There are currently “no grounds” for a peace agreement with Ukraine, the spokesman of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Peskov, told the New York Times.
Dmitry Peskov said that Russia does not plan to occupy any other territories of Ukraine except for five Ukrainian regions (including Crimea), which it has already illegally written into its Constitution as an inalienable part of Russia.
An American journalist asked Peskov if Russia sought to seize new Ukrainian territory other than the four annexed regions of Ukraine.
“No. We just want to control all the territory that is now written in our Constitution as ours. That’s all,” Dmitry Peskov replied.
Peskov also said that any peace agreement with Ukraine is impossible at this point, and Russia would continue its invasion of Ukraine “for the foreseeable future.”
Dmitry Peskov’s statements have proven to be untrue several times before, when a few days prior to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he claimed that Russia would never attack Ukraine and had no such plans.
Since 2014, Russia has been conducting a hybrid war against Ukraine, occupying Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, seizing parts of the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Kharkiv oblasts. At the first stage of the invasion in the spring of 2022, Russian troops occupied significant parts of the Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kyiv oblasts in northern Ukraine, the Mykolayiv Oblast in southern Ukraine, and the Kharkiv Oblast in eastern Ukraine but were forced to retreat from northern Ukraine and also withdraw its troops from the Mykolayiv Oblast and partly from the Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts during the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in the fall of 2022.
On 5 October 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed laws on the annexation of the occupied territories of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts of Ukraine into the Russian Federation. Thus, Russia considers the occupied Crimea and these four oblasts of Ukraine to be part of its country. However, Russian troops do not completely control the Zaproizhzhia, Kherson, and Donetsk oblasts.
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