Vladimir Putin’s three demands for Ukraine revealed: report
Vladimir Putin has told his generals what he needs in return for bringing the Ukraine invasion that has killed hundreds of thousands to an end, according to sources. Follow updates.
Vladimir Putin has demanded that Ukraine give up all of the eastern Donbas region, renounce ambitions to join NATO, remain neutral and keep Western troops out of the country, according to reports.
The Russian president met Donald Trump in Alaska last week for the first Russia-US summit in more than four years and spent almost all of their three-hour closed meeting discussing what a compromise on Ukraine might look like, according to the sources who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Speaking afterwards beside Mr Trump, Mr Putin said the meeting would hopefully open up the road to peace in Ukraine – but neither leader gave specifics about what they discussed.
In the most detailed Russian-based reporting to date on Putin’s offer at the summit, the contours of what the Kremlin would like to see in a possible peace deal to end a war that has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people have emerged.
In essence, the Russian sources said, Mr Putin has compromised on territorial demands he laid out in June 2024, which required Kyiv to cede the entirety of the four provinces Moscow claims as part of Russia: Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine – which make up the Donbas – plus Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south.
Kyiv rejected those terms as tantamount to surrender.
In his new proposal, the Russian president has stuck to his demand that Ukraine completely withdraw from the parts of the Donbas it still controls, according to the three sources. In return, though, Moscow would halt the current front lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, they added.
Russia controls about 88 per cent of the Donbas and 73 per cent of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, according to US estimates and open-source data.
Moscow is also willing to hand over the small parts of the Kharkiv, Sumy, and Dnipropetrovsk regions of Ukraine it controls as part of a possible deal, the sources said.
Putin is sticking, too, to his previous demands that Ukraine give up its NATO ambitions and for a legally binding pledge from the US-led military alliance that it will not expand further eastwards, as well as for limits on the Ukrainian army and an agreement that no Western troops will be deployed on the ground in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force, the sources said.
Yet the two sides remain far apart, more than three years after Mr Putin ordered thousands of Russian troops into Ukraine in a full-scale invasion that followed the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and prolonged fighting in the country’s east between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry had no immediate comment on the proposals.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly dismissed the idea of withdrawing from internationally recognised Ukrainian land as part of a deal, and has said the industrial Donbas region serves as a fortress holding back Russian advances deeper into Ukraine.
“If we’re talking about simply withdrawing from the east, we cannot do that,” he told reporters in comments released by Kyiv on Thursday. “It is a matter of our country’s survival, involving the strongest defensive lines.
Joining NATO, meanwhile, is a strategic objective enshrined in the country’s constitution and one which Kyiv sees as its most reliable security guarantee. Mr Zelensky said it was not up to Russia to decide on the alliance’s membership.
The White House and NATO didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the Russian proposals.
Political scientist Samuel Charap, chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy at RAND, a US-based global policy think-tank, said any requirement for Ukraine to withdraw from the Donbas remained a non-starter for Kyiv, both politically and strategically.
“Openness to ‘peace’ on terms categorically unacceptable to the other side could be more of a performance for Mr Trump than a sign of a true willingness to compromise,” he added. “The only way to test that proposition is to begin a serious process at the working level to hash out those details.”
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UKRAINE DESTROYS RUSSIAN OIL PIPELINE
It comes as Ukrainian forces obliterated a critical part of Russia’s Druzhba oil pipeline overnight as Kyiv fought back against Moscow’s ramped-up attacks despite ongoing peace deal talks.
Ukraine bombed the Unecha oil pumping station in the Bryansk region Friday morning AEST, according to the commander of Ukraine’s unmanned systems forces, Robert Brovdy.
Footage posted on Telegram showed a huge inferno raging at a facility with multiple fuel tanks in the wake of the strikes.
Bryansk regional Gov. Alexander Bogomaz said Ukraine had fired HIMARS rockets and drones at the region in a combined attack, setting the energy facility ablaze.
The Unecha station, which is a critical part of Russia’s Europe-bound Druzhba oil pipeline, supplies oil to Hungary and Slovakia.
🚨BREAKING - After Trump's hint that Ukraine needs to go on the offensive, Ukrainian forces have just launched a HIMARS attacks against the Druzbha Pipeline, in Unecha, Bryansk oblast of Russia. pic.twitter.com/xxsxY3Q3qU
— Gabriela Iglesias🇺🇲 (@iglesias_gabby) August 22, 2025
The Hungarian and Slovakian governments both said supplies to their countries could be cut for at least five days in the wake of the latest strike.
“The physical and geographical reality is that without this pipeline, the safe supply of our countries is simply not possible,” Foreign Ministers Peter Szijjarto and Juraj Blanar said in a letter to Europe’s executive Commission on Friday.
Russia and Ukraine have stepped up attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure over the past few weeks — despite a push by President Trump to reach a deal to end the war.
Moscow has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s gas infrastructure, while Kyiv has damaged several Russian refineries in a bid to disrupt Russian energy exports that are financing Russia’s invasion.
UKRAINE MUST ATTACK RUSSIA TO WIN WAR: TRUMP
Donald Trump has said Ukraine has no choice but to continue attacking Russia if Kyiv has any chance of winning the war, despite his ongoing efforts to end the conflict.
Days after hosting Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders in the White House, and meeting Vladimir Putin in Alaska to talk peace, the US president wrote via Truth Social: “It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country.
“It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defence, but is not allowed to play offence. There is no chance of winning! It is like that with Ukraine and Russia.”
With the post, published on his Truth Social platform, Mr Trump posted two pictures; one of him pointing at the Russian President and another of former president Richard Nixon poking his finger into the chest of then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Mr Trump continued to blame former president Joe Biden for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a common refrain of the US president and said Mr Biden “would not let Ukraine FIGHT BACK, only DEFEND.”
Asked what Mr Trump meant by his posts, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the president is making an observation, which happens to be true.”
Mr Trump also set a two-week time frame for assessing peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, as the US president ramps up his efforts to negotiate an end to the war.
“I would say within two weeks we’re going to know one way or the other,” he said in a telephone interview when asked about the chances of a peace agreement.
“After that, we’ll have to maybe take a different tack,” Mr Trump told Todd Starnes, a host for right-wing media outlet Newsmax, without giving further details.
Mr Trump, who had promised during last year’s presidential election to end the war in one day, has so far failed to achieve any major breakthroughs — more than three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
He met Russian President Vladimir Putin last week at a highly anticipated summit in Alaska that failed to reach an accord and saw Mr Trump drop his push for an initial ceasefire.
On Monday, the US president held talks at the White House with Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky and a handful of European allies.
Those meetings raised hopes that Mr Putin and Mr Zelensky could meet directly for a peace summit, as both leaders initially appeared open to that option.
But Mr Zelensky accused Russia of “trying to avoid the necessity to meet” and said that it did not want to end the war.
Russia, meanwhile, said that Ukraine did not seem to be interested in “long-term” peace, accusing Kyiv of seeking security guarantees completely incompatible with Moscow’s demands.
Mr Trump has a track record of issuing two-week deadlines to deliberate on Ukraine and other issues.
In late May, he said he would assess within that period whether Mr Putin was serious about achieving a peace deal, promising to respond “differently” if not.
– with AFP
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