Putin lashed out at what he called systemic errors committed by the “West’s globalist circles,” insisting that Russia posed no danger to European countries, which he said “seek to frighten their populations with a mythical Russian threat.”

He also insisted that the West was to blame for the war in Ukraine by seeking to expand NATO. “They directly supported separatism in the Caucasus and sought to break up Russia; this is a matter of fact. Furthermore, today’s crisis in Ukraine was likewise instigated by them.”

As if to put an exclamation point on Putin’s remarks, a Russian drone strike hit passenger rail infrastructure in western Ukraine as many Western diplomats, officials and experts, including former CIA director David Petraeus, former British prime minister Boris Johnson and former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt were leaving the country after attending the annual Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv.

Passengers on at least one train were evacuated, but no deaths or injuries were reported from the strike.

German Defense Minister Boris ​Pistorius called the drone strike a calculated escalation to fuel fear in Europe.

“It is ​all the more important that we ⁠remain levelheaded, that we do not ​allow ourselves to be provoked, but ​that at the same time we leave no doubt that we are capable of defending ​ourselves,” Pistorius told reporters. “What Vladimir Putin is doing is dangerous. He knows that, and that is ​why he ​is doing ⁠it.”

The rail line attack further alarmed European officials who have been warning that Russia could attack near Ukraine’s border crossings with NATO countries or could intensify sabotage operations inside Europe to discourage Western leaders from further aiding Ukraine.

“These coming weeks and months will be a time of very intensified actions on the Russian side, and unfortunately we cannot rule out that this escalation will also affect our territory,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Sunday following a government security briefing.

The Trump administration in recent days has renewed its efforts to jump-start peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, including with trips by presidential envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Moscow and Ukraine.

Following those talks, Kushner said that Washington had already drafted most of the peace agreement but that it was being held up by Ukraine’s reluctance to make territorial concessions to Russia, which now occupies about one-fifth of Ukraine’s sovereign territory.

Putin has demanded that Ukraine surrender all of its eastern Donbas region, and Russia has claimed, illegally, to have annexed four Ukrainian regions, even though militarily it does not control all of that land.

“President Putin laid out his position regarding what he wants to achieve,” Kushner said at the YES conference. “If Ukraine wanted to retreat to that line, we would have already prepared and agreed on the remaining terms of the deal. Currently, Ukraine does not want to do this.”

Ukraine has repeatedly said that ceding land that Russia failed to capture militarily is a nonstarter, arguing that withdrawing from fortified cities in Donbas would only expose the country to future attacks.

Kushner and Witkoff said they were pushing for trilateral negotiations. And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he is willing to meet Putin at the Group of 20 summit scheduled for mid-December at Trump’s resort in Doral, Florida.

The Kremlin immediately ruled out such a meeting, calling it “impossible” and saying that Putin would only meet Zelensky in Moscow. Kyiv repeatedly has dismissed the offer of a meeting in Moscow as the Kremlin playing games.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the talks on Ukraine probably would resume in October, after Russia holds a key parliamentary election this weekend.

The potential deployment of a European peacekeeping force has been discussed as one potential way to provide Ukraine with “security guarantees.” But any such step would first require the signing of a durable truce between Kyiv and Moscow.

Britain and France previously had agreed to deploy forces in Ukraine if the country reaches a peace deal with Russia, with then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron signing a “declaration of intent.”

But as negotiations stalled, with Washington focused on its own war in Iran, the proposals to send European troops to Ukraine have also gone quiet.

Europe, because of its increasing role in Ukraine’s capability to launch strikes against Russian territory, is becoming “Moscow’s central strategic problem, overshadowing the United States, Ukraine and, to some extent, even NATO,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote on X.

“This will shape the nature of negotiations with and about Ukraine, as well as the outcome of any settlement, far more than it did a year ago,” Stanovaya added. “It is likely to dominate European geopolitics for decades.”

Isolated wartime leader, withdrawn into his convictions, Vladimir Putin moves about in a traveling bunker. An armored limousine, a convoy of vehicles packed with weapons, offices replicated identically in his residences – these themselves transformed into cloned shelters across the country – ubiquitous air defense systems, heavily armed bodyguards and soldiers in camouflage: This is the world of the Russian president who, before the parliamentary elections held from Friday, September 18, to Sunday, September 20, resumed his travels across Russia this summer, after nearly six months without venturing into the country. Out of fear of Ukrainian drones, a fortress accompanies him on his journeys, both within Russia and during his rare trips to so-called “friendly countries,” such as India, where he traveled from September 11 to 13 for the BRICS summit.

The more the “special military operation” in Ukraine has become bogged down, the more Putin, 73 years old, fixates on his own security. Four and a half years after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the stalemate of this endless war has become a dead end for the Kremlin and could threaten to shake its authority. Ukrainian drones are not the only danger Putin fears. “They will hang me,” he confided to associates, according to a source quoted by the British weekly The Economist on September 1. He did not specify whether the enemy he feared was external or internal. “One thing is certain: Putin ties his fate to the outcome of the war in Ukraine. He fears what might happen to him if he fails,” warned a political scientist, an expert on Putin’s elites and clan rivalries. Reached by secure messaging in Moscow, she wished to remain anonymous.

A quarter of a century after Putin took power in Russia, the siloviki – members of the security apparatus, a neologism derived from the Russian word sila, meaning “force” – have seized control. At the top sits the FSB, successor to the KGB. At the same time, the Kremlin has steadily increased the ranks of the presidential guard, the Federal Protective Service (FSO). Since 2022, four decrees have raised the number of agents at the central headquarters to more than 800, including drone operators and even presidential food tasters. Overall, this guard is enormous: While the exact figure is classified, it is believed to number more than 50,000.

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