President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he was ready to compromise over Ukraine in possible talks with Donald Trump on ending the war and that Russian forces were moving towards achieving their primary goals on the battlefield.

Trump, a self-styled master of brokering agreements and author of the 1987 book “Trump: the Art of the Deal”, has vowed to swiftly end the conflict, but has not yet given any details on how he might achieve that.

Putin, fielding questions on state TV during his annual question and answer session with Russians, told a reporter for a U.S. news channel that he was ready to meet Trump, whom he said he had not spoken to for years.

Asked what he might be able to offer Trump, Putin dismissed an assertion that Russia was in a weak position, saying that Russia had got much stronger since he ordered troops into Ukraine in 2022.

“We have always said that we are ready for negotiations and compromises,” Putin said after saying that Russian forces, advancing across the entire front, were moving towards achieving their primary goals in Ukraine.

“Soon, those Ukrainians who want to fight will run out, in my opinion, soon there will be no one left who wants to fight. We are ready, but the other side needs to be ready for both negotiations and compromises.”

Reuters reported last month that Putin was open to discussing a Ukraine ceasefire deal with Trump, but ruled out making any major territorial concessions and insisted Kyiv abandon its ambitions to join NATO.

Russia, he said, had made proposals to Syria’s new rulers about Russia’s military bases there and most people that Moscow had spoken to on the issue favoured them staying.

He said Russia would need to think about whether the bases should remain or not, but that rumours about the death of Russian influence in the Middle East were exaggerated.

Asked about the fate of missing U.S. reporter Austin Tice, who was kidnapped in Syria in 2012, Putin said he planned to speak to former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the new leaders of Syria about the issue. Tice’s family wrote to Putin asking for his help in finding Tice.

War

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has left tens of thousands of dead, displaced millions and triggered the biggest crisis in relations between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Russia, which controls around a fifth of Ukraine, has taken several thousand square kilometres of territory in Ukraine this year, taking village after village and threatening strategically important cities such as Pokrovsk, a major road and rail hub.

Putin said the fighting was complex, so it was “difficult and pointless to guess what lies ahead… (but) we are moving, as you said, towards solving our primary tasks, which we outlined at the beginning of the special military operation.”

On the economy, Putin said it was showing signs of overheating which was stoking worryingly high inflation.

Discussing the continued presence of Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk region, Putin said Kyiv’s troops would definitely be forced out, but declined to say exactly when that would happen.

Putin also touted what he said was the invincibility of the “Oreshnik” hypersonic missile which Russia has already test-fired at a Ukrainian military factory, saying he was ready to organise another launch at Ukraine and see if Western air defence systems could shoot it down.

“Let them determine some target for destruction, say in Kyiv, concentrate all their air defence and missile defence forces there, and we will strike there with Oreshnik and see what happens. We are ready for such an experiment, but is the other side ready?” he said.

(Reuters)