Putin to talk of war and peace at marathon news conference
· The Straits TimesMOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely to send a signal to the United States and European powers on Dec 19 over his appetite for peace or more war in Ukraine when he speaks at a marathon end-of-year news conference.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine, triggering the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Cold War.
US President Donald Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, has repeatedly complained that ending the Ukraine war
has been one of the elusive foreign policy aims of his presidency.
Mr Putin, Russia’s paramount leader since the last day of 1999, will lead an end-of-year news conference and call-in with the population that is due to begin at 9am GMT (5pm, Singapore time) on Dec 19.
Putin due to take dozens of questions
At the Results Of The Year event, which Mr Putin has held in different formats most years since 2001, he fields dozens of questions on everything from price rises and his own future to nuclear weapons and what the Kremlin calls the “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Attendees had to undergo a COVID-19 test - still routine for meetings involving Mr Putin, 73, several years after the end of the pandemic.
At stake is whether Mr Putin will agree an end to the deadliest war in Europe
since World War II, the extent to which European powers are sidelined and whether or not a peace deal brokered by the United States
will fly.
Ukraine and its European allies are worried that Mr Trump could sell out Ukraine and leave European powers to foot the bill for supporting a devastated Ukraine after Russian forces took 12sq km to 17 sq km per day in 2025.
They echo former US president Joe Biden in saying the Russian invasion was an imperial-style land grab for which Moscow must be punished, a view which Mr Trump has challenged.
Mr Putin casts the war as a watershed moment in relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence.
An end to the war could reconnect Russia - which holds some of the world’s biggest reserves of natural resources from oil and gas to diamonds and rare earths - with the United States just as it seeks to refocus on competition with China, with whom Mr Putin has forged a “no limits” partnership.
A continuation of the war would lead to many more deaths, drain the economies of Ukraine, Russia and European powers, and raise the chances of the war escalating.
US officials say that Russia and Ukraine have suffered more than 2 million casualties, including dead and wounded since the war began. Neither Russia nor Ukraine disclose credible estimates of their losses. REUTERS