Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is ready to stop the full-scale war with Ukraine, which has been going on for three years, and sign a truce, provided that he retains control over the territories he has already conquered.
Source. Reuters reports this with reference to five sources close to the Kremlin.
According to the agency's interlocutors, Putin understands that a further offensive will require a repeat of the mass mobilisation, the first wave of which in the autumn of 2022 lowered the government's ratings and caused hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens to flee abroad.
Therefore, according to Reuters sources, Putin is ready to end the war, even though its original goals – the complete seizure of the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions – remain unfulfilled.
The Kremlin is confident that it will be able to sell the result of the invasion to the "population" as a "victory". "Putin will say that we won, that NATO attacked us, but we preserved our sovereignty and that we have a land corridor to Crimea," one source told Reuters.
Putin's key condition, on which he is not prepared to make any concessions, is the retention of all the territories seized by the Russian army, all of the agency's interlocutors say. If the West rejects his proposal, Putin is ready to continue fighting, they say.
Putin is counting on his army to continue to slowly advance deeper into Ukraine, 18% of which is already occupied by Russians. As a result, according to Reuters sources, the Kremlin hopes that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will come up with a peace proposal himself.
Putin is betting that the West will continue to delay military assistance to Ukraine, and is also counting on Russia's demographic advantages, which, at least for now, allow the Kremlin to maintain a numerical advantage over the Ukrainian armed forces on the battlefield even without a mobilisation call.
But the largest war in Europe since the Second World War, according to Western intelligence, has already caused Russia to lose almost half a million people in killed and wounded. And the Kremlin fears that "veterans" returning from the front will have problems finding jobs and earning income. This, in turn, could provoke tensions in society, Reuters sources say.
The official US position on Putin's initiatives remains unchanged: a peaceful settlement in Ukraine must take into account its "territorial integrity within internationally recognised borders," a State Department spokesman told Reuters.
"Russia can end the war at any time if it withdraws its troops from Ukraine, instead of continuing its brutal daily attacks on Ukrainian cities, ports and people," the diplomat added.
Meanwhile, analyst Yegor Chernev notes that the information about Putin's alleged readiness for peace should be perceived solely as an information operation and provocation by the Kremlin.
The goal is to confuse the participants of the peace summit in Switzerland and disguise preparations for escalation.
"While everyone is rushing to discuss Putin's 'peacefulness' and his new 'Sudetenland option', he is travelling to Belarus, where preparations are apparently underway for a new round of escalation in the confrontation with Ukraine and the West," the expert said.