Putin targets 'victory' in Ukraine as Trump pushes for truce

President Vladimir Putin said Russia would achieve its strategic objectives in Ukraine as he insisted the country was united behind his war.

“That strength of spirit has always brought us only victory,” Putin said Friday at the May 9 military parade on Moscow’s Red Square marking the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Russia “will always rely on our unity in military and peaceful affairs, in achieving strategic goals.”

Putin spoke after U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday called for a 30-day ceasefire in Russia’s war on Ukraine to allow for talks on a lasting peace deal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he’s willing to abide by a 30-day truce. Putin has so far resisted a halt to fighting while insisting on Russia’s maximalist demands in return for a settlement to the war he started that’s now in its fourth year.

“Hopefully, an acceptable ceasefire will be observed,” Trump said in a social media post. “If the ceasefire is not respected, the U.S. and its partners will impose further sanctions.”

Putin made no reference to Trump’s call for a ceasefire during his speech. The Russian leader announced a three-day truce from May 8-10 for the 80th anniversary commemorations. Zelenskyy, who didn’t commit to that pause, called Thursday for Russia to accept a “lasting and reliable” truce after the Ukrainian president held a phone call with Trump.

Chinese President Xi Jinping sat next to Putin on Red Square for the parade that included 11,500 troops as well as tanks, missiles and other military hardware. Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi were also among leaders from more than 20 countries including Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam and former Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan who attended.

Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has put Russia in confrontation with the U.S. and Europe and challenged the post-WWII order by attempting to redraw state borders by force.

He offered a gesture of conciliation in his speech, saying Russia “highly” valued the contribution of U.S. and European allies in their “common fight” against Nazi Germany.

Xi told Putin during a chat over tea in Moscow on Thursday that China hopes “a fair, lasting and binding peace deal” could be reached through dialogue to end the war in Ukraine, according to the Xinhua News Agency. Xi didn’t elaborate on what a possible deal should look like.

The White House has grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress for a deal after Trump sought unsuccessfully to bring an end to the war within the first 100 days of his return to the presidency in January. While top U.S. officials previously threatened to walk away from negotiations unless an agreement is reached soon, Trump said Thursday he’d “stay committed to securing Peace between Russia and Ukraine, together with the Europeans.”

Russia has demanded full control of four regions of Ukraine that it only partly controls and international recognition of its sovereignty over the territories. It wants a halt to Western arms supplies to Kyiv and says it won’t accept any NATO forces in Ukraine.

The U.S. has proposed freezing the conflict broadly along current front lines, handing Russia effective control of the territory it occupies. The Trump administration is also willing to recognize Crimea, which Putin seized in 2014, as Russian, Bloomberg reported in April, and has accepted Russian calls for Ukraine to abandon its goal of joining NATO.

A meeting between Putin and Trump is getting closer, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told state television Thursday. Trump said later that he doesn’t expect to meet Putin in Saudi Arabia during his trip to the Middle East next week.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was the only European Union leader to attend the military parade. He was forced to take a longer route to reach Moscow when the Baltic states refused overflight permission for his government plane to travel to Moscow.

Chinese troops marched alongside Russian soldiers on Red Square on Friday, the latest demonstration of the “no limits” friendship that Xi and Putin declared shortly before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. Armies from 13 countries were taking part in the parade, according to Ushakov.

Putin later chatted with several North Korean military officers who’d watched the parade, a rare sighting abroad of top army officials from the secretive state. He last month thanked North Korea’s army for sending soldiers to help Russian troops oust Ukrainian forces occupying part of Russia’s Kursk border region.

The Soviet Union’s victory at the cost of 27 million lives in what’s known as the Great Patriotic War from 1941 to 1945 is a shared memory of families across the former Communist superpower, including in Ukraine and Russia. The Kremlin has increasingly sought to co-opt that common history to rally public support for Putin’s war on Ukraine, by falsely casting the government in Kyiv as dominated by “fascists” and presenting Russian soldiers as descendants of the troops who fought the Nazis.

That’s even as it was Russia that sparked Europe’s worst conflict since WWII by invading Ukraine and occupying part of its territory.