Moscow (Reuters) – The conditions of President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine include a request that Western leaders engage in writing to stop NATO to the east and raise a piece of sanctions on Russia, according to three Russian sources knowing the negotiations.
President Donald Trump said on several occasions that he wanted to put an end to the deadliest European conflict since the Second World War and has shown increasing frustration with Putin in recent days, Warning Tuesday that the Russian leader “played with fire” By refusing to get involved in ceasefire talks with Kyiv when his forces have made gains on the battlefield.
After talking to Trump for more than two hours last week, Putin said he agreed to work with Ukraine on a memorandum that would establish the contours of a peace agreement, including the calendar of a ceasefire. Russia says it is currently writing its version of the memorandum and cannot estimate how long it will take.
Kyiv and European governments accused Moscow of getting stuck while his troops advance in eastern Ukraine.
“Putin is ready to make peace but not at any price,” said a main Russian source with knowledge of the high -level thought of the Kremlin, which spoke under the cover of anonymity.
The three Russian sources said Putin wanted a “written” commitment to the great Western powers does not enlarge it east to the NATO led by the United States – for having officially excluded membership in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova and other former Soviet republics.
Russia also wants Ukraine to be neutral, some Western sanctions have raised, a resolution of the question of Russian sovereign assets frozen in the West and the protection of Russian commissioners in Ukraine, the three sources said.
The first source said that if Putin realizes that he is unable to conclude a peace agreement according to his own conditions, he will seek to show the Ukrainians and Europeans by military victories that “peace tomorrow will be even more painful”.
The Kremlin did not respond to a request for comments on Reuters’ reports. Putin and Russian officials said on several occasions that any peace agreement should approach the “deep causes” of the conflict – Russian stenography for the question of NATO enlargement and Western support to Ukraine.
kyiv has repeatedly said that Russia should not be given a veto on its aspirations to join the NATO alliance. Ukraine says he needs the West to give him a strong safety guarantee with the teeth to dissuade any future Russian attack.
The administration of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not respond to a request for comments.
NATO has also declared in the past that it will not change its “open door” policy simply because Moscow demands it. An alliance spokesman for 32 members did not answer Reuters’ questions.
Putin ordered tens of thousands of soldiers in Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine between the separatists supported by Russia and Ukrainian troops.
Russia currently controls just under a fifth of the country. Although Russian progress has accelerated in the past year, war is expensive both in Russia and Ukraine in terms of victims and military spending.
Reuters reported in January that Putin cared for economic distortions of the Russian War Economy, in the midst of labor shortages and high interest rates imposed to brake inflation. The price of oil, the foundation of the Russian economy, has decreased regularly this year.
Alexander Kazakov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
Trump, who prides himself on having friendly relations with Putin and expressed his conviction that the Russian chief wants peace, warned that Washington could impose new sanctions if Moscow delays efforts to find a settlement. Asset suggesting on social networks on Sunday that Putin had “gone absolutely crazy” By releasing a massive air attack against Ukraine last week.
The first source said that if Putin saw a tactical opportunity on the battlefield, he would grow further in Ukraine – and that Kremlin thought that Russia could fight for years, whatever the sanctions and economic pain imposed by the West.
A second source said that Putin was now less inclined to compromise in the territory and sticks to his public position than he wanted the entirety of east regions claimed by Russia.
“Putin hardened his position,” said the second source about the question of the territory.
NATO enlargement
As Trump and Putin Joust in public on the perspectives of peace in Ukraine, Reuters could not determine whether the intensification of war and the hardening of the positions announce the determination to achieve an agreement or the collapse of talks.
In June of last year, Putin established her opening mandates for an immediate end to war: Ukraine must abandon its NATO ambitions and withdraw all its troops from the entire territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed and mainly controlled by Russia.
In addition to Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, Russia currently controls almost all Luhansk, more than 70% of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. He also occupies a ribbon in the regions of Kharkiv and Sumy and threatens Dnipropetrovsk.
Former American president Joe BidenThe leaders of Western Europe and Ukraine have thrown the invasion as an imperial style taking and have repeatedly promised to overcome the Russian forces.
Putin launched war as a moment of the watershed in Moscow’s relations with the West which, according to him, humiliated Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 by widening NATO and encroaching on what it considers the sphere of influence of Moscow.
At the 2008 Bucharest summit, NATO leaders agreed that Ukraine and Georgia would one day become members. Ukraine in 2019 has changed its constitution which engages on the path of full -fledged membership of NATO and the European Union.
Trump said that the United States support prior to the supply of membership in Ukraine NATO was a cause of the war and said Ukraine would not get membership. The US State Department did not respond to a request for comments for this story.
Putin, who reached the best job of the Kremlin in 1999, returned several times to the question of the enlargement of NATO, including in its most detailed remarks on a possible peace in 2024.
In 2021, only two months before the Russian invasion, Moscow proposed a draft contract with NATO members who, under article 6, would bind NATO to “refrain from any additional NATO enlargement, including the membership of Ukraine as well as other states”. American and NATO diplomats said at the time that Russia could not have a veto on the expansion of the Alliance.
Russia wants a commitment to NATO in writing because Putin thinks that Moscow was misleaded by the United States after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when the American Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not extend east, said two of the sources.
There was such a verbal promise, said former director of the central intelligence agency William J. Burns
NATO, founded in 1949 to ensure security against the Soviet Union, said that it poses no challenge to Russia – although its evaluation of peace and security in 2022 in the Euro -Atlantic region has identified Russia as the “most important and direct threat”.
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia that year prompted Finland to join NATO in 2023, followed by Sweden in 2024.
The leaders of Western Europe have said on several occasions that if Russia wins the Ukrainian war, it could one day attack NATO itself – a stage that would trigger a world war. Russia rejects affirmations as a baseless alarmist, but also warned that the war in Ukraine could degenerate into a broader conflict.
(Report by Reuters in Moscow; edition by Daniel Flynn)
