MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin said on Friday Russia would end the war in Ukraine only if Kyiv agreed to drop its Nato ambitions and hand over the entirety of four provinces claimed by Moscow, demands Kyiv swiftly rejected as tantamount to surrender.

On the eve of a conference in Switzerland to which Russia has not been invited, Putin set out maximalist conditions wholly at odds with the terms demanded by Ukraine, apparently reflecting Moscow’s growing confidence that its forces have the upper hand in the war.

He restated his demand for Ukraine’s demilitarisation, unchanged from the day he sent in his troops on Feb 24, 2022, and said an end to Western sanctions must also be part of a peace deal.

He also repeated his call for Ukraine’s “denazification”, based on what Kyiv calls an unfounded slur against its leadership.

Ukraine said the conditions were “absurd”.

“He is offering for Ukraine to admit defeat. He is offering for Ukraine to legally give up its territories to Russia. He is offering for Ukraine to sign away its geopolitical sovereignty,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told Italy’s SkyTG24 news channel: “These are ultimatum messages that are no different from messages from the past.”

US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters at Nato headquarters in Brussels: “He (Putin) is not in any position to dictate to Ukraine what they must do to bring about peace.”

The timing of Putin’s speech was clearly intended to pre-empt the Swiss summit, billed as a “peace conference” despite Russia’s exclusion, where Zelensky seeks a show of international support for Kyiv’s terms to end the war.

“The conditions are very simple,” Putin said, listing them as the full withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the entire territory of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in eastern and southern Ukraine. Russia claimed the four regions, which its forces control only partially, as part of its own territory in 2022, an act rejected by most countries at the United Nations as illegal.

Moscow also seized and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014.

Published in Dawn, June 15th, 2024