Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday promised to order an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and begin negotiations if Kiev withdraws its troops from four regions annexed by Moscow in 2022 and abandons plans to join NATO.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected an ultimatum from Putin demanding the transfer of more territory.
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Putin's comments came as Switzerland prepares to host a host of world leaders from outside Moscow this weekend for a first step towards peace in Ukraine.
The meeting also coincided with the Group of Seven summit in Italy, where the United States and Ukraine this week signed a 10-year security pact that Russian officials, including Putin, have denounced as invalid.
Putin denounced the Swiss conference as a mere ploy to divert attention, reverse the causes and effects of the Ukraine crisis and misdirect the debate.
His demands, expressed in a speech at the Russian Foreign Ministry, sought a final settlement rather than freezing the conflict and stressed that the Kremlin was ready to start negotiations without delay.
Putin's broader peace demands included Ukraine recognizing Crimea as Russian territory, maintaining the country's status as a non-nuclear state, limiting its military power and protecting the interests of its Russian-speaking people. All of this should be part of basic international agreements, and all Western sanctions against Russia should be lifted, Putin said.
We call for turning the page on this tragic history and beginning the gradual restoration of unity between Russia and Ukraine and across Europe, he said.
Putin's remarks, before a group of senior Foreign Ministry officials and some senior lawmakers, marked a rare opportunity for him to clearly outline his conditions for an end to the Ukraine war, but included no new demands. The Kremlin has previously said Kiev should recognise its territorial gains and withdraw its NATO membership application.
Zelenskiy, who was in Italy for the G7 summit, said Putin's proposal was not new and took the form of an ultimatum, likening it to Adolf Hitler's territorial seizures that led to World War II.
He said that President Putin's demand is to give them part of our territory, including occupied and unoccupied territories.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said Putin's plan is manipulative and unreasonable, intended to mislead the international community, undermine diplomatic efforts aimed at achieving a just peace, and disrupt the unity of the majority of the world around the goals and principles of the UN Charter.
In addition to seeking NATO membership, Ukraine wants Russian troops to withdraw from its territory, including the Crimean Peninsula which was illegally annexed in 2014, Ukraine's territorial integrity to be restored, Russia to be held accountable for war crimes and Moscow to pay reparations to Kiev.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022. After Ukrainian forces thwarted a Russian advance on the capital, much of the fighting has been concentrated in the south and east, where Moscow has illegally annexed four regions, none of which it fully controls.
Mykhailo Podolyakh, an adviser to Zelensky, said on social media that Putin had not made any new statements and that the Russian leader had simply used “typical aggressor rhetoric” that has been heard many times before.
There is nothing new in this, no real peace proposals, no desire to end the war, but a desire not to pay for this war, to continue it in new forms. All this is a complete lie, Podoljak wrote to X.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at NATO headquarters in Brussels that Putin was illegally occupying sovereign Ukrainian territory and that he was not in a position to tell Ukraine what to do to bring peace.
Austin added that Putin started this war without provocation and could end it today if he wanted to.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg added that this is not a peace proposal. It is a proposal for further aggression, further occupation, and shows that Russia's aim is to dominate Ukraine.
Putin has argued that Kiev should fully withdraw from all four annexed regions and essentially cede them to Moscow within their administrative borders. Russia still does not control the administrative capital of Zaporizhia in the southeast, which had a pre-war population of about 700,000. In the neighboring Kherson region, Moscow withdrew from the region of the same name, the region's largest city and capital, in November 2022.
Putin said that if Kiev and Western capitals reject the proposal, it is their problem and their political and moral responsibility to continue the bloodshed.
The Kremlin has reiterated its readiness for peace talks with Kiev and accused the West of hindering efforts to end the conflict.
Putin went further on Friday, claiming that his troops were approaching the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, but had no intention of storming the city.
Essentially, this was a peace operation with the Ukrainian regime, and the troops were there to press the Ukrainians to negotiate and find an acceptable solution, he said.
Moscow withdrew from Kiev in March 2022 as a show of goodwill as peace talks between the two sides began, but the withdrawal came amid fierce Ukrainian resistance and significantly slowed Russia's advance on the battlefield.
Putin also claimed that he told foreign officials that month that he would not rule out withdrawing troops from the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions and returning some of the occupied territories to Ukraine, as long as Kiev allowed Russia to have strong land ties with Crimea.
He said officials planned to take the proposal to Kiev and welcomed it, saying Moscow generally welcomes attempts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict. But the Kremlin then annexed the two regions along with Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, citing the results of a fake referendum it held in the oblasts. “The issue has been resolved permanently and is no longer up for discussion,” Putin said in a statement.
According to the Moscow Defense Ministry, Russian forces shot down 87 Ukrainian drones in Friday's fighting, most of them fired toward the Rostov region, home to Russia's southern military command, but no deaths or damage were reported from the Ukrainian drone barrage, the largest so far in the war.
In the Belgorod region on the border with Russia, Ukrainian artillery fire caused part of a house to collapse in the town of Shevekino, Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said, wounding three people.
Ukrainian forces have been outnumbered by their Kremlin counterparts in recent months and have been left short of ammunition and weapons due to delays in delivering promised military aid from Western countries.
Russia has launched drone attacks on Ukraine, particularly on its power grid. According to the Ukrainian Air Force, Russia launched 14 missiles and 17 Shahed drones overnight. The Ukrainian Air Force said its air defenses shot down all the drones and seven of the missiles.
Six people were injured in an attack on a house in the Donetsk region, authorities said.
A Russian drone struck a bus near the village of Esman in the northern Sumy region, injuring three women. Authorities said the bus had 20 passengers on board at the time.
Russia also returned the remains of 254 of its soldiers to Ukraine on Friday, Kiev said. The remains would be returned to their families once their identities had been confirmed, according to the Ukrainian Prisoners of War Coordination Center.
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(With inputs from PTI)
