- Putin will fight until West engages with her terms: sources.
- Let’s say that economic pressure will not force Putin to change course.
- Trump has promised weapons to Ukraine, threatened sanctions against Russia.
President Vladimir Putin intends to continue fighting in Ukraine until the West engages in his peace conditions, imperturbable by Donald Trump threats to more severe sanctions, and his territorial requests can widen as the Russian forces advance, three sources close to the Kremlin said.
Putin, who ordered Russian troops in Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting in the east of the country between the separatists supported by Russia and the Ukrainian troops, believes that the economy of Russia and its soldiers is strong enough to resist any additional Western measure, the sources said.
Trump expressed frustration on Monday in the face of Putin’s refusal to agree on a ceasefire and announced a wave of weapons supplies in Ukraine, including patriotic air surface missile systems. He also threatened new sanctions against Russia unless a peace agreement was concluded within 50 days.
The three Russian sources, familiar with the high -level thought of the Kremlin, said that Putin will not stop war under the pressure of the West and think that Russia – which has survived the most difficult sanctions imposed by the West – can bear new economic difficulties, including threatened American tariffs targeting Russian oil buyers.
“Putin thinks that no one has seriously committed to him about the details of peace in Ukraine – including the Americans – so he will continue until he gets what he wants,” said one of the sources Reuters subject to anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation.
Despite several telephone calls between Trump and Putin, and visits to Russia by the American special envoy Steve Witkoff, the Russian chief believes that there have been no detailed discussions on the basis of a peace plan, said the source.
“Putin appreciates the relationship with Trump and had good discussions with Witkoff, but Russia’s interests come above all,” added the person.
Asked a comment on Reuters’ report, the White House spokesperson Anna Kelly accused former President Joe Biden of having enabled the war to break out during his administration.
“Unlike Biden, President Trump focuses on stopping murder, and Putin will face sanctions and biting prices if he does not accept a cease-fire,” she said.
Putin’s conditions of peace include a legally binding commitment that NATO will not extend east, Ukrainian neutrality and the limits of its armed forces, the protection of the Russians who live there and the acceptance of the territorial gains of Russia, the sources said.
He is also willing to discuss a security guarantee for Ukraine involving major powers, although it is far from clear how it would work, according to sources.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that Ukraine would never recognize the sovereignty of Russia in its conquered regions and that kyiv retains sovereign law to decide if he wants to join NATO. His office did not respond to a request for comments for this story.
A second source familiar with the Kremlin said Putin considered Moscow’s objectives much greater than any potential economic loss of Western pressure, and that it was not concerned with American threats to impose prices on China and India for the purchase of Russian oil.
Two of the sources said that Russia had the upper hand over the battlefield and its economy, oriented towards war, goes beyond the production of the NATO alliance led by the United States in key ammunition, such as artillery shells.
Russia, which already controls almost a fifth of Ukrainian territory, has advanced some 1,415 square km (546 square miles) in the last three months, according to Deepstatemap data, an open source of conflict intelligence card.
“The appetite comes with eating,” said the first source, which means that Putin could seek more territory unless the war is arrested. The other two sources have independently confirmed the same thing.
Russia is currently controlling Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, as well as the entire eastern region of Luhansk, more than 70% of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and fragments of the regions of Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk. Putin’s public position is that these first five regions – Crimea and the four regions of East Ukraine – are now part of Russia and kyiv must withdraw before there can be peace.
Putin could fight until Ukraine’s defenses collapse and expand her territorial ambitions to include more Ukraine, according to sources.
“Russia will act according to the weakness of Ukraine,” said the third source, adding that Moscow could stop its offensive after conquering the four oriental regions of Ukraine if it encounters strong resistance. “But if it falls, there will be an even greater conquest of Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy and Kharkiv.”
Zelenskiy said that the summer offensive of Russia was not as successfully as Moscow had hoped. His brass, who recognize that the Russian forces are more numerous than the troops of Ukraine, say that kyiv’s troops hold the line and force Russia to pay a high price for his earnings.
Trump and Putin
The United States claimed that 1.2 million people were injured or killed during the war, the deadliest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. Neither Russia nor Ukraine give figures for their losses, and Moscow rejects Western estimates as well as propaganda.
Trump, since his return to the White House in January after promising a quick end to war, sought to repair links with Russia, speaking at least six times by phone with Putin. On Monday, he said that the Russian chief was not “an assassin, but that he is a hard to cook”.
In a brutal breakdown of his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, the administration of Trump threw war as a deadly proxy conflict between Russia and the United States, withdrew support from Ukraine joining NATO and launched the idea of recognizing the annexation of Crimea.
Putin depicts war as a moment of the watershed in Moscow’s relations with the West, which, according to him, humiliated Russia after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union by widening NATO and encroaching on what he considers the sphere of influence of Moscow, notably Ukraine and Georgia.
Putin has not yet accepted a Trump proposal for an unconditional ceasefire, which was quickly approved by Kyiv. The last days have seen Russia using hundreds of drones to attack Ukrainian cities.
However, Trump said to Bbc In an interview published on Tuesday, he did not finish with Putin and that a Ukraine agreement remained on the cards.
The first source rejected Trump’s assertion last week that Putin had launched “bullshit”, saying that there had been a failure to transform positive talks with Witkoff into a substantial discussion on the basis of peace.
A White House official said on Monday that Trump was considering 100% prices on Russian products as well as secondary sanctions on other countries that buy his exports as a means of driving Moscow to the negotiation table. China and India are the biggest raw buyers.
Despite the existing sanctions and the cost of fighting the greatest conflict in Europe since the Second World War, the economy of 2 dollars of Russia has worked much better than many Russia or the West. The economic ministry provides for a slowdown in annual growth of 2.5% in 2025, compared to 4.3% last year.
The second person said that Trump had little lever on Putin and suggested that even if Washington imposed prices on Russian gross buyers, Moscow would always find a way to sell it in the global markets.
“Putin understands that Trump is an unpredictable person who can do unpleasant things, but he maneuver to avoid irritating him too much,” said the source.
For the future, one of the sources said that there was probably an escalation of the crisis in the coming months and that the dangers of tensions between the two largest nuclear powers in the world. And, he predicted, the war would continue.
