
After nearly four years, the war stands at a delicate juncture after the U.S. pushed for a peace deal on terms that Ukraine and its European allies feared were slanted toward Russia. A diplomatic flurry has resulted, with Ukraine meeting separately with European leaders and officials from the Donald Trump administration.
Russia says it is waiting to hear from Washington how its draft of peace proposals have been modified following those consultations. Putin said Friday he believed Trump was sincere and frank in his dealings to end the war.
About That host Andrew Chang joins The National to break down how Europe is bolstering its defence capabilities in the face of increased Russian aggression and an uncertain defence alliance with the United States.
Kyiv has long called for a ceasefire and said it does not believe that Putin is serious about seeking peace. Russia says it is Ukraine that is refusing to come to the table.
Putin has long told local audiences that NATO’s eastward expansion was the main cause of the war because it put his country’s survival at risk, a view the Western military alliance rejects based on treaties Russia signed dating back to the 1990s.
Putin said Russia had been asked to make compromises at his summit with Trump in Alaska in August, though he didn’t elaborate on what that entailed, or what Russia was prepared to give up in negotiations.
Putin laid out a detailed and optimistic assessment of the battlefield situation.
“In general, immediately after our troops drove the enemy from the Kursk region, the initiative, the strategic initiative, passed entirely into the hands of the Russian armed forces,” he said. “What does this mean? It means that our troops are advancing along the entire line of contact, in some places faster, in others more slowly, but in all directions, the enemy is retreating.”
Ukraine says Russian gains are incremental and have come at the cost of huge casualties.
Putin was speaking hours after European Union leaders set aside a plan to use frozen Russian assets as backing for a loan to Ukraine, deciding instead to borrow cash to help fund Kyiv’s defence against Russia for the next two years.
The EU leaders said they reserved the right to use Russian assets to repay the loan if Moscow fails to pay war reparations.
Putin said the bloc had backed away from the original scheme because it would have faced serious repercussions, and it had damaged its status as a safe place to store assets.
“Theft is not the appropriate term…. It’s daylight robbery. Why can’t this robbery be carried out? Because the consequences could be grave for the robbers,” he said.
“This isn’t just a blow to their image; it’s an undermining of trust in the euro zone, and the fact that many countries, not just Russia, but primarily oil-producing countries, store their gold and foreign exchange reserves in the euro zone.”
Exchange of war dead takes place
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine, triggering the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Cold War.
Putin casts the war as a watershed moment in relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence.
An end to the war could reconnect Russia — which holds some of the world’s biggest reserves of natural resources from oil and gas to diamonds and rare earths — with the U.S. just as it seeks to refocus on competition with China, with whom Putin has forged a “no limits” partnership.
U.S. officials say that Russia and Ukraine have suffered more than two million casualties, including dead and wounded since the war began. Neither Russia nor Ukraine discloses credible estimates of their losses.
While Putin was holding his news conference, Ukraine and Russia have carried out a new exchange of bodies of dead soldiers.
Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky said Russia had handed over to Ukraine the remains of 1,000 Ukrainian servicemen and had received the bodies of 26 Russian soldiers from Kyiv. Ukrainian officials confirmed that Kyiv had received 1,003 bodies of killed servicemen from Russia.
They said that investigators and experts would work to conduct all necessary examinations and identify them.
Ukraine’s prisoner-of-war co-ordination centre posted on the Telegram app pictures of several large trucks and people in protective overalls checking bodies in white sacks.
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