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, according to a clip shown on Russian state television.
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 Zelenskyy has said Moscow should not be rewarded for a war it started.
About 5,000 square kilometres of Donetsk remain under Ukrainian control.
Russia currently controls just under 20 per cent of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80 per cent of Donetsk, about 75 per cent of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and small parts of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
