Saturday, June 11, 2026 - Russian President Vladimir Putin is rejecting calls to negotiate peace with Kyiv, three sources close to the Kremlin said in a new Reuters report, with Ukraine's recent drone strikes on Russia's oil refineries and ports strengthening his resolve to keep fighting for now.
Two of the sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said
that Putin was instead likely to escalate the conflict, now well into its fifth
year. One of them, who meets regularly with the president, described a “high
probability" of escalation in the coming months.
The comments come after U.S. President Donald Trump said
that Putin wanted the war to end and that a resolution was “closer than people
realize.” Trump held separate phone calls with Putin and his Ukrainian
counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy recently.
He met Zelenskiy at the NATO summit where the Ukrainian
president said they discussed ideas to bring peace closer. One of the people
familiar with Putin’s thinking said he had “dug in his heels” to achieve the
key objective of capturing the remainder of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region,
where Russian advances have slowed this year. The same source said Putin
recently rebuked a group of advisers suggesting a compromise based on a
ceasefire along the current front lines. The second source said Putin believes
Russia will soon capture the Donbas.
The Russian president publicly rebuffed a call by Zelenskiy
in June for a meeting and a ceasefire.
"Russia is ready for a peaceful resolution but has
enough capability to act independently and continue the special military
operation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in response to a request for
comment.
In response to a request for comment to Zelenskiy's office,
a senior Ukrainian official said Kyiv's intelligence reports in recent months
reflected that Putin was preparing for further steps in the war rather than for
peace, including new operations in Ukraine or a possible attack on another
European country. Some Western military analysts believe Russia would need a
mandatory draft of fighting-age men to achieve the goal of taking the Donbas, a
politically unpopular move Putin has been reluctant to make since early in the
war.
Russian military experts have increasingly discussed escalation in public, including the possibility of hitting European targets such as NATO bases in Baltic countries. Such a step would risk drawing Russia into direct confrontation with the U.S.-led alliance, testing the NATO commitment that an attack on one member nation constitutes an attack on all. Russia could seek to sow tensions within NATO with isolated attacks, comparable to a recent Russian drone strike on Romania, according to Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a defence and security think tank in London.
“The Russians would not be aiming for a war with NATO. But it could be used to divide NATO over how to respond,” Watling said.
He added that heightened tensions with NATO could help give
Putin a political justification within Russia for military conscription.
Repeated strikes on oil refineries, ports and storage depots in Russia and
Russian-occupied Ukraine have caused severe fuel shortages, bringing the impact
of the war home to millions of Russians. Putin’s approval rating remains high
but recently hit its lowest point since the war started in 2022, a poll showed.
Ukraine's allies have seized on what they call a momentum
shift in the war, with some calling for additional economic sanctions to force
Putin to end the conflict. Ukraine's recent successes, however, have made Putin
more angry and more determined to give a tough response, according to the
person who meets Putin regularly. Russian forces have launched two major drone
and missile attacks on Ukraine recently, including the capital Kyiv, killing
dozens of civilians, though Moscow said the assaults had struck military
targets. Speaking to generals in televised comments, Putin said Ukraine’s
strikes on energy infrastructure meant Russia would seek to capture more
Ukrainian land along the border, beyond Donbas, as a “security zone.”
A former Russian defence ministry official, Andrei Ilnitsky,
said in a column for Kommersant newspaper that escalation in the conflict could
start with the destruction of 30 major industrial sites in Ukraine, including a
steel plant and Odesa port. Russia has already caused widespread damage to
commercial enterprises and ports across Ukraine, impacting production and
exports.
Ilnitsky added that the next phase could be strikes on
NATO bases in the Baltic states and Romania as well as facilities in the
European Union producing long-range drones and missiles for Ukraine. Asked
about Ilnitsky's column, Kremlin spokesman Peskov told reporters that Russia
should strengthen its own security and cannot "close its eyes" to the
militarization of Europe.
The talk of Russian escalation comes as its slower progress
on the battlefield has raised the prospect that considerable time and
casualties will be needed to take Donbas. To date, about two million soldiers
had been killed, wounded or were missing since the full-scale invasion in early
2022, 1.4 million of them Russian, according to a recent estimate by the Center
for Strategic & International Studies. Neither side releases military
casualty data.
Russia’s troops have struggled to advance along the front
line as Ukraine’s drones counter Russia’s numerical advantage in troops. In
recent weeks, Russia has been grinding into the eastern city of Kostiantynivka,
one of several towns in Ukraine’s defensive front in the Donetsk region.
Putin said Russian forces had seized Kostiantynivka, though
Ukraine denied it. During a call with Trump, Putin sought to convince him that
Russia would take the remaining fifth of the Donetsk region of Donbas that
Ukraine still controls. Putin, the source who meets him regularly said,
considers winning control of the region a matter of principle, saying the
Russian president “needs some kind of victory.”
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