Russian President Vladimir Putin has assured that his counterpart in Türkiye, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, proposed a Christmas truce with Ukraine that did not come to fruition. “I didn’t refuse, I told him that we had to think about it and to ask them [a Kiev]. The next day, the head of his regime [el Gobierno electo ucranio] “He said there would be no truce,” Putin said in his traditional end-of-year press conference. However, the president has stressed that Moscow is not interested in any ceasefire. “We do not need a truce, we need a long-term, lasting peace backed by guarantees for the Russian Federation,” he declared in a press conference with journalists and citizens that lasted more than four hours and in which he assured that the end of the Ukrainian war “is near” as it heads into its fourth year. “Russia is closer to meeting its objectives in the special military operation,” he assured.
“The Russian army is advancing along the entire front line,” Putin said. “Combat operations are complex and we are moving towards resolving the main objectives that we set at the beginning of the military operation,” he added. However, its forces do not control any provincial capitals that were under Ukrainian control before 2022, not even in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, annexed on paper that year.
Everyone is waiting for the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump as US president to unblock the current stalemate in Ukraine. “I am ready for a meeting if he wants,” Putin declared. “I don’t know when I will meet with him, we haven’t spoken in more than four years,” he added, despite American journalists saying otherwise. According to Washington Postboth leaders spoke by phone two days after Trump’s victory in the November elections, and one of the reporters who uncovered the case WatergateBob Woodward also states that the two leaders have been in constant contact since the American left the presidency in January 2021.
The Ukrainian incursion into the Russian Kursk region last August has become a thorn in the Kremlin’s side, although Putin has appeared calm. “I cannot and do not want to give a specific date for his release.” […] but we will release her,” he responded in what was one of the first questions from Russian journalists during the press conference.
A couple of months before the war enters its fourth year, Putin has focused his speech on the army’s total adherence to his presidency. He spoke of the military as “our boys” and two aides surrounded him with a signed flag that the 155th Marine Brigade supposedly gave him.
According to the president, Russian soldiers are willing to die for him if he orders them to take Kursk immediately. “The boys [soldados] could you hear me say [que recuperaran el territorio] in a day or two, and they would go regardless of the losses. But it cannot be like that,” Putin has declared, at the same time that he has called the Ukrainians cowards.
“Mr Boris Johnson, a man with a good haircut, said that we must fight to the last Ukrainian. Here they are fighting and soon there will be no more Ukrainians who want to fight,” Putin believes. “In my opinion, soon there will be no one left [en Ucrania] who wants to fight,” he said.
The restoration of conquered territories is another problem for the Kremlin. Moscow has focused its efforts on rebuilding Mariupol, a key coastal city that remains half-finished. According to Putin, “300,000 people have already returned”, a doubtful figure given what has been seen on the ground in a city that in 2022 had just over 400,000 inhabitants and in which many buildings are practically empty.
Russia has restored 21,000 “constructions” in the territories taken in Ukraine, about 1,700 in Mariupol, and plans to recover another 20,000 by 2030, the Russian president detailed. However, except for Mariupol, the recovery in other metropolises is much slower, as there are towns such as Avdiivka, Bajmut or Vugledar that were reduced to rubble in the intense urban fighting fought there.
An idyllic Russia
The same optimism that Putin shows with the war against Ukraine has been exhibited with the Russian economy. Russian propaganda claimed at the beginning of the press conference that Russian citizens had sent their president more than two million questions, many, they acknowledged, connected to the dizzying rise in prices. However, the president painted a country that is going like a shot. “Russia has become much stronger in the last two or three years” which has placed Russia as “the first economy in Europe,” he said.
“Our economic growth adds up to approximately 8% in two years. In the United States it is 5% to 6%; in the eurozone it is 1%,” Putin has declared, based on the percentage growth of the gross domestic product (GDP), the same scale in which, for comparison, Guyana grew 43.8% last year, according to the Fund. International Monetary. On the other hand, according to official Kremlin data—although other studies speak of double-digit increases—annual inflation is now around 9.1%. Russian economic growth, furthermore, relies heavily on the massive manufacturing of weapons.
The Central Bank of Russia has raised interest rates to 21% in recent months, but does not rule out raising them even further due to uncontrolled price increases caused by the Government’s huge military spending, both to attract new recruits and for factories. of weapons. “The economic situation is normal. Despite everything, despite any external threat,” Putin responded, although he acknowledged that inflation is a “worrying” sign in the midst of the collapse of the ruble.
Negotiations with the new Syrian authorities
The flight to Moscow of former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has also endangered Russia’s geopolitical projection in the Middle East and Africa. The rebels’ takeover has put the future of the Tartus naval base and the Khmeimin airfield, both Russian, in Syria in question. “It will depend on whether the interests of the new authorities coincide,” Putin said.
Contacts between both parties continue and Moscow offers the bases “to deliver humanitarian aid to Syria,” according to Putin, who has also considered his military campaign in the Mediterranean country successful. “We came to Syria 10 years ago so that a terrorist enclave would not be created there, like in Afghanistan. We have achieved our goal overall. And even those groups that fought against the Assad regime also suffered internal changes,” the president said about the same factions that his propaganda branded as terrorists until the day the Syrian dictator fled.
In fact, Parliament has approved this week a law that paves the way for the Kremlin to remove both the Afghan Taliban movement and the Syrian Islamist militia Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) from the list of terrorist organizations, without a judicial decision. .
The Russian leader has also spoken for the first time about the attack that killed the head of Russia’s chemical and biological defense forces, Igor Kirillov, this Tuesday. “This is a terrorist act, the lives of many were put in danger,” Putin stressed after complaining that he had not heard any Western condemnation, although the Kremlin has not condemned the same attacks when they have occurred in Ukraine in the last decade. such as the assassination of Ukrainian intelligence colonel Maksim Shapoval with a car bomb in kyiv in 2017.
Putin painted a sweet moment for Russia where its few problems are not so serious because they are also bad elsewhere. “The birth rate has fallen to 1.41%, it is very low, but other countries like Finland and Norway are in the same situation,” he excused himself during his talk. “Everyone in the world sees porn websites, it’s like ordering meatballs. “We have to offer an alternative that is more interesting,” he responded at another time when talking about the defense of “traditional values.”
The Russian leader has also addressed the ecological catastrophe caused in the Black Sea by the shipwrecks of two old oil tankers last weekend. Although Russian experts have been warning for years that their fleet has more than half a century behind them, Putin has delegated responsibility to his captains. “They violated the rules,” he declared while urging the state of the ships to be studied. “We have to think about what to do with them in the future.”
Putin has insisted during his speech on one of his new ethereal concepts, “sovereignty”, as the unifying glue of the Russian people against foreign influence. The president alluded to this idea when remembering that people sang in English on a birthday of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who was later an advisor to the Russian state gas company Gazprom, with a handsome salary. “Sovereignty is in the heart […] “This feeling has been eradicated from the German people,” Putin said about singing in other languages as a German, and not about working for the Kremlin after leaving the German presidency.
