Putin offers Trump talks while defending his invasion of Ukraine

Bloomberg News on Dec 19, 2024

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Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to hold talks with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, while striking a defiant tone on his war on Ukraine by saying he should have invaded sooner.

“I don’t know when we’ll meet because he doesn’t say anything about it,” Putin said of Trump Thursday at his annual televised news conference and phone-in in Moscow. “I haven’t spoken to him at all for more than four years. I’m ready for it, of course, at any time. And I’ll be ready to meet if he wants.”

Trump has said he wants to bring about an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine even before he takes office for his second presidential term on Jan. 20. On Monday, he said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should be “prepared to make a deal” and appeared to downplay the value of land occupied by Russia since Putin ordered the February 2022 full-scale invasion.

Trump has said he wants Putin to be ready to agree on a deal, too. So far, the incoming U.S. president hasn’t indicated how he’ll get both sides to the negotiating table to resolve the war that Putin started, and on what terms.

At one point in the marathon news conference that lasted nearly four and a half hours, Putin was asked if he’d change anything about his decision to invade Ukraine in hindsight.

The order “should have been made earlier” and Russia should have prepared better, he replied.

As many as 700,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded, according to estimates by Ukraine’s U.S. and NATO allies, in a war that the Kremlin expected to last for only a few days and is now deep into its third year.

With its forces advancing on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine in recent months, Russia has expressed reluctance to agree to an immediate ceasefire. Putin has said he’s willing to hold talks, while insisting that any negotiations take account of the realities on the ground since his army invaded Ukraine and occupied swathes of the country’s south and east.

He’s also demanding that Ukraine abandon its goal of joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Putin said Ukraine has refused to extend a key gas transit deal to Europe that’s expiring at the end of this month. “There will be no such contract, it’s clear now,” he said. Zelenskyy separately indicated in Brussels that Ukraine won’t transit Russian gas.

Putin called the assassination of a top general in Moscow on Tuesday that was blamed on Ukraine a failure of Russia’s security services, in his first remarks on the killing.

He also said he hadn’t spoken to ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad since he fled to Moscow earlier this month to escape rebel forces that ended his family’s more than half-century rule.

“But I plan to, we’ll definitely talk,” Putin said, making his first comments on his deposed ally. He didn’t explain why there’d been no contact so far.

The president said he’d ask Assad about missing American journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared in Syria 12 years ago, and would also be willing to contact the country’s new authorities, in response to a question from a U.S. journalist.

Russia is in contact with the new leadership in Damascus, headed by a former offshoot of al-Qaeda, to try to keep a naval port and air base in Syria that are vital to the Kremlin’s efforts to project power in the Mediterranean and support its operations in countries across Africa.

Putin disclosed that Russia had airlifted 4,000 Iranian fighters out of Syria from the air base at Khmeimim at the request of the authorities in Tehran.

He insisted developments in Syria hadn’t been a defeat for Russia. Moscow’s working out what its relationship with the country’s new leadership should be and whether their interests coincide, Putin said.

During the event, Putin faced questions ranging from international relations to the rising cost of living and even whether the body of the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, should be removed from its mausoleum on Red Square and buried.

That remains an “extremely sensitive” issue, Putin said. While Russia’s likely to debate the subject in the future, now wasn’t the right time to “divide our society.”