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In an unusually wide-ranging interview with war correspondents and military bloggers, President Vladimir V. Putin on Tuesday portrayed the Russian military as steadfast against the long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive and suggested that the conflict was fulfilling its initial stated goals.
“The enemy has not succeeded in any of the sectors,” Putin said the Ukrainian offensive that rolled out in recent days, but instead suffered huge losses compared to relatively few for Russia. In terms of tanks, for instance, he said Ukraine had lost 160 compared to Russia’s 54, adding that some of the latter could be repaired. His claims could not be independently confirmed.
Putin has touched on virtually every aspect of the conflict in recent weeks. He chose a format he rarely used, which allowed 18 reporters to cover the war for more than two hours in a style reminiscent of his annual “Direct Line” performance, when he spends hours answering questions from all over the country.
Russia did not need to recruit more new soldiers because it had recruited about 156,000 contractors or other volunteers since January, he said, in addition to the 300,000 it had called up last year.
He tried to make the most of Russia’s repeated dealings with both men and weapons, suggesting that the country had learned valuable lessons on how to better organize its forces.
He admitted that the cross-border attacks from Ukraine by Russian partisans had been damaging, and suggested with some bravura that Russia might have to carve out an “exclusion zone” on the Ukrainian side of the border to prevent its artillery from reaching Russia.
At one point, he also suggested that the Russian army might have to march again on Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. Russian forces were driven from Kiev after failing to take it as promised within days of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, and lost much of the area around the eastern city of Kharkiv to a Ukrainian offensive last fall .
To Nikolai Petrov, a seasoned political analyst, the whole effort sounded like Putin was trying to demonstrate that he was a commander-in-chief in complete control of the facts on the ground. More importantly, Mr. Petrov speculated that the remarks could be a prelude to seeking negotiations by suggesting that the Ukrainian counter-offensive was doomed.
Given that the general public trusts the correspondents and bloggers much more than the Defense Department, his choice of interlocutors, along with the discarding of details such as the number of Russian tanks destroyed, was intended to provide a semblance of impartial analysis. building, Mr. Petrov said. .
“There is no reason for him to be so open and give such detailed explanations unless he was trying to address a Western or Ukrainian audience,” he said. “The whole idea is to show that he’s the commander-in-chief who knows everything about everything.”
Mr Putin claimed that Russia is doing an excellent job of demilitarizing Ukraine, despite its Western backers. He gave access to several bits of information that had previously been an open secret, such as the pardons he granted to convicts who had fought for the Wagner mercenary group.
Much of what he said was not new, such as the threat to pull out of a deal that has allowed Ukraine to export millions of tons of grain from its Black Sea ports despite Russian control of the waterways. so much of the world needed the grain.
He noted that military production had increased 2.7 times and in some cases was as high as 10 times, he said, using a somewhat odd anecdote to illustrate its quality. A T-90 Russian tank that hit a land mine had emerged unscathed, although the person inside was hit so hard that he died, Putin said.
In the final chapter of the feud between Sergei K. Shoigu, the defense minister, and Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the belligerent founder of Wagner’s private armed force, Mr. Prigozhin rejected a Defense Department call for all such organizations to signing contracts by July 1. The move was viewed by the ministry as an attempt to expand control over such troops, who are technically illegal in Russia, while granting them full military benefits.
Mr Putin said he supported the call for paramilitary organizations to sign such contracts. Mr. Petrov, the analyst, suggested that the president was using Mr. Prigozhin as a foil, making the president seem the more moderate figure as the mercenary repeatedly calls for escalating attacks on Ukraine and puts the economy on a war footing. “It’s his style before any negotiation to make his man say something horrible to look better,” Mr. Petrov said.
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.