Putin likely to escalate Ukraine war, despite Trump peace push, sources say

July 9 - President Vladimir Putin is rejecting calls to negotiate peace with Kyiv, three sources close to the Kremlin told Reuters, 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 on Monday 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 last week. He met Zelenskiy at the NATO summit on Wednesday where the Ukrainian president said they discussed “ideas to bring peace closer.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

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 for this story.

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. The draft is 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.

RISING COSTS OF WAR

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. Some call 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 in the last week, including the capital Kyiv, killing dozens of civilians. Moscow said the assaults had struck military targets.

Speaking to generals last week 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 June 29 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. Production and exports have also been impacted by Russia’s repeated strikes on power facilities.

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 this week that Russia should strengthen its own security and cannot "close its eyes" to the militarization of Europe.

A GRINDING GROUND WAR IN DONBAS

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 this year along the 1,200-km (745 mile) 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 ‘fortress belt,’ a critical defensive front in the Donetsk region.

On July 3, Putin said Russian forces had seized Kostiantynivka. Ukraine denied it.

A day later, 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.” REUTERS