Putin Says Russian Ukraine War Is Coming to an End
Vladimir Putin said on May 10 that the russian ukraine war is coming to an end, even after he vowed a day earlier at Moscow’s Victory Day parade to defeat Ukraine. He also said he would be willing to negotiate new security arrangements for Europe, a message that landed while Russian and Ukrainian forces were still trading strikes.
“I think that the matter is coming to an end,” Putin said after the parade. Ukrainian officials said on Sunday there had been Russian drone strikes and nearly 150 battlefield clashes over the past 24 hours, while Russia’s defence ministry said it had shot down 57 Ukrainian drones.
Moscow and Gerhard Schröder
Putin said his preferred negotiating partner would be Germany’s former chancellor Gerhard Schröder. That puts a named European figure, not a sitting government leader, at the center of a discussion Putin framed as a route toward new security arrangements for Europe.
António Costa, the European Council president, was named in the source material, but no statement from Costa was provided in the verified facts. The diplomatic opening Putin described sits beside a war that has not stopped on the ground.
Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Kherson
Russian strikes on the south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region killed one person and wounded three others on Sunday morning, according to Ivan Fedorov, the regional governor. In the north-eastern Kharkiv region, Oleh Syniehubov said drone attacks on the regional capital and nearby settlements wounded eight people, including two children.
Oleksandr Prokudin, the southern Kherson regional governor, said seven people, including one child, were wounded in Russian drone and artillery strikes since early Saturday. Oleksandr Hanzha said a child was wounded and infrastructure damaged in Russian attacks on the south-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region.
Three-day ceasefire
Russia and Kyiv had announced a US-brokered three-day ceasefire on the eve of the Moscow parade, but the fighting reported over the weekend showed how limited that pause was in practice. Russian troops are near a standstill on the battlefield, Russian advances have slowed in recent months, and Russian forces have so far been unable to take the whole of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Both armies are still sustaining heavy casualties while continuing to strike each other’s energy infrastructure. The next meaningful test is whether the ceasefire language produces any broader diplomatic track beyond Putin’s remarks and the war reports that followed them.
