WARSAW/LONDON (NYTIMES) - President Vladimir Putin of Russia said on Tuesday (April 12) that peace talks with Ukraine had reached a “dead end,” and  called the evidence of Russian atrocities in a Kyiv suburb “fake”, using his first extended remarks about the war in nearly a month to insist that Russia would persist in its invasion.

Speaking at a news conference at a newly built spaceport in Russia’s Far East, Putin said that Ukraine’s negotiating position at the talks, last held in Istanbul two weeks ago, was unacceptable.

He pledged that Russia’s “military operation will continue until its full completion”.

But the operation’s goals, he said, centered on the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russia separatists have been fighting since 2014. It was the first time that Putin had effectively defined a more limited aim for the war, focusing on control of the Donbas – and not all of Ukraine, which Putin and his subordinates have said should not be an independent country.  

“We will act rhythmically and calmly, according to the plan that was initially proposed by the general staff,” Putin said. “Our goal is to help the people who live in the Donbas, who feel their unbreakable bond with Russia.”

Just over a month ago, by contrast, Putin warned that Ukraine’s leaders risked “the future of Ukrainian statehood” by resisting the Russian invasion, which Kremlin military planners appeared to have mistakenly thought could be achieved with relative ease.

Still, Putin’s assertion of Russia’s more limited war aims in Ukraine cannot necessarily be taken at face value, and he might yet harbour an ultimate goal of taking control of the former Soviet republic.

For months leading up to the Feb 24 invasion, as Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s border, Russian officials insisted there were no plans to invade and that the buildup was merely a military exercise.  

Ukrainian and Western officials have said they expect that Russia, having failed to seize Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and most other key cities in an invasion hampered by poor logistics, would soon mount an intense offensive in the Donbas, where the Russian military has been pouring in troops.

But almost seven weeks into the war, the Russians have yet to conquer Mariupol, the strategically important southern Donbas port that has come to symbolize the death and destruction wrought by the invaders.

Western officials said they were evaluating unverified accounts that Russian forces may have dropped chemical weapons on a Mariupol steel mill that has become a bastion of Ukrainian army resistance. Use of chemical weapons is a war crime.  

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, referring to the unverified accounts from Mariupol, said he took them “as seriously as possible".

“Even during the Second World War, the Donbas did not see such cruelty in such a short period of time,” Zelensky said in a video released early Wednesday.  “And from who? From Russian troops.”

Russian forces also have repeatedly fired missiles and artillery indiscriminately at civilian targets they have little or no hope of taking, including those in and around Kharkiv, an eastern city that is Ukraine’s second largest.

On Tuesday, New York Times journalists witnessed the aftermath of a Russian cluster munitions attack on a Kharkiv suburb that left a trail of casualties, craters and punctured roofs.

Putin’s appearance on Tuesday – coming after several weeks in which the public glimpsed the Russian leader mainly in Kremlin footage showing him holding meetings by videoconference – appeared intended to shore up domestic support for a war with no clear end in sight.

Marking Cosmonauts’ Day – the anniversary of the Soviet Cold War triumph in which Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space – Putin used the new spaceport, the Vostochny Cosmodrome, as his stage.  

He was accompanied to the spaceport by President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Putin’s closest ally, an apparent reminder to Russians that they were not completely isolated in the war.  

Putin parried a question from a Russian journalist about the atrocities in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha by retreating into his familiar arguments about Western “double standards.”

He claimed that the world had been silent when the United States bombed Syria in the campaign against the Islamic State group, and that Lukashenko had provided evidence that the scenes in Bucha were an orchestrated, British “provocation".

“We discussed in detail this psychological special operation that the English carried out,” Lukashenko said in a news conference alongside Putin, referring to Bucha.

In fact, independent investigators, including journalists for The New York Times, have documented evidence of numerous execution-style killings, rapes and acts of torture against civilians in Bucha that had been carried out by Russian occupation troops before they retreated last month.  

But inside Russia, Putin’s pronouncements are going increasingly unchallenged, with access to Facebook and Instagram and many independent news websites blocked, and a draconian wartime censorship law punishing any deviation from the Kremlin line with as much as 15 years in prison.

While prices are rising and layoffs loom as Western companies pull out of Russia, there has been no sign yet of widespread public discontent, and pollsters see significant public support for the war.  It was the alliance of Western countries, Putin insisted, that would soon feel the political backlash from the economic pain wrought by the sanctions, as evidenced by rising prices for food and fuel.

European countries, in particular, had shown yet again that they were collectively acting as a “poodle” of the United States, he said.  “They always miscalculate, not understanding that in difficult conditions, the Russian people always unite,” Putin said.

 Putin offered no hint Tuesday that he was prepared to make peace before assaulting Ukrainian troops in the Donbas, in what Western officials fear could be the most violent phase of the war so far.

He insisted, as he has before, that Russia had no choice but to invade, alleging that the West was turning the country into an “anti-Russian bridgehead”.

“What is happening in Ukraine is a tragedy,” Putin said. “They just didn’t leave us a choice. There was no choice.”

Russia’s economy has withstood the West’s sanctions “blitzkrieg,” Putin said, citing the recovery of the rouble’s exchange rate.

But he conceded that logistics and payment systems remain a weakness and the long-term impact of western limits could be more painful.

The government is expecting an economic contraction of as much as 10 per cent this year, the worst in more than two decades.

The Russian president said he hoped that “good sense” will ultimately prevail in the West, leading to the easing of sanctions.

He also said that while rising inflation related to the crisis “inevitably” will cause political problems for Western leaders, Russian public support for his policy remains strong.