Ukraine slams Putin's 'disdain' for peace process after he says 'whole of Ukraine' belongs to Russia

Ukraine said Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin had shown "disdain" for the peace process by suggesting Moscow might seize more Ukrainian territory, including the northeastern city of Sumy.
"Putin's cynical statements demonstrate complete disdain for US peace efforts ... The only way to force Russia into peace is to deprive it of its sense of impunity," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga said in a post on X.
Putin on Friday told the St Petersburg International Economic Forum that Russians and Ukrainians were one people, "and in that sense the whole of Ukraine is ours".
He cautioned that advancing Russian forces could take the Ukrainian city of Sumy as part of a bid to carve out a buffer zone along the border.
Putin, who ordered troops into Ukraine in 2022 after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine, also said he was not seeking the capitulation of Ukraine or denying Ukraine's sovereignty, but that Ukraine had to be neutral.
Russia currently controls about a fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea, more than 99% of the Luhansk region, over 70% of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and fragments of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Kyiv and its Western allies say Moscow's claims to four Ukrainian regions and Crimea are illegal, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly rejected the notion that Russians and Ukrainians are one people.
He has also said that Putin's terms for peace are akin to capitulation.
Putin said on Friday he was not questioning Ukraine's independence or its people's striving for sovereignty, but he underscored that when Ukraine declared independence as the Soviet Union fell in 1991 it had also declared its neutrality.
Putin said Moscow wanted Ukraine to accept the reality on the ground if there was to be a chance of peace – Russia's shorthand for the reality of Russia's control over a chunk of Ukrainian territory bigger than the US state of Virginia.
"We have a saying, or a parable," Putin said. "Where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours."

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