Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Army, General Valery Gerasimov, continue to publicly emphasize their determination to achieve Russia's initially set military goals, while at the same time presenting an inflated picture of combat successes, News.bg reports.
During a ceremony to award Russian servicemen on December 17, Putin stated that Russia would fulfill all its goals and announced that Russian forces had captured “strategically important populated areas“, which, according to him, creates prerequisites for new offensive actions.
This is stated in an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
The Kremlin's official statement on the event also emphasized a statement by a serviceman, a Hero of Russia, who said the army was fulfilling Putin's mission to restore Russia's "ancestral lands." According to ISW, Putin's December 17 statements are part of a series of recent statements that reaffirm his commitment to the maximalist military goals formulated back in 2022. This suggests that the Kremlin would not accept a peace agreement based on the US-proposed 28-point plan.
Putin again exaggerated the progress of Russian forces, saying they had taken Siversk. However, ISW estimates that Russian troops control approximately 77 percent of the city.
General Gerasimov made similar claims during a briefing for foreign military attaches on December 18. He announced that Russian forces had captured Kupyansk, despite evidence that the Ukrainian army had liberated a significant part of the city, and that Russia controlled about 50 percent of Konstantinovka.
The ISW estimates that by 2025, Russian forces had seized approximately 4,700 square kilometers of territory. Even with Gerasimov’s more optimistic claims, this area is only slightly larger than the state of Delaware and represents about 1.04 percent of Ukraine’s total land area. According to the institute, such exaggerated statements rather reveal the slow pace of the Russian offensive and undermine the Kremlin’s efforts to wage cognitive warfare, presenting a Russian victory and the collapse of Ukrainian defenses as inevitable.
Against this backdrop, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed on December 18 that Ukraine is ready to hold presidential elections as part of the process towards a peace agreement to end the war. This position is consistent with the original 28-point US plan, which calls for elections to be held within 100 days of the formalization of the agreement.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Moscow continues to consider the possible deployment of Western troops in Ukraine as part of post-war security guarantees to be “unacceptable“ and that Russia would view such forces as a “legitimate target“.
ISW adds that Russia is stepping up both its covert and overt actions against Europe and has entered the so-called “Phase Zero“ - a stage of preparation through information and psychological operations aimed at creating the conditions for a potential future conflict between Russia and NATO.