As I pointed out here, the most significant thing to come out of Putin's Victory Day celebration was an off-hand comment that the "special military operation" in Ukraine might be coming to an end soon. The comment definitely wasn't a mistake because the Kremlin repeated it again today.
The Kremlin repeated Russian President Vladimir Putin's assertion that the war in Ukraine was almost over on Tuesday, after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Moscow had no intention of ending it.
"I think that the matter is coming to an end," Putin told reporters on Saturday of the war, now in its fifth year...
Asked to comment on Putin's remarks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said a certain amount of trilateral work with Ukraine and the United States had been done towards finding a peace deal.
"This accumulated groundwork in terms of the peace process allows us to say that the completion is indeed approaching," Peskov told reporters, though he added that it was difficult to provide specific details at the current time.
So Putin is throwing out the idea that he's ready to talk, maybe with the US or maybe with the EU. On Saturday, Putin had also suggested a former German chancellor as someone who might be a good mediator.
The Russian president told reporters that he would be open to reopening lines of communication with Ukraine and Europe, ideally mediated by former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
“For me personally, the former Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Mr Schröder, is preferable,” Putin said, asked on Saturday if he was willing to engage with Europe.
There was immediate agreement in Germany that Schröder would not be their choice for a mediator between Putin and Europe.
A mediator “cannot be Putin’s buddy”, Michael Roth, a former SPD lawmaker and chair of the foreign affairs committee, told the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
Germany’s Europe minister, Gunther Krichbaum, said that Schröder did not have the credentials to be an “honest broker”.
“He is, and certainly has been, heavily influenced by Mr Putin. Close friendships may be legitimate anywhere in the world, but they do not help one to be perceived as an impartial mediator,” Krichbaum said.
The bigger question here is if Putin really meant for any of this to be taken seriously in the first place. After all, he said this even as his army is getting ready for fresh attacks in Ukraine now that the weather is improving. He's also been doing a bit of saber-rattling with nuclear weapons once again.
Sergei Karakayev, the commander of the strategic missile forces, told Russian president Vladimir Putin a the successful test of the Sarmat strategic nuclear missile had been carried out on Tuesday.
Putin said that Russia planned to put the Sarmat into combat duty by the end of 2026.
It comes despite ongoing efforts towards peace, with the US reportedly pushing for a temporary ceasefire which would provide sanctions relief to Moscow as it looks to revive a flagging peace process.
So it's very much a mixed bag at this point and there are many ways to interpret it. The most aggressive interpretation is that Putin is planning to nuke Ukraine and that's why he sees the war ending soon. But Putin has rattled the nuclear saber many times before. This is something he does to show he's in charge and still a strongman. But there are still good reasons to think he realizes he's on the ropes right now.
His progress on the battlefield has stalled since Elon Musk cut off Russian access to Starlink. His clampdown on social media and Telegram seems like paranoia and is unpopular. Several of his largest oil refineries have been on fire. The reduced Victory Day parade lasted 45 minutes and featured no tanks or missiles. And he admitted just a month ago that the economy was not performing as well as expected. He really is in trouble despite the influx of cash created by higher oil prices.
So I think the best read on this at the moment is that he's walking a tightrope: Trying to look tough and decisive at home, but needing relief and signaling openness to talks abroad.
“He wants to send a message: ‘I understand this war needs to end soon, but it needs to end on my conditions,’” said Stefan Meister, a Russia analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Though Mr. Putin’s approval ratings have fallen recently, they remain significantly higher than they were in the years before he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, according to the Levada Center, an independent pollster. (Approval polls have obvious limitations in an authoritarian system.)
“It’s not that this regime is now suddenly breaking down and there is no support anymore,” Mr. Meister said. “I think what we understand now is, he is under pressure. And pressure works. He has to react somehow to it.”
Putin isn't broken but he can see the trend lines and right now they are all bad for him. Other than the higher oil prices, nothing is going his way. That can't continue for another six months or his situation really could become unstable. He needs to shake things up and these vague comments about ending the war, plus the nuclear threats are his way of walking that tightrope.
