Putin vows to seize Ukraine’s Donbas region by any means

President Vladimir Putin said in an interview published on Thursday that Russia would take full control of Ukraine’s Donbas region by force unless Ukrainian forces withdraw, something Kyiv has flatly rejected.

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, which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

“Either we liberate these territories by force of arms, or Ukrainian troops leave these territories,” 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 Zelenskiy has said Moscow should not be rewarded for a war it started. Russia currently controls 19.2 per cent of Ukraine, including Crimea.

In discussions with the US over the outline of a possible peace deal to end the war, Russia has repeatedly said it wanted control over the whole of Donbas. Putin received US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in the Kremlin on Tuesday, and said Russia had accepted some US proposals on Ukraine, and that talks should continue. Russia's RIA state news agency cited Putin as saying that his meeting with Witkoff and Kushner had been “very useful” but also “difficult work.”