Putin says Russia is ready to compromise with Trump on Ukraine war

By Vladimir Soldatkin and Andrew Osborn

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he was ready to compromise over Ukraine in possible talks with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on ending the war and had no conditions for starting talks with the Ukrainian authorities.

Trump, a self-styled master of brokering agreements and author of the 1987 book "Trump: the Art of the Deal", has vowed to swiftly end the conflict, but has not yet given any details on how he might achieve that.

Putin, fielding questions on state TV during his annual question and answer session with Russians, told a reporter for a U.S. news channel that he was ready to meet Trump, whom he said he had not spoken to for years.

Asked what he might be able to offer Trump, Putin dismissed an assertion that Russia was in a weak position, saying that Russia had got much stronger since he ordered troops into Ukraine in 2022.

"We have always said that we are ready for negotiations and compromises," Putin said, after saying that Russian forces, advancing across the entire front, were moving towards achieving their primary goals in Ukraine.

"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."

Reuters reported last month that Putin was open to discussing a Ukraine ceasefire deal with Trump, but ruled out making any major territorial concessions and insisted Kyiv abandon its ambitions to join NATO.

Putin said on Thursday that Russia had no conditions to start talks with Ukraine and was ready to negotiate with anyone, including President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

But he said any deal could only be signed with Ukraine's legitimate authorities, which for now the Kremlin considered to be only the Ukrainian parliament.

Zelenskiy, whose term has technically expired but who has delayed an election because of the war, would need to be re-elected for Moscow to consider him a legitimate signatory to any deal to ensure it was legally watertight, said Putin.

Any talks should take as their starting point a preliminary agreement reached between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in the early weeks of the war at talks in Istanbul, which was never implemented, he added.

Some Ukrainian politicians regard that draft deal as akin to a capitulation which would have neutered Ukraine's military and political ambitions.

WAR

Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine has left tens of thousands of dead, displaced millions and triggered the biggest crisis in relations between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Russia, which casts the conflict as a defensive special military operation designed to stop dangerous NATO expansion to the east, controls around a fifth of Ukraine and has taken several thousand square kilometres of territory this year.

Determined to incorporate four Ukrainian regions into Russia, Moscow's forces have taken village after village in the east and are now threatening strategically important cities such as Pokrovsk, a major road and rail hub.

Putin said the fighting was complex, so it was "difficult and pointless to guess what lies ahead... (but) we are moving, as you said, towards solving our primary tasks, which we outlined at the beginning of the special military operation."

Discussing the continued presence of Ukrainian forces in Russia's Kursk region, Putin said Kyiv's troops would definitely be forced out, but declined to say exactly when that would happen.

Russia, Putin said, had made proposals to Syria's new rulers about Russia's military bases there and most people that Moscow had spoken to on the issue favoured them staying.

Russia would need to think about whether the bases should remain or not, he added, but rumours about the death of Russian influence in the Middle East were exaggerated.

Asked about the fate of missing U.S. reporter Austin Tice, who was kidnapped in Syria in 2012, Putin said he planned to speak to former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the new leaders of Syria about the issue. Tice's family wrote to Putin asking for his help in finding him.

On the Russian economy, Putin said it was showing signs of overheating which was stoking worryingly high inflation.

Putin also touted what he said was the invincibility of the "Oreshnik" hypersonic missile that Russia has already test-fired at a Ukrainian military factory, saying he was ready to organise another launch at Ukraine and see if Western air defence systems could shoot it down.

"Let them determine some target for destruction, say in Kyiv, concentrate all their air defence and missile defence forces there, and we will strike there with Oreshnik and see what happens. We are ready for such an experiment, but is the other side ready?" he said.