Russian President Vladimir Putin has made one of his key demands, saying Moscow will occupy Ukraine’s Donbas region “by military or other means” as Ukrainian authorities prepare for further peace talks that have yet to be agreed.
Putin arrived in New Delhi on Thursday, where he was entertained by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, two days after meeting at the Kremlin with a U.S. delegation led by special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials are visiting the United States on Thursday and have been invited to talk with their American counterparts about Russia’s plan to end the war, a Ukrainian source familiar with the situation told CNN.
According to Russian state media Tass, in an interview with India Today ahead of his summit with Prime Minister Modi, President Putin said that Russia “will liberate Donbass and Novorossia in any case, by military or other means.”
One of the Kremlin’s biggest demands is for Ukraine to surrender territory in the Donbas region, which Russia has illegally annexed but has not yet fully conquered. Novorossia, or New Russia, is a historical term referring to the western territories of the Russian Empire. President Putin revived the term and used it in 2014 when he declared Crimea, a peninsula in Ukraine, as part of Russia.
As Russia doubles down on these territorial demands, Ukrainian officials continue to refuse, and the path to compromise appears increasingly uncertain.
Despite President Putin’s bullish claims, Russian forces will not take over the entire Donetsk region at their current rate of advance until August 2027, an analysis by the Institute for War Studies, a US-based conflict monitor, has found.
Describing his meeting with Witkov and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin said that while Russia did not agree with some points of the US proposal, it was a “difficult task.” He reiterated Russia’s demands for Ukraine to withdraw its troops from Donbas and “refrain from military action,” TASS reported.
Putin added that the talks took a long time because both sides had to “consider each point of the peace proposal,” according to TASS news agency.
President Trump said Wednesday that the U.S. delegation had a “very good meeting” with Putin and believed the Russian president “wants the war to end,” but the talks did not lead to a breakthrough.
“What will come out of that meeting?” he added. “It takes two people to tango, so it’s hard to say.”
Negotiations have been ongoing since a 28-point plan drawn up by the Trump administration was leaked in late November, but both sides have remained silent on progress in the latest negotiations. Several aspects of the plan were widely seen as concessions to Russia and included ideas previously rejected by Ukrainian and European officials.
Only few details of these talks have been made public, including Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s close ally and foreign policy adviser, admitting that they discussed territory during Tuesday’s meeting and that “without it, we cannot see a solution to the crisis.”
He added that some aspects of the U.S. proposal “seem more or less acceptable,” while others “do not suit us.”
The head of the Ukrainian government delegation, Rustem Umerov, and Kiev’s chief of staff, Andriy Natov, are visiting Miami on Thursday for peace talks with the United States. There, they will discuss the outcome of the meeting between Witkov and Kushner in Moscow, said Oleksandr Bevuz, the president’s chief of staff and a member of the negotiating team.
These talks come four days after the previous high-level meeting between U.S. and Ukrainian officials, which U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said was “a very productive and useful meeting that…made further progress.”
