Vladimir Putin shut the door on direct peace talks with Volodymyr Zelensky at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Thursday. A back-channel had just been opened, he said — and then Ukraine struck a college dormitory in the Luhansk People’s Republic in what he called a terrorist attack.
About three weeks earlier, an unnamed businessman Putin called trustworthy had flown to Kyiv at Zelensky’s invitation. He came back saying Zelensky wanted a meeting. Putin said he never slammed the door — but there was nothing real on the table to meet about.
The May 22 attack on a dormitory in Luhansk finished it, Putin said. He called it a terrorist strike on children. “Our attention should be directed not towards the authors of this letter,” Putin said, “but towards our soldiers on the line of contact.”
Zelensky had published an open letter before the forum proposing a direct meeting. According to Putin, it also argued that peace guarantors should be European, not American. Putin wasn’t having it. You want U.S. weapons, he said, but you won’t take Trump as a guarantor?
If Trump had been in office sooner, Putin said, none of this might have happened. “I regard him as a colleague of mine, and I respect him,” Putin said.
Putin said the Luhansk People’s Republic has been fully under Russian control since April 1. Less than 15% of the Donetsk People’s Republic still sits with Kyiv, he said.
International law was Putin’s next move. He cited the UN Charter’s right to self-determination and a Kosovo ruling by the International Court of Justice — that ruling, he said, means a region can break away without permission from the government it’s leaving. The parts of Ukraine that split from Kyiv after the 2014 upheaval, Putin said, did exactly that.
Putin returned to “denazification” with a fresh allegation: Nazi-era figures had just been reburied in Ukraine with full military honors, he claimed, and Zelensky was standing there for it. The world barely reacted, Putin said. Poland pushed back, which he said made sense — Jews, Poles, Russians, and Roma were the people those same forces were exterminating in World War II.
Putin had a name for what EU elites are doing: “inciting chaos.” Their own policies knocked Europe’s standing in the global economy, he said. Those sanctions, he added, have cost the eurozone somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 trillion euros. Russia’s reserves went the other direction — up from 300 billion to more than 500 billion dollars, even with 300 billion frozen.
Greece is carrying 146% of GDP, Putin said. Italy 137%, France 115%, Belgium 108%. Russia’s sits at roughly 16.4%. He moved straight to deficits: the EU ran 3.1% of GDP last year, he said. Russia’s was 2.6%.
Putin said the previous U.S. leadership made a catastrophic error when it started using the dollar and euro as political weapons — “a catastrophic strategic mistake” in his own words. Every government on earth, he said, now has to wonder whether its reserves could be frozen overnight. That question, he said, didn’t exist before.
IMF and World Bank data, Putin said, tells a clear story: BRICS nations now hold roughly 40% of global GDP in purchasing power parity terms. The G7 is below 29%. Between 2021 and 2025, BRICS economies drove two full percentage points of the world’s 4.1% average annual growth. The G7 managed 0.8.
Putin announced he would freeze the simplified taxation revenue threshold at 20 million rubles. April’s numbers held up, he said — industrial production up 1.9%, manufacturing up 3.1%, retail up 6.5%, GDP up 1.3%.
Uzbekistan’s Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan, and China’s Vice President Han Zheng joined Putin on the panel. Geeta Mohan, foreign affairs editor at India Today, ran the session before more than 20,000 people from 130 countries.
Mirziyoyev said he and Putin had formally launched a joint nuclear power plant project the day before — four reactors in total, two small and two large. Russia-Uzbekistan trade has tripled over the past decade to 13 billion dollars, he added. Hassan told investors Tanzania was open for business across five sectors and said Air Tanzania’s first direct flight to Moscow and Zanzibar takes off July 2. Han told the room Beijing and Moscow had just signed a joint declaration on building a multipolar world at their recent summit
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