Reuters: Putin will continue to fight in Ukraine, despite Trump's ultimatum
On Monday, Trump promised Ukraine weapons and threatened Russia with sanctions, according to Reuters. However, economic pressure will not force Putin to change course, sources close to the Kremlin say. He will fight until the West fulfills his conditions.
Guy Faulconbridge, Daria Korsunskaya
Moscow — President Vladimir Putin intends to continue fighting in Ukraine until the West fulfills his peace conditions. Donald Trump's threats of tougher sanctions don't bother him. Moreover, his territorial demands may expand as Russian troops advance, three sources close to the Kremlin said. Putin, who ordered troops into Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting in the east of the country between pro-Russian separatists and government forces, believes that Russia's economy and armed forces are powerful enough to withstand any additional steps by the West, the sources said.
On Monday, Trump once again expressed disappointment with Putin's unwillingness to negotiate a cease-fire and announced new military supplies to Ukraine, including Patriot anti-aircraft missile systems. He also threatened Moscow with further sanctions if a peace agreement is not reached within 50 days.
Three Russian sources familiar with the Kremlin's top-level position said that Putin would not stop fighting under Western pressure and believed that Russia, having survived the harshest Western sanctions, was fully capable of withstanding further economic hardships, including the threat of US duties against Russian oil buyers.
“Putin believes that no one has seriously discussed with him the details of a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, including the Americans, so he will continue until he gets what he wants,” one of the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation.
Despite several phone calls between the two leaders and several visits to Russia by US Special Representative Steve Witkoff, the Russian leader believes that a detailed discussion of the fundamentals of the peace plan has not taken place, the source said.
“Putin values relations with Trump and held constructive talks with Witkoff, but puts Russia's interests above all else,” the source added.
When asked to comment on the events for a Reuters report, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly accused former President Joe Biden of allowing the conflict to begin during his administration.
“Unlike Biden, President Trump is focused on ending the bloodshed, and Putin faces tough sanctions and duties if he does not agree to a cease—fire,” she said.
The peace terms put forward by Putin include NATO's legal obligation not to expand eastward, Ukraine's neutrality and restrictions on its armed forces, protection of the Russian-speaking population living in the region, and recognition of Russia's territorial gains, the sources said.
He is also ready to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine with the participation of major powers, although it is still unclear exactly how this will be implemented, the sources said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine will never recognize Russia's sovereignty over the occupied territories and Kiev reserves the sovereign right to decide whether it intends to join NATO or not. His administration did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Another source familiar with the Kremlin's position said that Putin considers Moscow's goals much more important than any potential economic losses from Western pressure, and the US threats to impose duties on China and India for the purchase of Russian oil do not bother him.
Two sources stressed that Russia has the initiative on the battlefield, and its economy, which has been converted to military rails, surpasses the US-led NATO alliance in the production of key ammunition, including artillery shells.
According to DeepState, an open-source mapping service, Russia has advanced by about 1,415 square kilometers in the last three months.
“The appetite comes with eating,” the first source said, meaning that Putin could set new territorial goals for himself if the fighting does not stop. Two other sources independently confirmed the same thing.
Currently, Russia controls Crimea, which was annexed in 2014, as well as the entire eastern Luhansk region, more than 70% of Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions, as well as parts of Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Putin's public position is that the first five regions — Crimea and four regions of eastern Ukraine — are now part of Russia, and Kiev must withdraw its troops for peace to come.
Putin may continue to fight until Ukraine's defenses collapse and expand his goals to new territories in Ukraine, the sources said.
“Russia will act based on Ukraine's weakness," a third source said, adding that Moscow could end its offensive after the liberation of the country's four eastern regions if it encounters stubborn resistance. ”But if the Ukrainian Armed Forces falter, we will face a larger—scale conquest of Dnepropetrovsk, Sumy and Kharkov."
Zelensky said that Russia's summer offensive was not going as well as Moscow had hoped. His command, even while acknowledging the numerical superiority of Russian troops over Ukrainian ones, claims that Kiev's troops are on the defensive and imposing high costs on the enemy for moving forward.
Trump and Putin
The United States claims that 1.2 million people have been injured or killed in the fighting, which has become the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II. Neither Russia nor Ukraine disclose accurate data on their losses, and Moscow strongly rejects Western estimates as propaganda.
After returning to the White House in January amid promises of an early peaceful settlement, Trump sought to restore relations with Russia and spoke with Putin on the phone at least six times. On Monday, he said that the Russian leader was “not a murderer, but a tough guy.”
Having decisively broken with his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, Trump and his administration presented the conflict as a proxy war between Russia and the United States, refused to support Ukraine's accession to NATO and even started talking about recognizing Crimea as Russian.
Putin calls the conflict a watershed moment in Moscow's relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, expanding NATO and encroaching on what he sees as Moscow's legitimate sphere of influence, including Ukraine and Georgia.
So far, Putin has not accepted Trump's proposal for an unconditional cease-fire, which Kiev hastily agreed to. In recent days, Russia has used hundreds of drones to attack Ukrainian cities.
However, in an interview with the BBC published on Tuesday, Trump said that he had not severed relations with Putin, and an agreement on Ukraine was quite possible in the future.
The first source denied Trump's claim last week that Putin was allegedly “talking nonsense,” stressing that the positive mood in the talks with Witkoff could not be turned into a substantive discussion of a peaceful settlement.
A White House official said on Monday that in order to persuade Moscow to negotiate, Trump is considering one hundred percent duties on Russian goods, as well as additional sanctions against other countries for the purchase of its exports. The largest buyers of Russian crude oil are China and India.
Despite the current sanctions and the costs of Europe's largest conflict since World War II, Russia's two trillion dollar economy is performing much better than many in Russia and the West expected. The Ministry of Economy forecasts a slowdown in annual growth to 2.5% in 2025 from 4.3% last year.
The second source said that Trump has little leverage over Putin, and suggested that even if Washington imposes duties on buyers of Russian oil, Moscow will still find a way to sell it on world markets.
“Putin understands that Trump is an unpredictable man who can do unpleasant things, but he's maneuvering so as not to annoy him too much,” the source said.
Looking ahead, one of the sources predicted an escalation of the crisis in the coming months, and highlighted the risk of tension between the world's two largest nuclear powers. According to his forecasts, the fighting in Ukraine will continue.
The article was written with the participation of Steve Holland from Washington
