Russian President Vladimir Putin is open to talks about a truce in Ukraine with Donald Trump, but rules out any major territorial concessions and insists that Kiev give up its ambitions to join NATO, reports Reuters.
US President-elect Trump, who promised to quickly end the conflict, returns to the White House at a time of Russian dominance on the front. Moscow controls a part of Ukraine that is the size of the US state of Virginia.
In the first detailed report on what Putin would accept in any Trump-brokered deal, five current and former Russian officials said the Kremlin could largely agree to freeze the conflict along the front lines.
Reuters sources claim that there may be a possibility for negotiations over the division of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.
While Moscow claims the four regions are fully part of Russia, its forces on the ground control 70-80 percent of the territory.
Russia could also be open to withdrawing from the relatively small swaths of territory it holds in the Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions, in northern and southern Ukraine.
Putin said this month that any ceasefire deal should reflect the "reality" on the ground, but he feared a short-lived truce that would only allow the West to rearm Ukraine.
"If there is no neutrality, it is difficult to imagine the existence of any good neighborly relations between Russia and Ukraine," Putin said.
Two Reuters sources said outgoing US President Joseph Biden's decision to allow Ukraine to fire US missiles deep into Russia could complicate and delay any solution, as well as toughen Moscow's demands. Yesterday, Kiev used missiles to hit Russian territory for the first time.
"Putin has already said that freezing the conflict will not work in any way. And the approval of the missiles is a very dangerous escalation by the United States," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said hours before the Russians reported the US missile strikes.
Trump adviser Stephen Chung said Trump is the only person who can bring both sides together to negotiate peace and work to end the war.
Trump said he would talk directly with Putin about a peace deal, but did not elaborate on how he might reconcile the warring parties.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said his country will not rest until every Russian soldier is expelled from its territory, based on the borders Ukraine gained after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
On June 14, Putin outlined his opening conditions for an immediate end to the war: Ukraine must abandon its NATO ambitions and withdraw all its troops from the entire territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed and largely controlled by Russia.
Although Russia will not tolerate Ukraine joining NATO, or the presence of NATO troops on Ukrainian soil, it is open to discussing security guarantees for Kiev, according to some Kremlin officials.
Other Ukrainian concessions the Kremlin could push for include Kiev limiting the size of its armed forces and pledging "not to restrict the use of the Russian language."
Russia controls 18 percent of Ukraine's territory, including all of Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014, 80 percent of the Donbass, and more than 70 percent of the Zaporizhia and Kherson regions.
In total, Russia controls over 110.000 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, while Ukraine holds about 650 square kilometers of Russia's Kursk Oblast.
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