A Reuters report on Thursday said that Russian President Vladimir Putin 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 discussions.
It was a dramatic, nearly surreal moment in world geopolitics.
Ever since the 2022 Istanbul talks between Russia and Ukraine failed—when former British PM Boris Johnson urged Ukrainian President Zelenskiy to walk away—the war pendulum has primarily swung Russia's way. With each square mile of territorial gain, Russia had insisted on a set of preconditions for entering into peace talks.
Territorial Concessions: Russia has insisted that Ukraine must recognize the annexation of territories it claims, including Crimea and parts of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia regions, including areas that Russia does not fully control militarily but claims as its own.
Neutrality: Russia has consistently demanded that Ukraine abandon its ambitions to join NATO. This was the primary driver for Russia's Special Military Operation, which began on February 22, 2022. This condition was highlighted in early negotiations.
Security Assurances: Russia has proposed that Ukraine should be a neutral state with limits on its military. It has also suggested that any peace deal would need to include security guarantees from Western countries to assist Ukraine in case of aggression—what Russia calls a pan-European "security architecture."
Withdrawal of actions from the International Criminal Court: Russia, like the United States, does not recognize the International Criminal Court. However, many countries do - and the ICC's finding that President Putin and his key leaders should be prosecuted for war crimes exposes them to a chance of arrest when they visit those countries. Diplomatic immunity protections do not apply to ICC findings.
However, these demands have been met with resistance from Ukraine, which insists on the restoration of its territorial integrity and has its own set of conditions for peace talks, including the withdrawal of Russian troops and prosecution of war crimes.
Thursday's news that Russia had no conditions to start talks with Ukraine and was ready to negotiate with anyone, including President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was a watershed milestone in the war, which will enter the fourth year of conflict in February. "We have always said that we are ready for negotiations and compromises," Putin reportedly 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."
Donald Trump's election changed Russia's calculus. Throughout history, winning sides rarely fire the first shot across the bow to initiate peace talks—the losing side often fires that shot. However, global elites witnessed tectonic shifts in their worldview when Donald Trump was reelected in a landslide in November. Trump, who has never criticized Russia for the invasion and only said that the war must end as soon as possible, has consistently claimed that he would help end the war on Day 1, presumably by announcing an end to military and financial support to Ukraine to force them to negotiate. No one knows what tricks Trump has up his sleeve, but for the person who wrote a book about the "Art of the Deal," Trump's position is prudent.
Events in Syria accelerated Russia's thinking. When Damascus fell to rebels, Russia's worldview changed significantly. Deeply engaged in its Ukraine battles, losing thousands of soldiers every day, Russia no longer had Bashar al-Assad's support for Russia's only naval base and airfield in the Mediterranean. With Turkey, Israel, and the United States each clamoring for influence in Damascus, Russia didn't want to be the fourth matchmaker. Speaking to a BBC reporter, Putin addressed this very question, saying that "rumours about the death of Russian influence in the Middle East were exaggerated."
TIPP prediction in June 2023: Whatever events may have triggered Thursday's bombshell news, we at Tippinsights predicted a similar outcome when we published this editorial in June 2023: "Prediction: The Ukraine War Will Last Until January 2025; Politics, undefined goals, and electoral concerns drive it."
At the time, President Biden and his team were just as clueless about the war as they are today. Biden had consistently avoided identifying a defined objective other than to have his senior cabinet officials talk in broad terms. Speaking at the U.N. Security Council, Secretary Antony Blinken had said: "We cannot – we will not – allow President Putin to get away with it. Defending Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity is about much more than standing up for one nation's right to choose its own path, fundamental as that right is. It's also about protecting an international order where no nation can redraw the borders of another by force."
Compounded with insane statements from Biden that America would support Ukraine for "as long as it takes," we were left with a war for which Congress never voted (other than to provide emergency funds), the objective of which was outsourced to a foreign leader, and the timeline was entirely open-ended. If anyone needed proof that President Biden was an irresponsible steward of taxpayer funds, this was it.
Even after Trump won the election, Blinken showed steadfast support for keeping the war going. Speaking in Brussels at a NATO summit on November 13, Blinken said, "President Biden is committed to making sure that every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed out the door between now and January 20." The Government Accountability Office reported that the Biden administration has sent at least $174 billion in aid and military assistance to Ukraine from the time the war began in February 2022 to April 2024, in about two years. Never mind that the war has consumed more than a million lives with nothing to show for the conflict other than misery and destruction.
Putin's announcement is welcome news—enough of this Biden-Blinken-Sullivan-Zelenskiy nonsense. It is high time the warring parties talked about peace.
