President Vladimir Putin offered no compromise yesterday on his terms for ending the war in Ukraine and accused the European Union of attempting “daylight robbery” of Russian assets.
As US President Donald Trump seeks an end to Europe’s deadliest conflict since the Second World War, Putin said the onus was on Ukraine and Europe to make the next move towards peace.
“President Trump is making serious efforts to end this conflict. He is doing so with complete sincerity,” Putin said.
“The ball is entirely in the court of our Western opponents, primarily the leaders of the Kyiv regime, and in this case, first and foremost, their European sponsors. We are ready for both negotiations and a peaceful resolution to the conflict.”
Trump is pushing for a peace deal on terms that Ukraine and its European allies fear will be slanted towards Russia. Kyiv has long called for a ceasefire and said it does not believe that Putin, who sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, is serious about seeking peace.
Putin was addressing an annual Press conference and “Direct Line” phone-in that ran for almost four-and-a-half hours. While Ukraine was the dominant topic, the event was punctuated by bizarre moments and occasional barbed comments from ordinary Russians whose text messages were flashed up on a big screen in the hall.
“Not a direct line but a circus,” one message read. Others complained about Internet outages, dirty tap water and the cost of living.
Putin said Russia’s terms for ending the war in Ukraine were those he set out in a speech in June 2024, when he demanded Ukraine abandon its ambition of joining Nato and withdraw entirely from four regions Russia claims as its own territory.
Kyiv says it will not cede land that Moscow’s forces have failed to capture in nearly four years of war.
A Ukrainian official said yesterday Ukraine had struck a Russian “shadow fleet” oil tanker in the Mediterranean Sea with aerial drones for the first time, reflecting the growing intensity of Kyiv’s attacks on Russian oil shipping.
Putin says Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is an illegitimate leader. Zelenskiy’s mandate expired last year but Ukraine, under martial law as it fights Russian forces, is constitutionally prevented from holding new elections.
If an election were held, Putin said, Russia would be ready to consider a halt to strikes deep inside Ukraine while people voted. He said 5-10 million Ukrainians living in Russia should be allowed to take part.
Putin was speaking hours after European Union leaders set aside a plan to use frozen Russian assets as backing for a loan to Ukraine, deciding instead to borrow cash to help fund Kyiv’s defence against Russia for the next two years.
The EU leaders said they reserved the right to use Russian assets to repay the loan if Moscow fails to pay war reparations to Ukraine.
Putin said the bloc had backed away from the original scheme because it would have faced serious repercussions, and it had damaged its status as a safe place to store assets.
“Theft is not the appropriate term... It’s daylight robbery. Why can’t this robbery be carried out? Because the consequences could be grave for the robbers,” he said.
Ukraine thanked the European Union for deciding to provide it with 90 billion euros ($105.46bn) of support over the next two years – even if the bloc failed to agree on an ambitious plan to finance it using frozen Russian assets.
The Kremlin said it had received more than 2.6m questions in advance for Putin’s Press conference. It styles the event as a demonstration of his openness to respond to questions on any topic.
The 73-year-old president, who is divorced, replied to one questioner in the affirmative when asked if he was in love, but did not elaborate. He told a boy he sometimes drives round Moscow incognito to understand what is happening in Russia.
Putin at one point gave the floor to Naran Ochir-Goryaev, a decorated Hero of Russia who described his part in Russia’s storming of the Ukrainian town of Siversk.
Putin apologised to the widow of a soldier killed in action after she said her family had not yet received the compensation due to them. State media later reported she had been paid.
Ukraine says Russian gains are incremental and have come at the cost of huge casualties. It says it is fighting back in locations such as Kupiansk in the northeast, which Russia said it had captured last month.
Putin said a sharp slowing in the Russian economy – to one per cent growth this year from 4.3pc in 2024 – was the result of conscious actions by the central bank to bring down the rate of inflation.
While his Press conference was underway, the bank announced it was cutting its key interest rate by half a percentage point to 16pc.
US intelligence reports continue to warn that Putin intends to capture all of Ukraine and reclaim parts of Europe that belonged to the former Soviet empire, sources familiar with US intelligence said, even as negotiators seek an end to the war that would leave Russia with far less territory.
The reports present a starkly different picture from that painted by Trump and his Ukraine peace negotiators, who have said Putin wants to end the conflict. The most recent of the reports dates from late September, according to one of the sources.
The intelligence also contradicts the Russian leader’s denials that he is a threat to Europe.
The US findings have been consistent since Putin launched his full-scale invasion in 2022. They largely align with the views of European leaders and spy agencies that he covets all of Ukraine and territories of former Soviet bloc states, including members of the Nato alliance, according to the sources.
“The intelligence has always been that Putin wants more,” Mike Quigley, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a Reuters interview. “The Europeans are convinced of it. The Poles are absolutely convinced of it. The Baltics think they’re first.”
Russia controls about 20pc of Ukraine’s territory, including the bulk of Luhansk and Donetsk, the provinces that comprise the industrial heartland of the Donbas, parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces and Crimea, the strategic Black Sea peninsula.
Putin claims Crimea and all four provinces as belonging to Russia. Trump is pressuring Kyiv to withdraw its forces from the small part of Donetsk they control as part of a proposed peace deal, according to two sources familiar with the matter, a demand that Zelenskiy and most Ukrainians reject.
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