Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who is visiting Kyrgyzstan, said this Thursday (11/27/2025) that a final cessation of hostilities in Ukraine will only be possible if that country’s forces, defending its territory from large-scale Russian aggression that began in February 2022, withdraw from the four regions that Moscow illegally annexed in 2022, although they still do not fully control them today.
The leader of the Moscow regime said in a conference broadcast live on his country’s television, “(If) the Ukrainian forces withdraw from the territories they occupy, the fighting will stop. (If) they do not leave, we will achieve this through military means.” He also stressed that there are voices in the West demanding the signing of the peace agreement as soon as possible, because they know that at any moment there may be a “collapse of the front.” He did not specify which voices he was referring to.
“The dissent (in Ukraine’s ranks) is very large. This appears not only in our media, but also in the reports of the Ministry of Defense and Western media. Containing it is practically impossible,” Putin said, adding that his forces were advancing in all sectors of the front. He added that this “increases the disparity between casualties and the number of soldiers who can be sent to the front lines.”
You want recognition
Putin also indicated in his speech that he wanted to address in the negotiations with the United States the recognition of Russian sovereignty over Donbass and the Crimean Peninsula, and stressed that international legal recognition – which Russia lacks – is “important”, because in this case the attack on those territories will be considered “an assault on the Russian Federation with all the resulting response measures.”
Handing over Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions to Russia was part of the original 28-point plan put forward by the United States to end the war in Ukraine, which has been criticized as favoring Moscow. This project was amended after negotiations between representatives of the United States and Ukraine.
The possibility of ceding territory to Russia represents a stumbling block preventing progress in the dialogue after nearly four years of conflict, which Moscow thought would last two weeks. Figures from the Center for Strategic and International Studies They claim that the Russian Federation has suffered more than a million casualties in this war, including dead and wounded.
DZC (EFE, AFP)