Putin says Russia will take all of Ukraine’s Donbas region militarily or otherwise
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Russian President Vladimir Putin is visiting India for the first time in four years.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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MOSCOW – President Vladimir Putin said on Dec 4 Russia would take full control of Ukraine’s Donbas region by force unless Ukrainian forces withdraw, something Kyiv has flatly rejected.
Mr Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine
“Either we liberate these territories by force of arms or Ukrainian troops leave these territories,” Mr Putin told India Today ahead of a visit to New Delhi
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 Zelensky has said Moscow should not be rewarded for a war it started.
Russia currently controls 19.2 per cent of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80 per cent of Donetsk, about 75 per cent of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
About 5,000 sq km 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 it wants control over the whole of Donbas, and that the US 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 referendums that the West and Kyiv dismissed as a sham
Mr Putin received US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in the Kremlin on Dec 2, and said Russia accepted some US proposals on Ukraine, and that talks should continue.
Russia’s RIA state news agency cited Mr Putin as saying that his meeting with Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner was “very useful”, and that it was based on proposals he and President Donald Trump discussed in Alaska in August. REUTERS
