Zelensky admits Ukraine cannot retake Crimea and Donbas

The Ukrainian President says it doesn’t ‘have the strength to recover’ the stolen territories, calling for the international community to pressure Putin to come to the negotiating table.

President Vladimir Putin in Crimea.

President Zelensky has admitted that Ukraine’s armed forces are unable to drive Russian troops from Crimea and other occupied territories in the country.

Although he said that Ukraine would never recognise Russian rule, Zelensky said that only diplomatic pressure could force Moscow to withdraw its occupying army.

“We cannot give up our territories. The Ukrainian constitution forbids us to do so. De facto, these territories are now controlled by the Russians. We do not have the strength to recover them,” he told the French newspaper Le Parisien. “We can only count on diplomatic pressure from the international community to force Putin to sit down at the negotiating table.”

Russia annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and controls about 80 per cent of the Donbas, an industrial area that includes the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. It has also seized parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, although it does not control their main cities. The Kremlin says that all five regions belong to Russia.

A much-anticipated counteroffensive failed last year to dislodge Russian forces despite being backed by fresh supplies of western weapons.

Zelensky suggested last month that Ukraine could abandon its attempts to win back the territories by force in exchange for Nato membership. However, the 32-nation western military alliance has said only that Ukraine will be invited to join at some future point.

Zelensky issued a decree in 2022 barring Ukraine from holding peace talks with President Putin, a stance that he appeared to suggest was flexible.

“It’s not about who sits across from you; it’s about the position you’re in when negotiating. I don’t believe we’re in a weak position, but we’re also not in a strong one,” he said.

“First, we need to develop a model, an action plan, a peace plan - call it what you will. Then we can present it to Putin or, more broadly, to the Russian people.”

Donald Trump, the US president-elect, has vowed to end the war within a day of taking office next month. Last week, he criticised as “foolish” President Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use western long-range missiles to hit targets inside Russia and suggested he could revoke that permission.

His comments were welcomed in Moscow. “The statement fully aligns with our position,” said Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman. “That impresses us. It is obvious that Trump understands exactly what is escalating the situation.”

Before the US elections in November, Keith Kellogg, Trump’s pick for special envoy to Russia and Ukraine, co-authored a plan that proposed freezing the front line, suspending the issue of Nato membership for Ukraine and partially lifting western sanctions against Moscow.

Under Kellogg’s proposals, Washington would continue to supply Kyiv with military assistance on the condition that it negotiates with Moscow.

The Kremlin has said that peace is possible only if Ukraine agrees to surrender Crimea and the other four regions that it claims as its own. Under Moscow’s terms, Ukraine would be forced to withdraw its troops from the cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which have a combined pre-war population of about one million people.

“We don’t want a ceasefire, we want peace, after our conditions are met and all our goals are achieved,” Peskov said on Friday, echoing comments by other Russian officials.

Sergey Rybakov, a Russian deputy foreign minister, said yesterday (Wednesday) that Moscow hoped to restore relations with the US to “relative normality” after Trump returned to the White House.

Zelensky’s comments came as a senior US military official said that North Korean troops fighting in western Russia’s Kursk region had suffered “several hundred” casualties.

“These are not battle-hardened troops. They haven’t been in combat before,” the unnamed official told the AFP news agency.

Zelensky has said that Russia is using North Korean troops in significant numbers for the first time as it tries to expel Ukrainian forces from the Kursk region after Kyiv’s surprise invasion in August.

The Ukrainian president posted a video that he claimed showed Russian soldiers attempting to conceal the identities of dead North Korean troops by setting fire to their faces.

“Russia is not only involving North Korean soldiers in assaults against Ukrainian positions but is also trying to conceal the losses of these individuals,” he said. “[They] literally burn the faces of the dead North Korean troops. This is a demonstration of the contempt that now prevails in Russia, a contempt for everything humane.”

THE TIMES