Russia will "in any case" capture Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions (Donbas), Russian President Vladimir Putin stated.

“All of this leads to that. Either we [i.e. Russia] liberate these territories by armed means, or the Ukrainian forces will leave these territories and cease fighting there,” Putin added in an interview with India Today.

According to him, Moscow had already proposed before the start of the full-scale war that Kyiv withdraw its troops from Donbas, but Ukraine “preferred to fight.”

Also, Putin recalled that he did not recognize the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic for eight years. “We were trying to establish relations between the rest of Ukraine and these republics,” Putin said.

But later, when it was seen in Moscow that “the republics were simply being destroyed,” Russia decided to recognize them and did so within the administrative borders in which they existed as part of Ukraine, Putin explained.