Putin admits he wants to find an end to the war in Ukraine

Russian president Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that his intention was not to prolong his country’s war in Ukraine but rather to end it as quickly as possible, a goal that would likely need to involve some form of a diplomatic solution.

“Our goal is not to spin the flywheel of military conflict, but, on the contrary, to end this war,”  the Russian president told reports during a press conference. 

"All armed conflicts end one way or another with some kind of negotiations on the diplomatic track," Putin continued. 

“Sooner or later, any parties in a state of conflict sit down and make an agreement,” the Russian president added, “the sooner this realization comes to those who oppose us, the better. We have never given up on this."

Putin’s comments came on the heels of Ukrainian president Vlodomyer Zelensky’s recent visit to Washington, a trip that helped secure the transfer of America’s powerful Patriot missile defense system to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. 

Over the last few months, Russia's military strategy has focused on knocking out Ukraine’s civil infrastructure and sapping the country’s civilian population of its will to continue fighting. 

American president Joe Biden denounced Russia's strategy of using “winter as a weapon” in his Wednesday meeting with Zelensky and promised to continue supporting Ukraine for as long as it took to achieve victory. 

In addition to announcing the transfer of a Patriot missile system, the United States Congress unveiled on Tuesday a new annual spending bill that would provide another $44 billion dollars in emergency assistance. 

The move was made to help Ukraine defend against Russian escalation as the war inches closer to entering its second year. 

While the announcement of Patriot missile defense systems and an additional $44 billion in aid to Ukraine may have spooked Putin into making his comments about peace, some American officials aren’t buying it. 

In a statement made just before Putin’s comments, White House spokesman John Kirby noted that the Russian president didn’t seem very interested in negotiating real peace with Ukraine. 

“Mr. Putin is obviously not interested in diplomacy right now,” Kirby told CNN reporters, “quite the contrary. He’s interested in killing more civilian Ukrainians and knocking out the lights and knocking out the heat as the winter approaches.”

Over the last few months, the Kremlin has repeatedly said that it was interested in a negotiated peace, but it was officials in Kyiv who had closed all diplomatic channels and possibilities for peace. 

Back in mid-November, president Zelensky did say that there could be no peace until Russia left Ukraine and returned to the annexed Crimean Peninsula. 

“A simple ceasefire won’t do the trick,” Zelensky said during a video call interview at the Bloomberg New Economic Forum. “Unless we liberate our whole territory,” he added, “we will not bring peace.” 

Russia, however, rejected Kyiv's most recent calls for peace in December with Kremlin spokesperson Dimitri Peskov saying that Kyiv needed to accept the “realities” of the war, insinuating that Russia was not going to relinquish the Crimean Peninsula or the four Oblasts it annexed in November. 

Unfortunately, Putin’s current overture for peace may just be a ploy to buy time to allow his struggling military to recover and regain its footing after a series of devastating losses and retreats that have turned the momentum of the war in Ukraine’s favor.