President Vladimir Putin wants US President Donald Trump to formally recognize all four Ukrainian regions that Moscow has claimed as its own in addition to Crimea, Russia’s Kommersant daily reported.
Citing unnamed sources who attended a private business event with Putin on Tuesday, Kommersant said that Putin wanted the US to formally recognize the four regions – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson – as part of Russia along with Crimea, which Moscow seized and annexed in 2014.
Russia, though advancing on the battlefield, does not fully control any of the four regions.
Trump, Putin did not discuss recognition
In return for recognition, if it happened “in the near future,” Kommersant said Putin would undertake not to lay claim to the Ukrainian port city of Odesa and other Ukrainian territory.
Asked about the Kommersant report on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin and Trump had not discussed the idea on their call on Tuesday.
But he confirmed, without elaborating, that Putin had discussed the conflict in Ukraine at Tuesday’s closed door meeting with members of Russia’s business elite.
Peskov did not confirm, however, whether Putin had floated the idea of the US recognizing the four regions in addition to Crimea at the meeting.
This article was originally published at www.jpost.com
