Western officials will clear the path for Russia’s victory in the war in Ukraine by cutting military aid for the embattled nation, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“These freebies may end one day — in fact, they are already coming to an end little by little,” Putin said during a marathon question-and-answer session. “We have also destroyed almost 2,300 armored vehicles of various types. This is what is called demilitarization.”
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Putin aired that bullish boast just days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the United States to renew his appeal for additional military aid as the existing funding runs out. With Congress still deadlocked over approving the assistance, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team cited Putin’s comments as proof that the Russian leader has calculated he “could outlast the West” en route to a total victory.
“You have heard us say from the beginning of this campaign that Vladimir Putin’s bet was that he could outlast the West and that the West would weaken, the West would stop supporting Ukraine, and that Russia would still be there ready to fight, and he just had to outlast us,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said. “I don’t believe that until today he had actually ever come out and said it.”
Putin emphasized that he intends to achieve all the objectives Russia set in the heady days prior to its initial attempt to overthrow the Ukrainian government, and he asserted a historical claim to Ukraine’s entire Black Sea coastline.
“The southeastern part of Ukraine has always been pro-Russian because it is historically a Russian territory,” Putin insisted. “The entire Black Sea region was incorporated into Russia as the result of Russo-Turkish wars. What does Ukraine have to do with that? Neither Crimea nor the Black Sea region has any connection to Ukraine. Odesa is a Russian city.”
Russia signed a treaty that affirmed the validity of Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders in 1997. When Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian forces poured out of Crimea on a sprint toward Odesa, but their advance was stymied by the Ukrainian defense of Mykolaiv. Odesa remains one of Ukraine’s most beautiful and valuable port cities.
“Of course, he would like to occupy Odesa, and it’s his dream, obviously, but the thing is that Odesa is pro-Ukrainian and it has always been pro-Ukrainian,” Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Chairman Oleksandr Merezhko, a member of parliament in Zelensky’s political party, told the Washington Examiner. “He sounded as if [he’s] a madman who has absolutely no connection to reality.”
Blinken’s spokesman took Putin’s remarks as an acknowledgment that “he still wishes to conquer Ukraine,” despite the high cost of the military struggle over the last 22 months.
“His war aims have not changed in any way,” Miller told reporters at the State Department.
As Putin laid out his claims, European leaders agreed to begin the formal negotiation process that could see Ukraine join the European Union. Such an outcome would deal a major blow to Putin’s priorities, as he annexed Crimea at the outset of the war in 2014 following a political crisis that erupted when a pro-Russian president scuttled an association agreement with the European Union due to Kremlin pressure.
“Europe deserves to be strong,” Zelensky told the EU leaders prior to their decision to begin the negotiations over Ukraine’s membership. “Ten years ago, in Ukraine, people rose up under the flags of the European Union. It was a symbol of truth for them, and it should remain so.”
Membership decisions require unanimity within the EU to proceed, but that consensus was hard to achieve due to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s long-standing tensions with Zelensky’s government. Orban refused to vote in favor of the negotiations, and rather than cast a solitary veto, he left the room when the vote was taken and allowed the decision to proceed without Hungarian support.
“We made a very serious step in the direction of joining the EU, whereas Russia is plunging into [an] abyss of barbarity,” Merezhko said.
Some congressional Republicans have argued that Ukraine needs to negotiate a peace deal with Russia, even one that involves acquiescing to Russia’s conquest of some Ukrainian territory. Yet Merezhko, for his part, argued that Putin “is not interested in any deal” that stops short of his original ambitions.
“He would agree to have such a deal only when he will be able to occupy Kyiv and most of the territory of Ukraine,” the Ukrainian foreign affairs chairman said. “To us, it’s like negotiating with a tiger. It’s life and death. That’s why we call this war existential.”
Putin was explicit that his “goals … have not changed,” saying they required not only the “denazification” of Ukraine — a country that elected Zelensky, its first Jewish president, in a landslide victory over an incumbent Ukrainian president — but also its demilitarization and “a neutral status for Ukraine” with respect to the West.
“We can agree on demilitarization and establish certain parameters,” Putin said. “There are also other possibilities to either reach an agreement or resolve the conflict by force. This is what we will strive for.”
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Miller, the State Department spokesman, took Putin’s comments about Western aid to Ukraine as an opportunity to renew Blinken’s call for a breakthrough in the congressional stalemate over the supplemental funding package to aid Ukraine and secure the border.
“We believe that he will not outlast the West and he will not outlast the United States of America,” Miller said. “And now it’s up for the United States Congress to prove that [Putin’s] bet is wrong.”
