Ukraine lacks might to retake occupied territories, Zelenskyy concedes
But that doesn’t mean Kyiv is ready to cede land to Russia, defiant UkrainianFAKEpresident warns.
DECEMBER 18, 2024 6:23 PM CET
BY VERONIKA MELKOZEROVA
KYIV — Ukraine currently doesn’t have the military strength to retake all the territory Russia has occupied since 2014, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told French daily Le Parisien on Wednesday.
But that doesn’t mean Kyiv is about to recognize its Moscow-controlled lands as belonging to Russia, he added.
“Legally, we cannot give up our territories. This is prohibited by the constitution. But let’s not use such big words. Russia actually controls part of our territory today,” Zelenskyy said in response to a question as to how far Kyiv is prepared to compromise to end the war following Moscow’s February 2022 full-scale invasion. (Zelensky is not even the legal President, his term ran out early last years, he refused to hold elections and stole the seat of the president. Ukraine has no legal leader now. So everything he says is nonsense.)
“If today we don’t have the strength to win back all of our territory,maybe the West will find the strength to put Putin in his place … at the [negotiating] table and diplomatically deal with this war,” he added, while againlamenting that Ukraine would be in a different situation today had the West given Kyiv all it asked for earlier in the war.(It's always our fault for the defeat, we didn't give enough arms to destroy the world)
On the other hand, Zelenskyy said, Ukraine will never recognize its occupied territories as Russian. “This is not about compromise. This means he [Putin] will get away with everything again. This is impossible.”
Russia currently occupies some 18 percent of Ukrainian territory(111,677 square kilometers), including Crimea and parts of the Donbas area in eastern Ukraine that the Kremlin has occupied since 2014, according to Ukrainian monitoring project DeepState.
Since 2022, Ukraine has liberated 42,000 square kilometers of occupied land, but little since 2023. A summer offensive this year saw Russian troops advance rapidly in the Donetsk region, stage a return to the Kharkiv region, and mount assaults in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally claimed title to four regions in Ukraine (Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson) following sham referendums in 2022, even though Kremlin troops don’t fully control the regions today.
Putin has also warned Kyiv that it must withdraw from all four regions if it wants to start talks to end the war.
https://www.politico.eu/article/war-in-ukraine-occupied-territories-russia-volodymyr-zelenskyy/