[Photo Credit: Reuters]
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday that he thought the Ukraine war was coming to an end, remarks that came just hours after he had vowed victory in Ukraine at Moscow’s most scaled-back Victory Day parade in years.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine triggered the most serious crisis in relations between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when many people feared the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
The Kremlin has said peace talks brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration were on pause. Putin has repeatedly vowed to fight on until all of Russia’s various war aims are achieved in what Moscow calls the “special military operation”.
Putin was speaking in the Kremlin after setting out his view of the causes of the war. He blamed “globalist” Western leaders, saying they promised NATO would not expand eastward after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, but then tried to draw Ukraine into the European Union’s orbit.
Putin, who has ruled Russia as president or prime minister since the last day of 1999, faces a wave of anxiety in Moscow about the war in Ukraine, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, left swathes of Ukraine in ruins, and drained Russia’s $3 trillion 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.
After Russia and Ukraine accused each other of violating unilateral ceasefires they had each declared over recent days, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a from Saturday to Monday that was supported by the Kremlin and Kyiv. The two sides also agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners.
He added that he would “like to see a big extension” of the ceasefire. There were no reports of violations of the ceasefire from either Moscow or Kyiv.
