Russia Matters, 12/20/24

1. “I would like to emphasize from the very beginning that the outgoing year has been crucial in achieving the goals of the special military operation,” Vladimir Putin told an expanded annual meeting of the Russian Defense Ministry Board on Dec. 16. He then claimed during his annual call-in show on Dec. 19 that Russian forces were moving toward achieving their “priority goals.” Russia is yet to establish full control over the four Ukrainian regions it has annexed since the beginning of its re-invasion of Ukraine in February 2022,¹ but Vladimir Putin is already seeking to shape the narrative so that he can present his gains in Ukraine as a victory next year, while his planning horizon for the five Ukrainian regions Russia has already claimed as its own stretch as far as 2030.*
2. “He [Zelenskyy] should be prepared to make a deal. That’s all,” Donald Trump asserted on Dec. 16 at his first post-election victory press conference. Trump is already planning to send his special envoy for the Ukraine war Keith Kellogg to Kyiv, along with London, Paris and Rome after his inauguration, and Kellogg, a retired general, is also open to visiting Moscow, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, Putin is sending conflicting signals on whether he would agree to a ceasefire instead of pursuing a peace deal. “I didn’t reject it,” Putin said during his Dec. 19 call-in show with regard to Viktor Orban’s proposal for a Christmas truce, according to Meduza. At the same time, however, Putin told the annual call-in-show that “we don’t need a truce; we need peace.” When asked during the call-in show about Russia’s conditions for negotiations with Ukraine, Putin reiterated that negotiations can begin without preliminary conditions, but at the same time they must be based on what he has described as “agreements in Istanbul” that Ukrainian and Russian negotiators discussed during the early weeks of the war, and negotiations must also take into account “the realities that are taking shape on the ground today.” He added that any treaty could only be signed with a “legitimate government.” In his turn, Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejected a return to the Istanbul agreements because he claimed that there were none. At least one of the drafts of the agreement Ukrainian and Russian negotiators discussed in Spring 2022 would have designated Ukraine as a “neutral” state that would not join NATO, but could join the EU and could seek security guarantees from other countries. On top of that, Putin—who insists Zelenskyy’s presidential powers have expired—continues to demand regime change in Kyiv by stressing that he can only negotiate with a legitimate government of Ukraine. 
3. In the past month, Russian force have made a net gain of 204 square miles (an area roughly equivalent to 1/3rd of the total area of London), according to RM staff’s estimate that was published in the Dec. 18 issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card, and that is based on data provided for that period by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). One sign of how worried the Ukrainian leadership has become about Russian advances in this eastern province of Ukraine, where Russian troops have reached the outskirts of the key town of Pokrovsk this week, is the replacement of the commander of the Ukrainian forces there less than a month after replacing the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces. As NYT has observed, “On the battlefield, the situation has not looked this desperate for Ukrainian troops since the start of the invasion.”
4. The commander of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical (NBC) Defense Forces Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov has been killed in an bomb blast, which was allegedly set up by an Uzbek national on the orders of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). The SBU claimed the Russian military’s NBC chief—whom it had accused of ordering the use of chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops—was a legitimate target, but even inside Ukraine some questioned the wisdom of the assassination. Joe Biden’s NSA Jake Sullivan disapproved of the hit, arguing that “we do support and enable Ukraine to defend itself and to take the fight to Russian forces on the battlefield, but not operations like this,” while Keith Kellogg, Donald Trump’s nominee for special envoy for the conflict, called the assassination “not a very good idea.” Moreover, Ukraine’s forces are steadily losing ground on the battlefield and assassination won’t improve their war effort, analysts and Western officials told NYT. The Russians will find a replacement for that general, a Ukrainian special forces officer told NYT, predicting that as a condition of any peace settlement, Russia would insist not only on a cessation of military operations, but also of secret operations that kill their generals. As for the Russian reaction, it went beyond threats of retaliation, with Vladimir Putin offering a rare criticism of his special services. “Our security services allowed a serious terrorist act to happen. Such grave failures cannot be tolerated,” Putin said during his call-in show one day before it was revealed that the head of the FSB’s Military Counterintelligence Department Nikolai Yuryev resigned. Such a public criticism of Russia’s secret services by Putin, an ex-KGB officer and former head of the FSB himself, occurs rarely and could be a sign of what Russians call “organizational conclusions.”
5. Vladimir Putin flaunted Russia’s nuclear forces during his Dec. 16 address to the expanded annual meeting of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Board yet again. “The army and navy are being re-equipped with up-to-date weapons and equipment at an accelerated pace. For example, the share of such weapons in the strategic nuclear forces has already reached 95%. Meanwhile, we have specified the fundamental principles for the use of nuclear weapons envisaged in the updated Basic Principles of State Policy on Nuclear Deterrence. Let me stress once again, so that no one accuses us of trying to scare everyone with nuclear weapons: this is a policy of nuclear deterrence,” he said. He also flaunted the purported capabilities of the Oreshnik MRBM yet again both in the Dec. 16 address to the MoD board and during his Dec. 19 annual call-in show. During the latter, he proposed a “21st-century high-tech duel,” in which Russia would field the Oreshnik and the West deployed a system in Ukraine that Western experts think can intercept that MRBM. This week also saw Putin threaten to stop complying with the INF Treaty, which he claims to be complying with in spite of the legal death of that treaty, while also having the chief of his Strategic Missile Forces Sergei Karakayev participate in nuclear saber-rattling, including a claim that Russia may automate nuclear retaliation. In his interview to the RF MoD’s Red Star this week, Karakayev also implied Russia may have disclosed to the U.S. the area the Oreshnik was to target in Ukraine prior to the Nov. 21 launch of this MRBM.
6. On Dec. 16, Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov told an expanded meeting of his agency’s board that one of the priorities for the Russian armed forces is “ensuring full readiness for a possible military conflict with NATO in the next decade… The first among the priority areas is victory in the special military operation,” he said.
7. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in Syria has conceded that it will probably allow Russia to keep some or all of its bases, and it is likely to respect Russia’s lease at Tartus port, according to The Economist.