The Russian leader said he did not “rule out maintaining Ukrainian sovereignty”. (File)
Moscow:
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that Moscow would only cease fire and begin peace talks if Ukraine gave up four of its regions and abandoned its bid for NATO membership.
The Russian leader outlined his “conditions” for stopping the large-scale military offensive he launched in February 2022, speaking on the eve of a major peace summit in Switzerland, orchestrated by Ukraine and its allies.
“Ukrainian troops must be completely withdrawn from the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions,” Putin said in a televised speech to Russian diplomats in Moscow.
Russia claimed to have annexed the four regions in 2022, despite not having full control over any of them.
“As soon as Kiev says it is ready to do this and actually begins to withdraw troops and officially renounce plans to join NATO, we will immediately – literally that very minute – cease fire and begin negotiations,” Putin said.
The Russian leader said he has not “ruled out maintaining Ukrainian sovereignty” over the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia “on condition that Russia has a strong land link with Crimea.”
Military analysts have long said that one of Russia’s main objectives in its offensive could have been to create a “land bridge” between Russia and the Crimean peninsula, along Ukraine’s southern coast.
But Putin and senior Russian officials have typically tried to justify their offensive by saying they were protecting ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine from a “neo-Nazi” regime in Kiev.
Ukraine and the West rejected these allegations as baseless and exposed Russia’s military actions as imperial-style aggression.
Russia unilaterally annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014, sparking international outrage and armed conflict between Russian-backed separatists and Kiev’s forces in the east of the country.
Ukraine has said it will only accept peace if Russia fully withdraws from its internationally recognized territory, including Crimea.
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