Russian President Vladimir Putin smiles as he visits We Are Together Form and the awards ceremony in Moscow, Russia, on December 3, 2025.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that the Kremlin will seize Ukrainian territory by force if Kiev forces do not withdraw, signaling inflexibility over a key impasse in peace talks.
“Either we will liberate these territories by force, or the Ukrainian military will withdraw from these territories,” Putin, who is currently on a state visit to India, said in an interview with India Today. The comments, published by Russian state media and translated by Reuters, referred to Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
Russia is estimated to control more than 80% of the Donbas region, where fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists began long before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. War in the region first began in 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, a peninsula in southern Ukraine.
Seizing and formally annexing the Donbas region would allow Russia to build a land bridge to Crimea, an important military and trade hub for Moscow.
In the so-called referendum of the occupied territories, it turned out that up to 99% of the residents of parts of the Donbass region voted for membership in the Russian Federation. These referendums have been widely criticized by the international community as fake votes.
Putin’s comments came after a five-hour meeting with U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, in Moscow on Tuesday.
In an interview with India Today on Thursday, President Putin said Russia did not agree with several points outlined in the United States’ revised peace plan for Ukraine, calling the negotiation process a “difficult task.”
“It’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.”
The original 28-point peace plan, drawn up by Russian and American officials without input from Ukraine, reportedly included a condition for Ukraine to cede territory in the Donbas Islands to Russia. The deal was redrafted following talks between the U.S. and Ukraine, with President Zelenskiy reiterating that any peace agreement must respect Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Marnie Howlett, a lecturer in Russian and Eastern European politics at the University of Oxford, told CNBC on Friday that the war will only end if Russia stops attacking Ukraine.
“Given the Kremlin’s lack of real interest in ending the conflict, a peace agreement is unlikely in the near future,” she said.
“Russia has not been able to occupy Donbas by force since 2014 because the Ukrainians have made it clear that they will not accept the illegal occupation of their territory. Any ‘deal’ is not possible without the support of the Ukrainians, and nearly 12 years of resistance shows that they are not willing to support territorial concessions.”
Emily Ferris, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense and security think tank, agreed that unless land rights are on the table, Moscow is unlikely to seriously invest in making peace in Ukraine.
“At this point, I don’t see any reason for Russia to come to the negotiating table, because obviously their gains on the battlefield are small, but they don’t have a proposal that meets their demands,” he told CNBC. “The two issues are European military aid to Ukraine, so-called security and what it actually means, and, of course, the territorial issue on which the Russian government expects Ukraine to compromise.”
Speaking at the 2025 Investor Summit conference at the London Stock Exchange on Thursday, Kim Darroch, who served as British ambassador to the United States during the Trump administration’s first term, said she did not believe an end to the Ukraine conflict was imminent.
“I don’t think the war is going to end anytime soon unless the Ukrainians agree to surrender and give up their territory. And unless they agree to never join NATO or anything of this kind, I think it’s basically impossible to make concessions and survive politically,” he told the audience.
“So I think the war will drag on beyond the winter, and that could be very dangerous for Europe, because if President Trump doesn’t get a deal, he might just walk away and cut off arms supplies to Ukraine and say to the Europeans, ‘That’s your problem, I tried to get a deal, so you should too.’” And we don’t know if they actually have the capacity to give Ukraine what it needs. ”
Investors around the world are closely monitoring developments in the negotiations, which are likely to impact markets across all asset classes. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered global stock market declines and large swings in energy markets as Western countries sharply reduced trade and investment with Russia. Concerns about Russian aggression have also led to massive splurges on defense spending across Europe, fueling a bull market in regional defense stocks.
—CNBC’s Holly Ellyatt contributed to this article.
