Putin: Russia will seize Donbas region by any means

By Jessie Yeung, Svitlana Vlasova

(CNN) — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would seize the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine “in any case,” including by military means, digging in on one of his key demands as Ukrainian officials prepare for more peace talks that have yet to yield a deal.

Putin is set to arrive in New Delhi on Thursday where he will be hosted by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, two days after a meeting at the Kremlin with a US delegation led by special envoy Steve Witkoff.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials are traveling to the US on Thursday, where they have been invited to hold talks with their American counterparts on a plan to end Moscow’s war, a Ukrainian source with knowledge of the situation told CNN.

Ahead of the Modi summit, Putin gave an interview with India Today, in which he said Russia would “liberate Donbas and Novorossiya in any case – by military or other means,” according to Russian state media TASS.

One of the Kremlin’s biggest demands is for Ukraine to surrender territory in the Donbas region, which Russia has illegally annexed but not yet fully conquered. Novorossiya, or New Russia, is a historical term referring to territories toward the west during the Russian empire; Putin has revived the term, and used it in declaring the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea as part of Russia in 2014.

As Russia doubles down on these territorial demands, which Ukrainian officials continue to reject, the path towards any compromise seems increasingly unclear.

Despite Putin’s bullish claims, Russian forces would only seize the entire Donetsk region in August 2027 at the current rate of their advance, an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based conflict monitor, found.

In Putin’s description of his meeting in Moscow on Tuesday with Witkoff and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, he said Russia did not agree with some of the points of the of the US proposal, but that it was a “difficult task.” He reiterated Russia’s demands that Ukraine withdraw its troops from Donbas and “refrain from military action,” according to TASS.

The meeting lasted a long time since both parties had to “go through each point of the peace proposals,” Putin added, according to TASS.

Trump said Wednesday the US delegation had a “very good meeting” with Putin, and that they believed the Russian president “would like to see the war ended” – though the talks failed to yield a breakthrough.

“What comes out of that meeting?” he added. “I can’t tell you, because it does take two to tango.”

Both sides have remained coy about any progress they made in this latest round of negotiations, which have been ongoing since a 28-point plan drafted by the Trump adminstration was leaked in late November. Several points in that plan were widely seen as concessions to Russia and contained ideas that had previously been rejected by Ukraine and European officials.

Only small details from these meetings have been released, such as Putin’s aide and foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov acknowledging that they discussed territory in the meeting on Tuesday, “without which we do not see a solution to the crisis.”

He added that some points in the American proposals “look more or less acceptable,” while others “do not suit us.”

Ukrainian officials Rustem Umerov, the head of the country’s delegation, and Andrii Hnatov, Kyiv’s Chief of the General Staff, are traveling to Miami Thursday for their own peace talks with the US.

These talks comes four days after a previous high-level meeting between US and Ukrainian officials that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as “a very productive and useful session where … additional progress was made.”

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