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Speaking at a meeting with parliamentary leaders on Thursday, the Russian president said the prospects for any negotiation would grow dimmer the longer the conflict dragged on.
“Everyone should know that, by and large, we haven’t started anything yet in earnest,” he said. “At the same time, we don’t reject peace talks. But those who reject them should know that the further it goes, the harder it will be for them to negotiate with us.”
Putin also accused Ukraine’s western allies of fueling hostilities, charging that “the west wants to fight us until the last Ukrainian” and that they were welcome to try, but it would only bring tragedy for Ukraine.
“Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield. What can you say – let them try,” he said.
“We have heard many times that the west wants to fight us to the last Ukrainian. This is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people, but it seems that everything is heading towards this.”
The Russian leader also raged against “totalitarian liberalism” that he said the west had sought to impose on the entire world and reaffirmed his long-held claim that the west is using the conflict in Ukraine to try to isolate and weaken Russia.
“They simply don’t need such a country as Russia,” Putin said. “This is why they have used terrorism, separatism and internal destructive forces in our country.”
He charged that western sanctions against Russia had failed to achieve their goal of “sowing division and strife in our society and demoralising our people”. However, he conceded that sanctions were creating difficulties, “but not at all what the initiators of the economic blitzkrieg against Russia were counting on”.
“The course of history is unstoppable, and attempts by the collective west to enforce its version of the global order are doomed to fail,” Putin said.
“There is no ‘collective west’ plan. Only a specific z-army which entered sovereign Ukraine, shelling cities and killing civilians,” Podolyak tweeted. “Everything else is a primitive propaganda.”
Russian parliamentary leaders responded to Putin’s comments and one, Sergei Mironov of the A Just Russia party, encouraged him to set up a special agency to facilitate the integration of occupied Ukrainian territories into Russia – an idea Putin promised to discuss.
Russian prosecutors also called for prison sentences on Thursday for a prominent opposition activist and for a Moscow city council member who spoke up against Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Alexei Gorinov, who was detained in April, is the first Russian elected representative to face prison for spreading “knowingly false information” about the Russian army, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of 15 years’ jail.
Gorinov criticised Moscow’s military actions in Ukraine at a council meeting in March, a recording of which is now available on YouTube. The video shows him voicing skepticism over a planned children’s art competition in his constituency while “every day children are dying” in Ukraine. A Russian prosecutor has asked for a seven-year sentence.
Prosecutors have also asked that Andrei Pivovarov, former head of the Open Russia organisation, be given a five-year sentence for “directing an undesirable organisation”, according to his lawyer, Sergei Badamshin.
Pivovarov was pulled off a Warsaw-bound plane at St Petersburg’s airport just before takeoff in May last year. He was taken to the southern city of Krasnodar, where he was accused of supporting a local candidate on behalf of an “undesirable” organisation. The criminal charge is based on his social media posts supporting independent candidates in Krasnodar’s municipal elections.
Since invading Ukraine on 24 February, Russian forces have captured large swathes of the country, most recently seizing the eastern region of Luhansk.
But their progress has been far slower than many analysts predicted, and after failing to capture Kyiv and other big cities in Ukraine’s north-east early in the campaign, Moscow’s forces shifted their focus to the eastern industrial heartland of Donbas.
Earlier this week, the Russian military claimed control of Luhansk province, one of the two that make up Donbas, and is preparing to press its offensive into neighbouring Donetsk.
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