MOSCOW: President of Russia Vladimir Putin is open to discussing a Ukraine ceasefire deal with Donald Trump but rules out making any major territorial concessions and insists Kyiv abandon ambitions to join NATO, five sources with knowledge of Kremlin thinking told Reuters.
U.S. President-elect Trump, who has vowed to swiftly end the conflict, is returning to the White House at a time of Russian ascendancy. Moscow controls a chunk of Ukraine about the size of the American state of Virginia and is advancing at the fastest pace since the early days of the 2022 invasion.
In the first detailed reporting of what President Putin would accept in any deal brokered by Trump, the five current and former Russian officials said the Kremlin could broadly agree to freeze the conflict along the front lines.
There may be room for negotiation over the precise carve-up of the four eastern regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, according to three of the people who all requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
While Moscow claims the four regions as wholly part of Russia, defended by the country’s nuclear umbrella, its forces on the ground control 70-80% of the territory with about 26,000 square km still held by Ukrainian troops, open-source data on the front line shows.
Russia may also be open to withdrawing from the relatively small patches of territory it holds in the Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions, in the north and south of Ukraine, two of the officials said.
Putin said this month that any ceasefire deal should reflect the “realities” on the ground but that he feared a short-lived truce which would only allow the West to rearm Ukraine.
“If there is no neutrality, it is difficult to imagine the existence of any good-neighbourly relations between Russia and Ukraine,” Putin told the Valdai discussion group on Nov. 7.
“Why? Because this would mean that Ukraine will be constantly used as a tool in the wrong hands and to the detriment of the interests of the Russian Federation.”
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Two of the sources said outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to fire American ATACMS missiles deep into Russia could complicate and delay any settlement – and stiffen Moscow’s demands as hardliners push for a bigger chunk of Ukraine.
On Tuesday, Kyiv used the missiles to strike Russian territory for the first time, according to Moscow which decried the move as a major escalation.
If no ceasefire is agreed, the two sources said, then Russia will fight on.
“Putin has already said that freezing the conflict will not work in any way,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters hours before the Russians reported the ATACMS strikes. “And the missile authorisation is a very dangerous escalation on the part of the United States.”
The Ukrainian foreign ministry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this article.
