Putin issues new threat to Ukraine amid deadlock in peace talks: “It all boils down to this” / Message for Europe

The Kremlin leader again asked Kiev to withdraw its troops from the territories that Russia claims, threatening that otherwise the war will continue, write Reuters and Tass.

Russia will liberate Donbass and Novorossia either by military means or by other means, Vladimir Putin said in an interview with the India Today television channel ahead of his official visit to India.

“Everything comes down to this. Either we liberate these territories by force of arms, or Ukrainian troops leave these territories and stop fighting there,” Putin stressed, quoted by the Russian public agency Tass.

Putin said his Tuesday meeting with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner was “very useful” and was based on proposals discussed with President Donald Trump in Alaska, state news agency RIA also reported.

The US, the Kremlin leader also said, has divided the 27 points of Trump's plan for peace into four components, which will be discussed separately.

Finding a solution to the “Ukraine crisis” is a difficult task, he added.

Putin also had a message for European countries, saying that they “should get involved in the resolution of the conflict in Ukraine, instead of hindering the process”, TASS also wrote.

New negotiations

Peace talks continue Thursday with a meeting in the Miami region between Kiev's chief negotiator Rustem Umerov and Steve Witkoff, who will be accompanied by the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The two Americans were in Moscow on Tuesday to talk for over five hours with Putin. They had the “impression” that the Russian president “wanted to end the war”, Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday, without giving details on further negotiations, although it became clear that a peace agreement has not yet been reached, as the White House leader has long wanted.

“What will come out of this meeting? I can't tell you, because it takes two to tango,” Trump said.

“I think they would like to get back to a more normal life. I think they would like to trade with the United States, frankly, rather than lose thousands of troops a week. But their impression was very strong that they would like to make a deal,” Trump said of Putin.

However, after the talks in Moscow, the diplomatic adviser of the Russian president, Yuri Ushakov, had a much less optimistic verdict, emphasizing the impasse of the talks.

The two sides “are neither closer nor further from resolving the crisis in Ukraine,” he said, citing a complete lack of progress on the fundamental issue of the territory.

NBC News reported, citing a Russian official briefed on Moscow's position, that Russia has three points on which it does not intend to compromise.

According to him, Moscow wants the entire Donbas region, it wants the limitation of the Ukrainian armed forces and for the US and Europe to recognize the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia.

However, these three issues are also considered “red lines” for the Ukrainian authorities.

Russia is counting on the advance on the front

Ushakov estimated on Wednesday that recent Russian military “successes” had “influenced the conduct” of this meeting, referring to Moscow's claimed capture of the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine.

Military observers of the DeepState project, close to Ukrainian forces, confirmed that a large part of the city is under Russian control, but not all of it.

And the Ukrainian unit defending the sector said Russian forces were “entrenched” in urban fighting and were disseminating information to “misinform” about the “alleged capture of the city of Pokrovsk”.

Observers in Europe and the US have warned that Russia's position has remained unchanged, that Putin is in fact unwilling to compromise and that the Kremlin intends to achieve all the maximalist demands it made at the start of the war.