Russian President Vladimir Putin used a defiant state television interview Sunday to reject Ukraine’s proposal for a mutual halt to long-range strikes, declaring that Russia will continue pressing its front-line offensive.
Zelenskyy’s office did not immediately respond to Putin’s remarks. Credit: X
Russian President Vladimir Putin flatly rejected a Ukrainian proposal for a mutual halt to long-range strikes on Sunday, vowing instead to press ahead until Russia has fully seized all four Ukrainian regions it illegally annexed in 2022, in his most uncompromising statement yet on the now four-year-old war.
Speaking to Russian state television in Moscow, Putin dismissed Ukraine’s proposal as a transparent attempt to relieve military pressure on Kyiv’s forces along the two sides’ 1,250-kilometre front line. “It is clear why this proposal is being made, because our counter-strikes deep into Ukrainian territory are much stronger, have greater impact and are, frankly, more destructive,” he said. “Given their catastrophic shortage of personnel, the Ukrainian Armed Forces apparently believe this could be their salvation. But saving the Kyiv regime is not part of our plans.”
Full Donbas and ‘Novorossiya’: Putin’s Territorial Demands Have Not Moved an Inch
Putin’s Sunday interview made clear that Russia’s territorial ambitions remain as maximalist as they were when tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border in February 2022. He said Ukrainian drone attacks were “aimed at diverting our attention and forces from achieving the main objectives, the complete liberation of Donbas and Novorossiya,” referencing the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Donbas, along with Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
Independent military analysts at the Institute for the Study of War noted that Putin’s invocation of “battlefield realities,” a standard Kremlin phrase, ignores the fact that Russia’s rate of advance has been steadily declining since November 2025, and that Ukraine’s intermediate-range strike campaign is increasingly disrupting Russian logistics in ways that are beginning to manifest on the front line.
Drone Strikes Burning Refineries But Putin Says Front Unaffected
Sunday’s interview came hours after Ukraine struck two major Russian oil refineries overnight, triggering fires that burned into the morning and forcing road and airport closures near Moscow. Putin’s response was to deny any battlefield consequence while simultaneously calling for urgent action to fix the problem.
“All the strikes, wherever they hit our infrastructure, absolutely do not affect the situation on the front, on the line of combat contact,” he said, before adding in the same breath: “The first task is to quickly and significantly ramp up production of those air defence systems that are most needed.”
Witkoff and Kushner Expected Back
Despite his battlefield maximalism, Putin left one diplomatic door fractionally ajar. He said Russia was expecting a resumption of US-led diplomatic efforts once the “hot phase” of the US-Israeli conflict with Iran was resolved, and anticipated a new visit to Moscow by US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. On the Alaska summit, he said: “Nobody signed anything, but we talked about certain possibilities for ending the conflict in Ukraine.”
He also suggested Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, with whom he held two days of meetings this week, could play a role in any future peace process, a suggestion Kyiv is unlikely to welcome, given Belarus’s role as a staging ground for the initial Russian invasion.
Zelensky’s office did not immediately respond to Putin’s remarks. His open letter to Putin this month proposing a face-to-face meeting has already been rejected. The front line, for now, is Putin’s only answer.
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