Vladimir Putin has no incentive to agree to a full 30- day truce with Ukraine now and little reason to contemplate a permanent end of hostilities before next year, experts said last night. Russian troops have momentum in Ukraine and, though they are not “surrounding” Ukrainian troops in Kursk, have made sturdy advances there. The only benefactor, Putin knows, would be his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.
What his 90-phone call with US President Donald Trump showed is that he is happy to work on “negotiating” a full peace while still waging his bloody war on Ukraine. Partly this is due to Putin’s own indecisiveness.
Having failed to achieve his initial objectives in Ukraine, he has spent the last two years buying time while he awaited the hoped-for advent of a more understanding Trump administration.
“Russia may be losing this war but Putin believes Ukraine is losing it faster“, said Russia expert Prof Mark Galeotti.
Now that Trump is in office , he is assessing how much he can take back to increasingly fed-up Russians in the form of a win for his so-called special military operation.
Ironically, this means denying the US President the quick solution he was seeking.
The “semi-truce” Putin has accepted, which is supposed to see the end of attacks on infrastructure and energy supplies, will also benefit him. This is one area where Ukraine’s long-range drones and missiles have hit home with repeated mid-winter strikes on Russian gas and pipeline installations.
But time is no longer on Putin’s side.
While Trump is bedazzled by the prospects of re-establishing economic ties with Russia, there are many in Putin’s inner circle who fear the former KGB colonel will push the Oval Office too far.
And next year is when the Russian dictator will have to make some “very tough decisions between guns and butter”, said Prof Galeotti.
To begin with, warehouses containing stocks of Soviet-era tanks will finally empty – Russia can only manufacture 500 tanks a year and has lost 1,500 since 2022.
In the meantime Russia’s wartime economy is overheating, with the ruble in free-fall and food inflation is so high that butter is now “as valuable as gold”.
More importantly, more than 70 per cent of Russians would now accept a permanent peace treaty as long as it was signed by Putin.
“The Kremlin is still the number one consumer of polling data, not because they necessarily do what the masses want, but because it knows authoritarian leaders don’t risk losing elections, they risk hanging from a lamppost in Red Square”, said Prof Galeotti.
Nevertheless, it leaves Ukraine with the real prospect, as former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Sir James Everard said recently, of “another year of trading time, space, blood and treasure” .
