Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted Friday that Ukraine’s counteroffensive had “no chance” and talked up Russia’s financial health at his country’s main international economic forum.
A day after his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told NBC News that Russia risked losing the war if his forces could drive Russia back, Putin sounded bullish at the gathering of his country’s elite.
“Ukraine’s armed forces have no chance, I have no doubt about that,” Putin said in his keynote address to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. Without providing any evidence, he said that Ukraine had lost about “about 30% of the arms supplied by the West without any success.”
NBC News has not been able to verify this claim, but the launch of the counteroffensive has seen the battlefield debut of Western-supplied armored vehicles, including German Leopard tanks and American-made Bradley fighting vehicles.
In a seeming admission that the war would not end soon, however, Putin told the forum that “additional funds were needed to strengthen defense and security, to purchase weapons.”
His comments came after Zelenskyy said Thursday, days after the start of the long-awaited counteroffensive aimed at driving Russian forces out of occupied territory, that the news from the front lines was “generally positive, but it’s very difficult.”
His tone was matched by American officials, and there are also signs that some in Russia are preparing for a long slog.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Thursday that the war would not end soon.
“It’s a very violent fight, and it will likely take a considerable amount of time at a high cost,” Milley said after a meeting at the NATO headquarters in Brussels of the U.S.-led Contact Group of some 50 countries that give military aid to Ukraine. Austin also told the meeting that the war was a “marathon, not a sprint.”
On the streets of Moscow there also appeared to be an acknowledgement that the end to the conflict was not in sight.
Student Ilya Lysitsyn, 20, also said he supported what Putin was “doing in terms of foreign policy.”
And Anna, 47, a real-estate agent, also said she had “great respect” for Putin, but she she was preparing for a conflict that would last “two or three years,” until “everyone realizes that they have had enough, everyone will run out of strength, and they will come to some kind of consensus.”
The war has made gauging public opinion in Russia difficult, with many people afraid to speak their minds or reveal their last names, especially to the foreign media, amid a fierce crackdown on dissent and any criticism of what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.
A poll released earlier this week by the independent Levada Center with a sample of 1,603 people, also said that 45% of Russians believe the conflict will last at least another year.
Putin nonetheless remained bullish about Russia’s economic prospects, telling the crowd that his country “had maintained a responsible, balanced budgetary and monetary policy,” which had “made it possible to reach the minimum levels of unemployment as well as inflation, which is now lower in Russia than in many Western countries.”
He added that Russia had not “turned on to the self-isolation path,” and had instead “widened contacts with reliable and responsible partners in the countries and regions that serve as the engine, the drivers of the world’s economy today.”
