Putin says Russia will take Donbas by force if it's not ceded by Ukraine

President Vladimir Putin said in an interview published on Thursday that Russia would take full control of Ukraine's Donbas region by force unless Ukrainian forces withdraw — something Kyiv has flatly rejected.

Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops in the Donbas, which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

"Either we liberate these territories by force of arms, or Ukrainian troops leave these territories," Putin told India Today ahead of a visit to New Delhi, according to a clip shown on Russian state television.

Ukraine says it does not want to gift Russia its own territory that Moscow has failed to win on the battlefield, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Moscow should not be rewarded for a war it started.

About 5,000 square kilometres of Donetsk remain under Ukrainian control.

Tight-lipped about unacceptable proposals

Russia currently controls just under 20 per cent of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80 per cent of Donetsk, about 75 per cent of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and small parts of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

In discussions with the United States over the outline of a possible peace deal to end the war, Russia has repeatedly said that it wants control over the whole of Donbas — and that the United States should informally recognize Moscow's control.

A Ukrainian servicemember walks near apartment buildings damaged by a Russian military strike in Kostiantynivka on Nov. 15. The city is in part of the Donetsk region that Ukraine still controls. (Ukrainian Armed Forces/Reuters)

In 2022, Russia declared that the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia were now part of Russia after referendums that the West and Kyiv dismissed as a sham. Most countries recognize the regions — and Crimea — as part of Ukraine.

Putin received U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in the Kremlin on Tuesday, and said that Russia had accepted some U.S. proposals on Ukraine, and that talks should continue. Witkoff and Kushner were expected to meet Thursday in Miami with Ukraine national security official Rustem Umerov.

Russia's RIA state news agency cited Putin as saying that his meeting with Witkoff and Kushner had been "very useful" and that it had been based on proposals he and U.S. President Donald Trump had discussed in Alaska in August.

There were provisions that Moscow said it was ready to discuss, while others "we can't agree to," Putin said, adding "it's difficult work."

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Trump said Wednesday that Witkoff and Kushner came away from their marathon session confident that Putin wants to find an end to the war. European leaders, left on the sidelines in talks, have accused Putin of feigning interest in Trump's peace drive.

Putin refused to go into details as to what Russia could agree to, saying it "could simply disrupt the working regime" of the peace effort, according to Russia's Tass agency.

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In fighting, Russian barrages of civilian areas of Ukraine continued overnight into Thursday. A ballistic missile struck Kryvyi Rih on Wednesday night, wounding six people, including a three-year-old girl, according to city administration head Oleksandr Vilkul.

Vilkul said that the strike damaged more than 40 residential buildings, a school and domestic gas pipes in the city, which is Zelenskyy's hometown.

Ukraine rescuers work Wednesday night at the site of apartment buildings hit by a Russian airstrike, in Sloviansk, Donetsk. (Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters)

A six-year-old girl died in Kherson, a southern port city, after Russian artillery shelling wounded her the previous day.

"Doctors fought until the very end to save her life, but her injuries were too severe," regional military administration chief Oleksandr Prokudin wrote on Telegram.

Tens of thousands of people were left without power and heating in southern Ukraine after Russian nighttime attacks on the front-line city of Kherson and Ukraine's largest seaport, Odesa, local authorities and the energy company said Thursday.

As winter approaches, Russia has sharply increased the number and intensity of attacks on Ukraine's energy and utilities sector, plunging entire cities and regions into darkness.

Ukrainian energy company DTEK said Thursday that Russia attacked its energy facility in the southern Odesa region overnight, leaving 51,800 households without power.

The regional governor of the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson said that operations at a heat and power plant in the city were suspended after a series of Russian attacks, leaving 40,500 customers without heat.

"This entirely civilian facility, which provided heat to the city's residents, has suffered serious damage: the station's premises and equipment have been damaged," Prokudin said on Telegram.

Ukraine's Energy Ministry said Russian attacks had also left about 60,000 residents of the front-line Donetsk region without power, but gave no more details.

Ukraine, which is targeting Russia's oil exports as Moscow bombards its power grid, has taken responsibility for an attack by seaborne drones on two empty tankers heading toward a Russian port last week. But it denied any link to another incident on Tuesday in which a Russian-flagged tanker loaded with sunflower oil said it had come under drone attack.

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Turkey, the NATO member with diplomatic relations with both Kyiv and Moscow, is calling on the warring parties to keep energy infrastructure out of their conflict.

"Hopefully, this horrible war will end. But as of today also, we say to all the parties — Russia and Ukraine — to keep the energy infrastructure out of this war," Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar told journalists in embargoed comments on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, in the Russia-occupied part of Ukraine's Kherson region, two men were killed by a Ukrainian drone strike on their vehicle Thursday, Moscow-installed regional leader Vladimir Saldo said.