Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu, an influential ally of President Vladimir Putin, said today that the West must accept that Russia is winning the war in Ukraine, and to conduct negotiations to end the conflict, reported Reuters.
The war, which has lasted more than two and a half years, may now be entering its final phase, according to representatives of some governments, after Moscow's forces have advanced since August at the rapid pace with which they were in the opening weeks of the conflict, and Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.
Trump said on the campaign trail that if elected he could achieve peace in Ukraine within 24 hours, but did not give many details on how he would end Europe's biggest land war since World War II war.
Shoigu, who was Russia's defense minister from 2012 to 2024 before Putin moved him to the Security Council, said the West had tried to use Ukraine to defeat Russia strategically, but the plan failed. has failed.
"Now that the situation in the theater of military operations is not in favor of the Kiev regime, the West is faced with a choice - to continue to finance it and destroy the Ukrainian population, or to realize the reality and start negotiations," said Shoigu.
He also told a meeting of security representatives from the Commonwealth of Independent States in Moscow that Russia considers the Ukrainian leadership to be "terrorist" and controlled by outside forces.
The Kremlin reacted cautiously yesterday after Trump was elected US president, saying the US was still an enemy state and only time would tell if Trump's rhetoric about ending the war in Ukraine could be put into practice.
Reuters reported earlier this year that Putin was ready to end the war with a negotiated ceasefire that recognized the limits of the current battle lines, but was prepared to continue fighting if Kiev and the West did not agree with this.
The West and Ukraine have characterized the invasion as an imperial-style land grab, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has presented a "victory plan" in which he demands additional help from the West to win.
Putin sees the conflict as part of an existential battle against a declining and declining West, which he says has humiliated Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by encroaching on Moscow's sphere of influence, which includes Ukraine, Reuters noted.
p>
The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in a revolution earlier that year and Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, with Russian-backed separatists fighting Ukrainian armed forces.
p>