Vladimir Putin’s end-of-year Q&A session with reporters and the public is billed as a chance for Russian citizens to ask the president about the issues that matter to them most. But while much of the televised marathon focuses on domestic affairs, Putin always uses it to send signals to the West and the rest of the world, too.
This year, Putin’s messaging was colored by expectations that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will push or an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine, or at least for a cease-fire, when he takes office on January 20.
He dangled the prospect of Russian concessions before audiences in Washington and the West, saying more than once that Russia was ready for compromise, and headlines abroad reflected those remarks as he spoke for nearly 4 1/2 hours.
But he attached numerous conditions to the idea of compromise, suggesting that Moscow’s goal of subjugating Ukraine and winning major security guarantees from NATO and the West remain in place, as well as saying he does not consider Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy a legitimate leader.
'Plenty To Talk About' With Trump
Putin said that he has not spoken to Trump in over four years and is “ready for this, of course, at any time. And I will be ready for a meeting if he wants it.... I’m sure we will have plenty to talk about.”
Putin, as he often does, may have been aiming to portray Russia as a constructive country that is open to dialogue, while at the same time leaving Moscow a path to shut the door on any negotiations and blame others for their failure.
He rejected an assertion from a reporter for the U.S. network NBC that that amid heavy Russian losses in Ukraine and after the downfall of ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria and other setbacks for Moscow, he would be in a weaker position than Trump in talks.
With Russia is making gains on the ground as its full-scale invasion nears the three-year mark, he suggested that Moscow would have little reason to make compromises and that it would be approaching any peace process from a position of strength.
On the battlefield, where Russian forces have had the upper hand since an unsuccessful Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023, “the situation is changing dramatically,” Putin said. “There is movement along the entire front line. Every day.”
Unanswered Question
Coughing and clearing his throat repeatedly, Putin tried to exude an unhurried air of calm, asserting that Russia is ready to fight on indefinitely, and to keep churning out the weapons it needs to do so, while seeking to cast doubt on Ukraine’s ability to keep up its defenses for long.
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"Soon, those Ukrainians who want to fight will run out, in my opinion -- soon there will be no one left who wants to fight. We are ready, but the other side needs to be ready for both negotiations and compromises," Putin said.
He compared Ukrainian recruiting methods to a dogcatcher rounding up strays and said Kyiv is sending unprepared draftees to the front with insufficient training -- something that Russia, which has suffered casualties in the hundreds of thousands as it presses for months to take Ukrainian cities it has virtually destroyed, is widely accused of doing itself.
He also trolled both Ukraine and the West in comments when he rejected a suggestion that his claims that a hypersonic intermediate-range missile Russia used against Ukraine last month cannot be shot down were bogus, challenging the United States to a “high-tech 21st century duel” between the Oreshnik missile and U.S. missile defenses.
“Let them determine some target for destruction, say in Kyiv,” he said.
Despite his show of confidence that Russia will prevail in Ukraine, he left one question in many Russian minds unanswered: When will the war be over?
While he said near the end of the marathon that he will not be happy until Russian soldiers return home -- something tens of thousands or more will never do -- he declined to put a timeline on the end of the war or on what he promised would be the ouster of Ukrainian forces from Russia’s Kursk region, where they have held territory since a surprise offensive in August.
