US intelligence reports seem to paint a starkly different picture about the Russia-Ukraine war than President Donald Trump, who has said that his counterpart in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, “wants to end” the conflict.
The intelligence in the US has continued to warn that Putin has not abandoned his aims of “capturing the whole of Ukraine and parts of the former Soviet Union”, Reuters reported, citing sources.
This comes as negotiators seek an end to the war that would leave Russia with far less territory.
Trump and his Ukraine peace negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, have said Putin wants to end the conflict. The most recent report dates back to late September, according to the Reuters report.
The intelligence reports also contradict Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has constantly denied that he is a danger to Europe
“The president’s team has made tremendous progress with respect to ending the war,” said a White House official without addressing the intelligence reports, adding that Trump has stated that a peace deal “is closer than ever before,”.
The US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in an X post on Saturday that intelligence officers have briefed lawmakers that “Russia seeks to avoid a larger war with Europe” and that its troops’ performance in Ukraine shows it currently lacks the capacity to overrun “all of Ukraine, let alone Europe.”
What has the intelligence said about Russian ambition?
The reports of the US intelligence findings have been consistent since Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. They largely align with the views of European leaders and spy agencies that he covets all of Ukraine and territories of former Soviet bloc states, including members of the NATO alliance, sources quoted by Reuters report.
“The intelligence has always been that Putin wants more. The Europeans are convinced of it. The Poles are absolutely convinced of it. The Baltics think they’re first,” Democrat Mike Quigley, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a Reuters interview
Russia controls about 20% of Ukraine’s territory, including the bulk of Luhansk and Donetsk, the provinces that comprise the industrial heartland of the Donbas, parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces and Crimea, the strategic Black Sea peninsula.
Putin claims Crimea and all four provinces as belonging to Russia. Trump is pressuring Kyiv to withdraw its forces from the small part of Donetsk they control as part of a proposed peace deal, according to two sources familiar with the matter, a demand that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and most Ukrainians reject.
