President Vladimir Putin says a large number of men signing up for the Russian military voluntarily is turning the tide of the Ukraine war in the Kremlin's favour and says he hopes his army will keep advancing.
Putin, who said Russian forces had pushed the Ukrainian army out of nearly 200 settlements this year and held the initiative along the entire frontline, made the comments in a speech at the Defence Ministry at a time when his army is advancing at the fastest pace since 2022, according to open source maps.
"I would like to point out at once that the past year was a landmark year in achieving the goals of the special military operation (in Ukraine)," Putin told top generals.
"Russian troops have a firm grip on the strategic initiative along the entire line of contact. This year alone, 189 population centres have been liberated," he said.
He said roughly 430,000 Russians had signed army contracts this year, up from roughly 300,000 the year before - a factor he said had huge importance for Russia's war effort.
"This flow of volunteers is not ending. And thanks to this ... we are seeing a turning point on the frontline," Putin said.
Andrei Belousov, Putin's defence minister, told the same audience that Russian troops had pushed Ukrainian forces out of almost 4500 square kilometres of territory this year and were advancing an average 30 square kilometres per day.
Belousov also said that Russian military planning had to be ready for any scenario, including the most extreme such as a potential conflict with the NATO military alliance in Europe in the next decade.
Putin in his own speech accused the United States and its European allies of pushing Russia to its "red lines" - situations it has publicly made clear it will not tolerate - and said Russia had been forced to respond.
"They (foreign leaders) are simply scaring their own population that we are going to attack someone there using the pretext of the mythical Russian threat," Putin said.
"The tactic is very simple: they push us to 'a red line,' from which we can not retreat, we start to respond and then they immediately scare their population - in the old days it was with the Soviet threat and now it's with the Russian threat," Putin said.
He said that Russia was watching the US development and potential deployment of short and medium-range missiles with great concern and would lift its own voluntary restrictions on the deployment of such missiles if the US did decide to deploy such weapons.
US president-elect Donald Trump said on Monday that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy should be prepared to make a deal with Putin to bring an end to the nearly three-year-old Ukraine war.
"Gotta make a deal," Trump said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump said he would talk to Putin and Zelenskiy about bringing the war in Ukraine to an end, saying he is troubled by images of carnage from the conflict.
"It's got to stop," Trump said.
Trump did not give a direct answer when asked whether he believed Ukraine should cede territory to Russia as part of a negotiated settlement to end the war.
Trump said much of the territory in dispute has been reduced to rubble and that it would take a century to recover.
"I mean, there are cities that there's not a building standing, it's a demolition site," he said.
He also said he had been shown pictures of body-strewn battlefields that reminded him of some of the grisly photographs from the 1861-1865 American Civil War.
