Russian President Vladimir Putin has said recent talks with United States negotiators over ending the war with Ukraine were “very useful”, while doubling down on the maximalist demands and territorial designs that are standing in the way of a solution.
In advance of a trip to New Delhi on Thursday, Putin told India Today TV that he planned to seize control of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region by force, confirming Kremlin reports that no consensus had been reached in the previous day’s talks with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
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“It all boils down to this: either we will liberate these territories by force, or Ukrainian troops will leave these territories and stop fighting there,” he said in comments from the interview that were carried by state news agency Tass on Thursday.
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, comprising the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
His renewed determination to take the region appeared to pour cold water on US President Donald Trump’s earlier assertion that Witkoff and Kushner had thought the Russian leader wanted “to end the war”.
“Their impression was very strongly that he’d like to make a deal,” Trump said.
Putin’s comments came amid reports that special envoy Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Kushner will meet top Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov in Florida on Thursday as a follow-up to the five hours of talks in Moscow on Tuesday.
Embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has been bogged down by Russia’s advance and a domestic corruption scandal, maintains that he does not have the power to sign away Ukrainian territory and that Russia should, in any case, not be rewarded for its invasion. The Ukrainian constitution also forbids the ceding of territory.
28-point plan ‘still valid’
In discussions with the US over the outline of a possible peace deal to end the war, Russia has repeatedly said it wants control over the whole Donbas and that Washington should informally recognise Moscow’s control.
The Kremlin narrative appeared to have been in the ascendancy when Trump released his 28-point plan to end the war, which initially envisioned Ukraine ceding the entire Donbas, limiting the size of its military, and giving up on joining NATO.
But following intense criticism of what many saw as a Moscow wish list, Ukrainian negotiators pushed for revisions during talks in Geneva, Switzerland, paring back the original draft to 19 points.
It was unclear following the Moscow talks which version of the draft had been discussed. Putin’s aide Yury Ushakov had earlier said several documents were being discussed.
Paraphrasing Putin’s comments to India Today, Tass said the 28-point plan was “still valid and being discussed” and based on agreements reached during the Russia-US summit in Alaska in August.
“They just broke these 28 or 27 points into four packages. And they proposed discussing these four packages with us. But, in effect, they are the same [points],” Putin said, according to Tass.
Reporting from Moscow, Al Jazeera’s Yulia Shapovalova said Moscow was unlikely to move on its “red lines”. “According to Putin, until Russia’s interests are respected, the country won’t sign any agreements, and will reach its goals on the battlefield,” she said.
Meanwhile, in Kyiv, senior correspondent Jonah Hull said there had been “a breakdown based on a clash of red lines that are, at this point, insurmountable”. He described the recent rounds of talks, which have seen the US moving between parties, as a sort of “round Robin of ‘It’s not us, it’s them’”.
“Here in Ukraine, the government does view this process as a valuable one,” he said. “They think it can lead to results if it’s allowed to run its course now that Ukraine’s interests have been heard and included, and as long as pressure is kept on Russia.”
Russian attacks continue
Russian attacks on civilian areas of Ukraine continued overnight into Thursday.
A ballistic missile struck Kryvyi Rih on Wednesday night, injuring six people, including a three-year-old girl, according to city administration head Oleksandr Vilkul.
Vilkul said the attack damaged more than 40 residential buildings, a school and domestic gas pipes in the city, Zelenskyy’s hometown.
A six-year-old girl died in Kherson, a southern port city, after Russian artillery shelling injured her the previous day.
Russia also struck Odesa with drones, injuring eight people, while civilian and energy infrastructure was damaged, said the head of the regional military administration, Oleh Kiper.
On Thursday, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused Ukraine of disrupting peace talks with attacks on oil tankers in the Black Sea and on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal in Novorossiysk.
Russia currently controls 19.2 percent 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 slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions, according to the Reuters news agency.
Ukraine’s army chief said on Thursday that Ukrainian troops continued to hold the northern part of the key city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk.
About 5,000sq km (1,900sq miles) of Donetsk remains under Ukrainian control.
