Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has conceded that Ukraine does not have the ability to drive Russian forces out of the territory Russia has captured since the 2022 invasion, as well as Crimea, which Russia has controlled since 2014.
“We cannot give up our territories. The Ukrainian constitution forbids us to do so. De facto, these territories are now controlled by the Russians. We do not have the strength to recover them,” Zelensky told the French newspaper Le Parisien.
“We can only count on diplomatic pressure from the international community to force Putin to sit down at the negotiating table,” the Ukrainian leader added.
Zelensky has long maintained that his war goals include driving Russian troops out of Russian-controlled Ukraine, which includes about 80% of the eastern Donbas region and parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. A “peace formula” pushed by Zelensky called for a full Russian withdrawal before peace talks could even happen.
A potential peace deal that was on the table in March and April of 2022 would have involved a Russian withdrawal from the territory it had captured following the invasion in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality. But the deal was discouraged by the US and its allies and fell apart. Later that year, Moscow formally annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, and it now considers all of the oblasts, even the Ukrainian-controlled areas, a part of Russia.
Back in June, Russian President Vladimir Putin laid out Moscow’s conditions for peace, which included a Ukrainian withdrawal from the oblasts he considers part of Russia.
