Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely to send a signal to the United States and European powers on Friday over his appetite for peace or more war in Ukraine when he speaks at a marathon end-of-year news conference.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine, triggering the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Cold War.
US President Donald Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, has repeatedly complained that ending the Ukraine war has been one of the elusive foreign policy aims of his presidency.
Putin, Russia's paramount leader since the last day of 1999, will lead an end-of-year news conference and call-in with the population that is due to begin at 0900 GMT on Friday.
PUTIN DUE TO TAKE DOZENS OF QUESTIONS
At the "Results of the Year" event, which Putin has held in different formats most years since 2001, he fields dozens of questions on everything from price rises and his own future to nuclear weapons and what the Kremlin calls the "special military operation" in Ukraine.
Attendees had to undergo a COVID test - still routine for meetings involving Putin, 73, several years after the end of the pandemic.
At stake is whether Putin will agree an end to the deadliest war in Europe since World War II, the extent to which European powers are sidelined and whether or not a peace deal brokered by the United States will fly.
Ukraine and its European allies are worried that Trump could sell out Ukraine and leave European powers to foot the bill for supporting a devastated Ukraine after Russian forces took 12-17 square km per day in 2025.
They echo former US President Joe Biden in saying the Russian invasion was an imperial-style land grab for which Moscow must be punished, a view which Trump has challenged.
European Union leaders decided on Friday to borrow cash to fund Ukraine's defence against Russia for the next two years rather than use frozen Russian assets, sidestepping divisions over an unprecedented plan to finance Kyiv with Russian sovereign cash.
Putin casts the war as a watershed moment in relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow's sphere of influence.
An end to the war could reconnect Russia - which holds some of the world's biggest reserves of natural resources from oil and gas to diamonds and rare earths - with the United States just as it seeks to refocus on competition with China, with whom Putin has forged a "no limits" partnership.
A continuation of the war would lead to many more deaths, drain the economies of Ukraine, Russia and European powers, and raise the chances of the war escalating.
US officials say that Russia and Ukraine have suffered more than 2 million casualties, including dead and wounded since the war began. Neither Russia nor Ukraine disclose credible estimates of their losses.
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