Vladimir Putin sent an unyielding message regarding his goal to capture the entire Donbas region, as negotiations centered on Ukraine and the US peace plan have yet to yield results. In an interview with India Today ahead of his visit to New Delhi, Putin declared that Russia will take full control of the Ukrainian Donbas region by force, unless Ukrainian forces withdraw from there – something Kiev rejects.
Putin sent tens of thousands of soldiers to Ukraine in February 2022, following eight years of conflict between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in Donbas, which consists of Donetsk and Luhansk.
“Either we will liberate these territories with the force of arms, or Ukrainian troops will abandon these territories,” the Russian president stated.
It should be noted that Russia currently occupies 19.2% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, over 80% of Donetsk, approximately 75% of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and parts of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk regions. About 5,000 square kilometers of Donetsk remain under Ukrainian control.
In talks with the US about the outline of a potential peace agreement to end the war, Russia has repeatedly stated that it wants control over the entire Donbas – as well as that the US should unofficially recognize Moscow’s control.
Russia declared the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia parts of Russia in 2022 following referendums, which the West and Kiev rejected as fraud. Most countries recognize these regions – and Crimea – as part of Ukraine. Putin received American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner on Tuesday at the Kremlin and stated that Russia accepted some of the American proposals for Ukraine, and that talks should continue.
Putin’s messages on G8 and Europeans
In other parts of the interview, which is expected to be published in full this afternoon, according to Sky News:
- Putin has no plans to return to the G8 – despite the fact that this idea is included in an American peace plan.
- Efforts to end the war in Ukraine were a “difficult task,” he says.
- The Russian leader added that the proposals submitted by the American side were mainly based on agreements between Putin and Trump in Alaska, where they met in August.
- He noted that the US divided the 28-point peace plan into four parts.
- Europeans must participate in peace efforts and not interfere.
- According to the Russian president, Moscow proposed that Ukraine withdraw from the Donbas region, but Kiev refused.
