St Petersburg: Russian President Vladimir Putin said that in his view, the whole of Ukraine was “ours” and cautioned that advancing Russian forces could take the Ukrainian city of Sumy as part of a bid to carve out a buffer zone along the border.
Ukraine’s foreign minister denounced Putin’s statements as evidence of Russian “disdain” for US peace efforts and said Moscow was bent on seizing more territory from its neighbour and killing more Ukrainians.
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday.Credit: AP
Russia currently controls about one-fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea, more than 99 per cent of the Luhansk region, over 70 per cent of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and fragments
of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Asked about fresh Russian advances, Putin told the St Petersburg International Economic Forum that he considered Russians and Ukrainians to be one people and “in that sense, the whole of Ukraine is ours”.
Kyiv and its Western allies say Moscow’s claims to four Ukrainian regions and Crimea are illegal, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly rejected the notion that Russians and Ukrainians are one people.
He has also said that Putin’s terms for peace are akin to capitulation.
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Putin, who ordered troops into Ukraine in 2022 after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine, said on Friday (Saturday AEST) he was not questioning Ukraine’s independence or its people’s striving for sovereignty, but he underscored that when Ukraine declared independence as the Soviet Union fell in 1991 it had also declared its neutrality.
Putin said Moscow wanted Ukraine to accept the reality on the ground if there was to be a chance of peace – which is Russia’s shorthand for the reality of Russia’s control over a chunk of Ukrainian territory bigger than the US state of Virginia.
