If there was a single message to take from Vladimir Putin’s marathon news conference on 19 December, it was this: do not expect an imminent end to the war in Ukraine. Despite Donald Trump’s ongoing push for a peace deal by Christmas and his insistence that “we’re closer now than we’ve ever been” to a halt to the fighting, Putin made clear that he believes Russia is winning the war and that he has no intention of abandoning his assault until his latest demands are met. These include Ukraine ceding the four regions he claims to have annexed in 2022, along with Crimea, which Russia has occupied since 2014, and go far beyond the proposed compromises hammered out by Ukrainian, European, and American negotiators in recent weeks.
While claiming that Russia was “ready to end the conflict peacefully”, Putin insisted that Russian forces were “advancing across the entire frontline. As he summed up the outlook for the live television audience, “The enemy is on the retreat.” (It is true that Russian forces have made small gains in recent weeks, but these advances have been incremental and achieved at a staggering cost in casualties with the Ukrainian military mounting a series of counterattacks.)
Far from preparing to usher in a new era of peace, Putin appeared to be girding the country for a longer war. He patched in a decorated Russian military commander to share unsubstantiated claims of Ukrainian war crimes, assured another caller the Russian central bank had inflation under control, and apologised to the widow of a Russian soldier, left raising two children alone, for the delay in processing her survivor’s pension, assuring her that the case was now “under control”.
This is a well-worn approach for the Russian leader. During his quarter-century in power, his mostly annual “Direct Line with Vladimir Putin” events have come to serve as both a crude demonstration of his personal stamina – this year’s edition lasted around four and a half hours – assuring both ordinary citizens and would-be political rivals that Putin, now 73, is in full command of both the Kremlin and his own cognitive functions, and an opportunity to address the country’s festering grievances.
Fielding questions from both media representatives inside the hall and a carefully vetted selection of Russians “calling in” to speak to the president, he takes notes, asks for clarifying details, and generally promises to take matters under his personal supervision. Beyond the war, this year’s topics ranged from the price of fish to benefits payments, potholed roads, and whether an approaching comet might actually be an alien spacecraft. (“It’s out secret weapon,” Putin joked of the latter. “But seriously, it’s a comet.”)
The clear message is that Putin himself is not the problem, but rather, as was portrayed of Russian tsars past, he is the only man who can solve the country’s problems – if only you can break through the dysfunctional bureaucracy surrounding him and reach the president personally.
Putin’s assurances on the supposedly unrelenting advances on the battlefield, the resilience of the Russian economy, and his concern for the welfare of veteran’s families ranged from exaggeration to outright disingenuous. But he has reason to be confident about the broader strategic outlook of his war. With Donald Trump in the White House, repeatedly threatening to cut off support for Kyiv and telegraphing his antipathy towards Europe, Putin assesses a unique opportunity to press on with his long-held objectives of subjugating Ukraine and redrawing Europe’s security architecture.
That confidence will only have been bolstered by the news from Brussels in the hours before his news conference that EU leaders had been unable to agree a German-led plan to leverage around £160bn in frozen Russian assets to finance a loan to Ukraine. Instead, the bloc agreed to raise around £80 billion from capital markets, secured against the EU’s shared budget, with carve-outs for Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic which threatened to veto the deal unless they were exempted from future obligations.
This was not all bad news for Volodymyr Zelensky, who had travelled to the EU summit to plead Ukraine’s case directly for the reparations loan. Without a deal, Ukraine was in danger of running out of money within months. Now, the budget is secured through 2026. Confronted by an emboldened Russia and an increasingly hostile United States, Europe has not delivered the “independence moment” Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, promised ahead of the summit, but neither has it entirely collapsed. Instead, after 16 hours of fraught discussions, which continued well into the night, European leaders have, characteristically, emerged with a compromise plan to muddle through.
Thus, Ukraine ends 2025 roughly where it started, under pressure on the frontlines, under continued bombardment from Russian missiles and drones, with rolling blackouts and power shortages wrought by continued attacks on the national grid, and with no realistic end to this war in sight. What has changed, starkly, is the position of the United States, under Trump, whose long-term support for Kyiv, and its European allies, can no longer be relied upon. The next 12 months will determine whether Europe can rise, however cautiously and reluctantly, to meet the demands of this new reality, and prove Putin’s confidence to be misplaced.
Despite his swaggering performance on television, there are cracks in that façade. In 2022, after a series of Russian military defeats, Putin did not hold his annual conference at all. This year, that he devoted so much time to the war and attempts to assuage his citizens’ concerns, demonstrates that beyond the bravado, he understands that this war is not popular, the economy is under strain, and that much as he might like to pretend otherwise, Russia, too, cannot fight on indefinitely.
[Further reading: Europe is losing Ukraine]
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