Russian President Vladimir Putin has said in an interview that Russia would take full control of Ukraine's Donbas region by force, unless Ukrainian forces withdraw, something Kyiv has flatly rejected.
Mr Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops in the Donbas, which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
"Either we liberate these territories by force of arms, or Ukrainian troops leave these territories," Mr Putin told India Today ahead of a visit to New Delhi, according to a clip shown on Russian state television.
Ukraine says it does not want to gift Russia its own territory that Moscow has failed to win on the battlefield, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Moscow should not be rewarded for a war it started.
Russia currently controls 19.2% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80% of Donetsk, about 75% of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
About 5,000 square km of Donetsk remains under Ukrainian control.
In discussions with the United States over the outline of a possible peace deal to end the war, Russia has repeatedly said that it wants control over the whole of Donbas - and that the United States should informally recognise Moscow's control.
Watch: Trump says he believes Putin wants to end war
US President Donald Trump has said that he believes Mr Putin wants to end the Ukraine war despite inconclusive talks in Russia, as US officials prepared for a follow-up meeting with Ukraine's top negotiator.
Mr Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner huddled into the early hours with Mr Putin in the Kremlin, but reached no breakthrough on halting Europe's worst conflict since World War II.
The Kremlin said afterward it found parts of the US plan to end the war unacceptable, even though the proposal includes Ukraine ceding parts of the eastern Donbas region it still holds nearly four years after Russia's invasion.
"I can tell you that they had a reasonably good meeting with President Putin," Mr Trump said when asked about the talks, adding they were "very good".
Mr Trump said it was too soon to tell what would happen "because it does take two to tango".
Pressed on whether Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner got any sense that Mr Putin genuinely wanted to halt Russia's nearly four-year-old invasion, President Trump replied: "He would like to end the war. That was their impression."
Mr Trump added that Ukraine "pretty well" backed the US proposal, although he added that Ukraine should have done so earlier, when he had a notoriously heated meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in February.
Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner are due to meet top Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov in Florida later today, two US officials told AFP, to follow up on the Kremlin talks.
"Our task now is to obtain complete information about what has been said in Russia and what other reasons Putin has found to prolong the war and to pressure Ukraine, to pressure us, our independence," Mr Zelensky said in an evening address from Kyiv.
"Ukraine is prepared for any possible developments. Of course, we will work as constructively as possible with all our partners to ensure peace is achieved, and that it is a dignified peace."
Read more: Russia says no compromise reached in peace talks with US
'Successes of the Russian army'
But while the White House had voiced optimism ahead of the Kremlin talks, Russia said that the two sides had failed to reach a compromise and that more work was needed.
The Kremlin added that its army's recent battlefield successes in Ukraine had bolstered its position and that Ukraine's ties to NATO remained a key question.
Russia's advance in eastern Ukraine gathered pace last month and Mr Putin has said in recent days that Russia is ready to fight on to seize the rest of the land it claims if Ukraine does not surrender it.
"The progress and nature of the negotiations were influenced by the successes of the Russian army on the battlefield in recent weeks," Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, who took part in the US-Russia talks, told reporters.
Russia insisted it was incorrect to say Mr Putin rejected the plan in its entirety.
"We are still ready to meet as many times as is needed to reach a peace settlement," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
'Opportunity to end the war'
In Kyiv, Mr Zelensky said that though a window of opportunity for peace has opened, it must be accompanied by pressure on Russia.
"The world now clearly feels that there is an opportunity to end the war, and the current activity in negotiations must be supported by pressure on Russia," he said in a regular evening address.
The fresh talks come as NATO pledges to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of US arms for Ukraine.
NATO chief Mark Rutte said it was positive that peace talks were ongoing, but that the alliance should make sure that "Ukraine is in the strongest possible position to keep the fight going".
Russian troops have been grinding forward across the front line against outgunned and outnumbered Ukrainian forces.
Earlier this week, Russia claimed to have captured the important stronghold of Pokrovsk, but a Ukrainian army unit fighting in the city said urban combat was still ongoing.
European countries have expressed fears the US and Russia will reach agreements without them and have spent the last weeks trying to amend the US plan so that it does not force Ukraine to capitulate.
Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said he hopes to have a "fruitful discussion" with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Friday about an EU plan to use Russian frozen assets to support Ukraine.
The European Commission has proposed a "reparations loan" using Russian state assets frozen in the EU following Russia's invasion. However, Belgium, which holds the majority of the assets, has raised various legal concerns and remains unconvinced by the plan.
Mr Merz has voiced support for the plan but also said the risks should be borne by all EU countries, not just Belgium.
Russia sent Ukrainian children to North Korea 're-education' camps, Kyiv says
Russia has sent some of the thousands of Ukrainian children it has abducted from occupied territory to North Korea for "re-education", Ukraine's human rights ombudsman has said.
The official, Dmytro Lubinets, did not say how many children Russia had taken to North Korea - a highly repressive autocracy that has intensified cooperation with Moscow in recent years - and Russia made no immediate public comment.
Citing testimony published by a Kyiv-based human rights group, Mr Lubinets said there was a network of 165 "camps" where Russia was attempting to re-educate the children - in occupied Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, as well as in North Korea.
A representative from the Regional Center for Human Rights - who Mr Lubinets was citing - reported in testimony to the US Senate yesterday that at least some of the children were sent to the Songdowon summer camp on North Korea's eastern coast.
There, they were taught to "destroy Japanese militarists" and met Korean veterans responsible for seizing a US spy ship in 1968.
The Ukrainian government says Russia has abducted or forcibly displaced almost 20,000 children since launching its full-scale invasion in 2022.
Russia has acknowledged moving some children since launching its offensive, but said it did so for their own safety and is trying to reunite them with their families - an assertion Ukraine rejects.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Mr Putin and his children's rights commissioner in 2023 over the alleged deportation and transfer of children to Russian-controlled territory.
