Russia will take all Ukraine’s Donbas, Putin says

President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia will seize full control of Ukraine’s Donbas region by force unless Ukrainian forces withdraw, but Kiev has flatly denied this.

Putin sent tens of thousands of soldiers to Ukraine in February 2022, after eight years of conflict between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian soldiers in Donbas, consisting of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

“Either we liberate these regions by force of arms, or Ukrainian troops leave these regions,” Putin told India Today on Thursday, before his visit to New Delhi, according to a clip shown on Russian state television.

While Ukraine said that it did not want to gift its own territory to Russia, which Moscow could not win on the battlefield, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that Moscow should not be rewarded for a war it started.

Russia controls one-fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80 percent of Donetsk, about 75 percent of Kherson and Zaporizhia, and small parts of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

Approximately 5000 square kilometers of Donetsk remains under Ukrainian control.

In talks with the United States over a draft of a possible peace agreement to end the war, Russia has repeatedly said it wants control over all of Donbas and that the United States should informally recognize Moscow’s control.

In 2022, Russia declared that Ukraine’s Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions are now part of Russia, following referendums that the West and Kiev considered fabricated.

Most countries recognize these regions and Crimea as part of Ukraine.

Putin received US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin on Tuesday and said Russia accepted some of the US proposals on Ukraine and that talks should continue.

Russia’s RIA state news agency quoted Putin as saying that his meeting with Witkoff and Kushner was “very useful” and that it was based on proposals that he and President Donald Trump discussed in Alaska in August.