Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual marathon press conferences might best be summed up as a combination of a city board meeting and a geopolitical talkfest. The Kremlin leader is making sweeping declarations about the current world order, interjected with minor questions from local journalists about the quality of the Komi Republic’s roads.
But this year’s in-person event comes on the heels of Europe injecting a $105 billion lifeline to Ukraine in the form of interest-free loans to keep Kiev in the fight against Moscow.
Although Brussels failed to pass a controversial proposal to divert billions of dollars of Russia’s frozen assets in Europe to Ukraine, the loan literally gives Ukrainians time and ammunition as the war launched by President Vladimir Putin approaches its four-year milestone in February 2022.
Perhaps with that aid package in mind, President Putin has made some rather unsparing statements about the war. He began by stating that Russia was “advancing across the entire front,” enumerating the gradual gains of Russian troops on the battlefield and listing towns and villages over which Russian troops now claim full or partial control.
Putin also claimed, contrary to all evidence, that the Kremlin “did not start this war” and avoided responsibility for the extraordinary loss of life. But the Russian president said Russia was “ready and willing to bring this conflict to a peaceful end by addressing the root causes that gave rise to this crisis, based on the principles I outlined at the Russian Foreign Ministry last June,” hinting at some kind of openness toward a negotiated end to the conflict.
However, the phrase “root cause” requires an important caveat. This is an abbreviation for the same demand that Putin made to Ukraine and the West on the eve of a full-scale invasion. These include a complete withdrawal of Kiev from the Donbass region, a ban on further NATO expansion, and some form of regime change in Ukraine.
Back in 2022, President Putin used long-standing dissatisfaction with NATO expansion after the end of the Cold War to argue for war with Ukraine. He echoed similar sentiments on Friday, saying in response to a question from BBC reporter Steve Rosenberg that there would be no more “special military operations” such as a full-scale invasion of Ukraine “if they treat us with respect.”
Putin’s angry words, “They just messed us up,” gloss over the fact that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine actually prompted NATO expansion in the Nordic region.
But it also suggests that Putin’s red lines haven’t really changed, even as the Trump administration presses forward with unconventional diplomatic efforts to bring parties to the conflict to the negotiating table.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff is scheduled to meet in Miami on Friday with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund and a key ally of President Vladimir Putin, to discuss the latest proposals to end the war in Ukraine.
On Friday, Putin praised Trump’s efforts to end the war, saying the president was “seriously trying to end the conflict.”
It is still unclear how serious Putin is about ending the same war.
CNN’s Anna Chernova, Christian Edwards, Katarina Krebs and Alejandra Jaramillo contributed reporting.
