RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE
Kiev regime ‘not interested in peace,’ turning to terror, suffering ‘huge losses’ on battlefield: Key points from Putin’s speech
Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused Ukraine’s leadership of carrying out terrorist attacks on Russian territory in order to derail peace efforts, which he said threaten the Kiev regime’s grip on power.
Speaking at a government meeting on Wednesday, Putin said the recent sabotage of railway infrastructure in Russia’s Bryansk and Kursk Regions was a deliberate strike on civilians intended to disrupt the negotiations.
Kiev’s backers have become “accomplices to terrorists”
Putin said the attacks were the result of decisions made by Ukraine’s top political leadership, calling them “undoubtedly a terrorist act.”
“This only confirms our concern that the already illegitimate regime in Kiev, which once seized power, is gradually turning into a terrorist organization, and its sponsors are becoming accomplices to terrorists,” he said.
The two incidents occurred on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. In Bryansk Region, a bridge collapsed in front of a moving passenger train. In Kursk Region, a freight train derailed when a railway bridge gave way. In total, seven people died and over 120 were injured.
“Under all international norms, such actions are called terrorism,”Putin said.
Ukraine’s battlefield losses
The Russian president accused Kiev and its Western backers of previously aiming to inflict a strategic defeat of Russia on the battlefield. Now, he said, the country’s leadership is shifting tactics amid mounting losses and as Ukrainian forces retreat along the front line.
“Today, amid heavy losses and retreating along the entire line of contact, the Kiev leadership has turned to organizing terrorist acts in an attempt to intimidate Russia,” Putin said.
He questioned the competence of Ukraine’s leadership, under whose orders the Ukrainian armed forces have suffered “senseless and enormous losses” – including during their now-repulsed incursion in Kursk Region – and continue to face defeat on the battlefield.
“What kind of authority can the leaders of a thoroughly rotten and completely corrupt regime possess?” Putin added.
Deliberate strikes to disrupt talks
Putin called Kiev’s railway sabotage an “intentional strike on the [Russian] civilian population.”
He said the “crimes” committed against Russian civilians – including women and children – were timed to disrupt the peace process.
Both attacks came shortly before the second round of Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul and amid a surge in Kiev’s drone raids into Russia, which Moscow says are aimed at derailing attempts to reach a settlement in the conflict.
Speaking about Kiev’s apparent attempts to undermine the peace efforts, Putin noted that Ukrainian officials simultaneously requested a ceasefire lasting 30 to 60 days, along with a top-level meeting.
“But how can such meetings be held under these conditions?” he said. “What is there to talk about? Who conducts negotiations with those who rely on terror – with terrorists?”
He warned that any pause would only allow the Ukrainian forces to regroup, receive more Western arms, and prepare for renewed hostilities.
Kiev regime not interested in peace
Ukraine has repeatedly rejected Russia’s proposals for a short-term ceasefire on humanitarian grounds, Putin said.
“It does not surprise us and only convinces us further that today’s Kiev regime does not want peace at all,” he stated. “For them, peace most likely means a loss of power.”
Putin emphasized that “power, for the [Kiev] regime, is apparently more important than peace, more important than human lives.”
Kiev’s lack of political culture
Putin also accused the Ukrainian leadership of lacking basic political culture, pointing to recent public remarks. This week, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky referred to Russia’s negotiators as “idiots” after Moscow proposed a brief truce to recover fallen soldiers’ bodies.
“Apparently, we are dealing with people who not only have no real competence in anything but also lack even a basic political culture if they allow themselves to make certain statements – including direct insults – against those they claim to want to negotiate with,”Putin said.
WESTERN PERSPECTIVE
Ukraine hit fewer Russian planes than it estimated, US officials say
The United States assesses that Ukraine's drone attack over the weekend hit as many as 20 Russian warplanes, destroying around 10 of them, two U.S. officials told Reuters, a figure that is about half the number estimated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Still, the U.S. officials described the attack as highly significant, with one of them cautioning that it could drive Moscow to a far more severe negotiating position in the U.S.-brokered talks to end more than three years of war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told U.S. President Donald Trump in a telephone conversation on Wednesday that Moscow would have to respond to attack, Trump said in a social media post.
Trump added it "was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate peace."
Ukraine says it targeted four air bases across Russia using 117 unmanned aerial vehicles launched from containers close to the targets, in an operation codenamed "Spider's Web."
It released footage on Wednesday showing its drones striking Russian strategic bombers and landing on the dome antennas of two A-50 military spy planes, of which there are only a handful in Russia's fleet.
The two U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, estimated the Ukrainian strikes destroyed around 10 and hit up to 20 warplanes in total.
That estimate is far lower than the one Zelenskiy offered to reporters in Kyiv earlier on Wednesday. He said half of the 41 Russian aircraft struck were too damaged to be repaired.
Reuters could not independently verify the numbers from Kyiv or the United States.
Russia, which prioritizes its nuclear forces as a deterrent to the United States and NATO, urged the United States and Britain on Wednesday to restrain Kyiv after the attacks. Russia and the United States together hold about 88% of all nuclear weapons.
The United States says it was not given any notice by Kyiv ahead of the attack.
The war in Ukraine is intensifying despite nearly four months of efforts by Trump, who says he wants peace after the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Russian and Ukrainian embassies also did not immediately reply.
ESCALATION RISK
Ukraine's domestic security agency, the SBU, said the damage to Russia caused by the operation amounted to $7 billion, and 34% of the strategic cruise missile carriers at Russia's main airfields were hit.
Commercial satellite imagery taken after the Ukrainian drone attack shows what experts told Reuters appear to be damaged Russian Tu-95 heavy bombers and Tu-22 Backfires, long-range, supersonic strategic bombers that Russia has used to launch missile strikes against Ukraine.
Russia's Defence Ministry has acknowledged that Ukraine targeted airfields in the Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan and Amur regions and were repelled in the last three locations. It has also said several aircraft caught fire in the Murmansk and Irkutsk regions.
The attack has bolstered Ukrainian morale after months of unrelenting Russian battlefield pressure and numerous powerful missile and drone strikes by Moscow's forces.
It also demonstrated that Kyiv, even as it struggles to halt invading Russian forces, can surprise Moscow deep inside its own territory with attacks up to 4,300 km (2,670 miles) from the front lines.
Influential Russian military bloggers have accused Russian authorities, especially the aerospace command, of negligence and complacency for allowing the nuclear-capable bombers to be targeted.
Trump's Ukraine envoy said the risk of escalation from the war in Ukraine was "going way up," particularly since Kyiv had struck one leg of Russia's "nuclear triad," or weapons on land, in the air and at sea.
"In the national security space, when you attack an opponent's part of their national survival system, which is their triad, the nuclear triad, that means your risk level goes up because you don't know what the other side is going to do," Trump's envoy, Keith Kellogg, told Fox News on Tuesday.
RT/Reuters
