“Priority number one”: Vladimir Putin displayed on Thursday his unwavering determination to conquer all of Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, where his army is advancing, also assuring that his troops were in parallel pushing back Ukrainian forces from the Russian border region of Kursk.
The Russian president also said he was willing to hold talks with kyiv on the basis of those in spring 2022, if Ukraine requests it, while Moscow said it ruled out any discussion due to the Ukrainian offensive against the Kursk region launched in early August.
Vladimir Putin ordered a large-scale assault on his Ukrainian neighbor on February 24, 2022, a military operation that the Kremlin intended to be lightning-fast.
But after weeks of fierce Ukrainian resistance, Moscow’s forces were forced to retreat in spring 2022 from northern Ukraine, before losing ground in the south and in the northern part of the eastern front.
These humiliating defeats prompted the Kremlin’s master to mobilize several hundred thousand reservists in the fall of 2022 and proclaim the annexation of four Ukrainian regions — Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia — without, however, controlling them entirely.
“The total liberation” of Donbass, which includes the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, “is our number one priority,” Vladimir Putin hammered home Thursday at an economic forum in the Russian Far East, displaying his unwavering determination, despite the human and economic cost.
The Russian president had already set as a condition, before any peace talks, that kyiv withdraw completely from these areas. An unacceptable demand for Ukraine and its Western allies.
“The enemy has weakened”
While the Russian army had been taking the initiative on the front for almost a year, Ukrainian forces launched a major offensive on August 6 in the Russian region of Kursk, seizing several hundred square kilometers according to kyiv, the largest advance on Russian soil by a foreign army since the Second World War.
In the following days, Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian television visibly irritated by the ease with which Ukrainian forces had been able to enter Russian soil, encountering little resistance.
One of kyiv’s stated goals in recent weeks was to force Russia to redeploy its troops that are on the attack in the Donetsk region, according to Vladimir Putin.
But according to him this objective has failed, with Moscow continuing its assault in the Donbass, in particular in the direction of Pokrovsk, a crucial rail and road hub for the logistics of the Ukrainian forces in this region of eastern Ukraine.
“Did (the Ukrainian tactic) work? No!” Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.
” On the contrary […]”The enemy has weakened in key areas and our troops have accelerated offensive operations” on the eastern front, he said, adding that Ukraine was suffering “very heavy losses” there.
In the Kursk region, Russian forces have even, according to him, “stabilized the situation and begun to gradually expel” the Ukrainian army, which says it controls around a hundred localities.
Ready to chat?
Regarding possible talks, the Russian president said he was ready for discussions with kyiv, if Ukraine wants them, but on condition that they be conducted on the basis of the “documents on which we had agreed and which had been de facto initialed in Istanbul” in the spring of 2022.
These texts mentioned by the Russian head of state have never been made public, and the Ukrainian side has always denied any agreement.
Vladimir Putin’s announcement comes two weeks after the Kremlin staunchly maintained that talks to end the conflict were impossible “at this stage” because of the Ukrainian attack in the Kursk region.
Before that in June, Mr Putin himself had taken yet another position, saying he would end the conflict only if Ukraine gave up its ambition to join NATO and handed over the four Ukrainian regions it claims plus the annexed Crimean peninsula, which would constitute a de facto capitulation for kyiv.
Regarding the spring 2022 talks in Istanbul, Moscow claims that a compromise was initialed, but that the West pushed kyiv to reject the agreement. Ukraine denies this version of events.
The positions, as they stand, between Moscow and kyiv, however, seem difficult to reconcile.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that he wants to develop a plan by November, the date of the presidential election in the United States – a vital ally of kyiv – that would serve as the basis for a future peace summit to which the Kremlin must be invited, as a prerequisite for further discussions.