MOSCOW, Dec 4 (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin said in an interview published on Thursday that Russia would take full control of Ukraine’s Donbas region by force unless Ukrainian forces withdraw, something Kyiv has flatly rejected.
Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops in the Donbas, which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
“Either we liberate these territories by force of arms, or Ukrainian troops leave these territories,” Putin told India Today ahead of a visit to New Delhi, according to a clip shown on Russian state television.
Ukraine says it does not want to gift Russia its own territory that Moscow has failed to win on the battlefield, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said Moscow should not be rewarded for a war it started.
Russia currently controls 19.2% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80% of Donetsk, about 75% of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
About 5,000 square km (1,900 square miles) of Donetsk remains under Ukrainian control.
In discussions with the United States over the outline of a possible peace deal to end the war, Russia has repeatedly said that it wants control over the whole of Donbas – and that the United States should informally recognise Moscow’s control.
Russia in 2022 declared that the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia were now part of Russia after referenda that the West and Kyiv dismissed as a sham. Most countries recognise the regions – and Crimea – as part of Ukraine.
Putin received U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in the Kremlin on Tuesday, and said that Russia had accepted some U.S. proposals on Ukraine, and that talks should continue.
Russia’s RIA state news agency cited Putin as saying that his meeting with Witkoff and Kushner had been “very useful” and that it had been based on proposals he and President Donald Trump had discussed in Alaska in August.
(Reporting by Reuters, Writing by Guy Faulconbridge/Felix Light; editing by Andrew Osborn)
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