Russian President Vladimir Putin has outlined his current terms for ending the war against Ukraine, demanding that it give up all of Donbas, abandon its ambitions to join NATO, remain neutral and not allow Western troops into its territory. According to Reuters, which was told on Thursday by three sources familiar with the positions of top Kremlin officials, this is a rough outline of what Moscow would envision as part of a possible peace deal, TASR writes.
In his proposal, according to Russian sources, Putin insists on the demand that Ukraine completely withdraw from the parts of Donbas that it still controls. In exchange, he would order Russian forces to stop fighting along the current front line in Zaporizhia and Kherson regions and would be willing to return to Ukraine small parts of its Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions that were occupied by Russian troops.
Draft peace agreement
According to unnamed officials, the Russian president has essentially backed down from the territorial demands he set out in June 2024. According to them, Kiev was to cede all four of its regions to Moscow - Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia. Donetsk and Luhansk regions together form the Donbas. Kiev rejected these demands at the time, calling them capitulation.
On the other hand, Putin still insists that Ukraine abandon its ambition to join NATO and that the alliance provide a legally binding promise not to expand further east. He also demands a limit on the size of the Ukrainian army and an agreement that no Western troops will ever be deployed on Ukrainian territory as part of a peacekeeping force, the sources added.
Russia currently controls about a fifth of Ukraine's territory, but does not fully control any of the four Ukrainian regions it annexed in September 2022 in violation of international law - Zaporizhia, Luhansk, Donetsk and Kherson. It only fully controls Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, which it annexed in 2014. This was preceded by a brief military operation and referendum that Kiev and Western powers call illegal.
