Calling The Peace Talks Deadlocked, President Putin: The Blitzkrieg Our Enemy Counts Did Not Work

Presiden Rusia Vladimir Putin. (Wikimedia Commons/Kremlin.ru/The Presidential Press and Information Office)

JAKARTA - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday peace talks with Ukraine had reached a stalemate, using his first public comments on the conflict in more than a week, vowing his troops would win.

In his first public address since Russian troops withdrew from northern Ukraine, after they were stopped at the gates of Kyiv, President Putin promised Russia would achieve all "noble" goals in Ukraine.

In the strongest signal to date, that the war will go on for much longer, President Putin said Kyiv had thwarted peace talks by carrying out what he said were false claims for Russia's war crimes by demanding security guarantees to cover all of Ukraine.

"We are returning to a dead-end situation for us," President Putin, Russia's supreme leader since 1999, told a news conference during a visit to the Vostochny Cosmodrome 3.450 miles (5.550 km) east of Moscow.

Asked by Russian space agency workers whether the operation in Ukraine would achieve its goals, President Putin said: "Of course. I have no doubts at all."

Russia will rhythmically and calmly continue its operations, but the most important strategic conclusion is, the unipolar international order that the United States has built after the Cold War disbanded, President Putin said.

He said Russia had no choice but to go to war because it had to defend Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, preventing its former Soviet neighbor from becoming an anti-Russian springboard for Moscow's enemies.

Meanwhile, the West has condemned the war as a brutal, imperial-style land grab, targeting a sovereign nation. Ukraine says it is struggling to survive after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and on February 21 recognized two of its rebel territories as sovereign states.

President Putin dismissed Western sanctions, which have steered Russia into its worst recession since the years following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, as failures.

"The Blitzkrieg that our enemies reckoned didn't work, the United States is ready to fight with Russia to Ukraine, that's how it is," he said. Blitzkrieg was a war tactic used by the Nazis to gain control of Europe in a short time, relying on infantry with armored vehicles.

President Putin, who has appeared everywhere on Russian television in the early days of the war, has largely retreated from public view since Russia's withdrawal from northern Ukraine two weeks ago.

His only public appearance in the past week was at the funeral of a nationalist MP, where he did not directly talk about the war.