Vladimir Putin has played his hand and has told his generals what he needs in return for bringing the Ukraine invasion that has killed hundreds of thousands to an end, according to sources.
The Russian president is demanding that Volodymyr Zelensky give up the whole of the eastern Donbas region, renounce his ambitions to join NATO, remain neutral and keep Western troops out of the country.
Putin made the demands after meeting Donald Trump in Alaska, according to three sources familiar with top-level Kremlin thinking.
Meeting for the first Russia-US summit in more than four years the pair spent almost all of their three-hour closed meeting discussing what a compromise on Ukraine might look like, according to Kremlin sources.
Russian sources claim Putin has compromised on previous demandswhich required Kyiv to give up the entirety of the four provinces Moscow claims as part of Russia: Dontesk, Luhansk which make up the Donbass,Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
Kyiv rejected those terms as tantamount to surrender.
In his new proposal, the Russian president has stuck to his demand that Ukraine completely withdraw from the parts of the Donbas it still controls. In return, Moscow would halt the current front lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, sources said.
The sources cautioned that it was unclear to Moscow whether Ukraine would be prepared to cede the remains of the Donbas, and that if it did not then the war would simply continue.
‘If we’re talking about simply withdrawing from the east, we cannot do that’, Zelensky told reporters on Thursday.
‘It is a matter of our country’s survival, involving the strongest defensive lines.’
A fourth source said Putin understood the economic vulnerability of Russia and the scale of the effort needed to invade further into Ukraine.
Trump has said he wants to end the ‘bloodbath’ of the war and be remembered as a ‘peacemaker president’.
He said on Monday he had begun arranging a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders, to be followed by a trilateral summit with the US president.
‘I believe Vladimir Putin wants to see it ended,’ Trump said beside Zelenskiy in the Oval office. ‘I feel confident we are going to get it solved.’
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday that Putin was prepared to meet Zelensky but that all issues had to be worked through first and there was a question about Zelensky’s authority to sign a peace deal.
The leaders of Britain, France and Germany have said they are sceptical that Putin wants to end the war.
‘There are two choices: war or peace, and if there is no peace, then there is more war,’ one of the sources said.
