Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday 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.
Putin, who ordered troops into Ukraine in 2022 after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine, also said he was not seeking the capitulation of Ukraine or denying Ukraine’s sovereignty, but that Ukraine had to be neutral.
Russia currently controls about one-fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea, almost the entire Luhansk region, more than 70 percent of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and fragments of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Photo: Reuters
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.”
He said that he was not questioning Ukraine’s independence or its people’s striving for sovereignty, but when it declared independence as the Soviet Union fell in 1991, it had also declared its neutrality.
He said Moscow wanted Ukraine to accept the reality on the ground if there was to be a chance of peace — Russia’s shorthand for the reality of Moscow’s control over a chunk of Ukrainian territory bigger than the US state of Virginia.
“We have a saying, or a parable,” Putin said. “Where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours.”
Russian forces are carving out a buffer zone in Ukraine’s Sumy region to protect Russian territory, he said, adding that he did not rule out those same troops taking control of the regional capital of Sumy.
The depth of the zone under Russian control in the Sumy region was 8km to 12km, Putin said.
“Next is the city of Sumy, the regional center. We don’t have the task of taking it, but in principle I don’t rule it out,” he said.
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