‘The Guardian’: Putin suggests Ukraine war is winding down but aides say it is ‘long road’ to peace

Photo: Kremlin.ru

Vladimir Putin has said he thinks the Ukraine war is winding down, hours after he had vowed to defeat Ukraine at Moscow’s most scaled-back Victory Day parade in years and even as two of his senior aides played down the notion of a quick end to the conflict, ‘The Guardian’ writes.

“I think that the matter is coming to an end,” Putin said of Europe’s deadliest conflict since the second world war. He said he would be willing to negotiate new security arrangements for Europe and that his preferred negotiating partner would be Germany’s former chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said this weekend that reaching a peace agreement on Ukraine would take a long time.

“It is clear that the American side is in a hurry, but the issue of a Ukrainian settlement is too complex, and reaching a peace agreement is a very long road with many complicated details,” Peskov said.

The Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said negotiations would “probably resume”, but it was unclear when.

Ushakov told Russian media on Thursday that Moscow saw no basis for a new round of trilateral talks with Ukraine and the US until Ukrainian forces withdrew from the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine – a condition Kyiv has rejected.

This week the European Council president, António Costa, said he believed there was potential for the EU to negotiate with Russia and to discuss the future of the security architecture of Europe.

On Saturday Moscow was blanketed in heavy security, with internet services switched off across the city, as Ukraine continued to rattle Russia with long-range drone and missile strikes – forcing parade organisers to strip the event of its usual pageantry.

The customary display of missiles and armoured vehicles, a fixture of the parade since Putin introduced military hardware in 2017, was absent entirely. The Kremlin took measures to protect the parade – which celebrated the allies’ victory over Nazi Germany in the second world war – after recent long-range Ukrainian drone strikes on a range of targets.

On Saturday, Putin criticised western support for Kyiv. “They [the west] started ratcheting up the confrontation with Russia, which continues to this day,” he said. “I think it [the war] is heading to an end but it’s still a serious matter. They spent months waiting for Russia to suffer a crushing defeat, for its statehood to collapse. It didn’t work out. And then they got stuck in that groove and now they can’t get out of it.”

Putin said he was ready to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a third country once all conditions for a potential peace agreement were settled – holding to his usual position on a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart. “This should be the final point, not the negotiations themselves,” he said.

Asked if he was willing to engage in talks with the Europeans, Putin said: “For me personally, the former chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Mr Schröder, is preferable.”

Many in Ukraine and Europe will be sceptical of involving Schröder given his background as a close friend of Putin and history of ties to Russian business and projects, such as the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

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