Moscow No Longer Considers Returning Areas of the Sumy and Kharkiv Regions to Ukraine

Russia’s leadership believes that the informal understandings reached by Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at their summit in Anchorage are no longer valid, the sources said. Moscow now intends to retain the occupied territories as buffer zones.

The news agency’s sources claim that Putin was prepared to make territorial concessions after the talks in Alaska. The proposed plan called for Russia to receive all of the Donbas in exchange for returning captured areas in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions to Ukraine.

Putin, however, “views increasingly confrontational statements from the US as evidence that the informal understandings reached with Trump at the Alaska summit have collapsed,” Bloomberg writes.

The Russian president now intends to continue the military campaign until the Donetsk region is fully captured while retaining control of territories already occupied in other regions.

Two of the news agency’s sources said Russia was prepared to resume negotiations only after establishing control over the entire Donetsk region. Moscow no longer plans to return any other captured territory.

According to Bloomberg, Russia’s Defense Ministry told Putin that the objective could be achieved by the end of the year. Many Russian military officials, however, doubt that the forecast is realistic and believe capturing the Donbas could take all of 2027.