President Vladimir V. Putin said on Friday that Russia would be ready to order a cease-fire in Ukraine and enter negotiations with its government if Kyiv were to withdraw troops from the four regions that Moscow has claimed as its own and drop its aspirations to join NATO.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry quickly denounced Mr. Putin’s statement, saying that his goal was “to mislead the international community, undermine diplomatic efforts aimed at achieving a just peace and split the unity of the world over the goals and principles of the United Nations Charter.”
Mr. Putin’s new announcement stipulates that Ukraine effectively surrender huge swaths of land it now controls to Moscow, including the capitals of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. It represents Mr. Putin’s most concrete set of territorial conditions to stop the war to date.
Until now, Mr. Putin has said that any negotiations should take into account “the realities of today,” a stance that some analysts interpreted as offering a cease-fire at the current battle lines.
Kyiv has said that Russia must withdraw its troops from all of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory.
Mr. Putin made the remarks one day before a peace conference in the Swiss Alps that Ukraine has organized to persuade countries to sign onto its plans for the war and eventual peace. Russia was not invited to the summit, and Mr. Putin’s announcement appeared intended to get out ahead of the gathering.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said Mr. Putin’s timing suggested that he was trying to undermine Ukraine’s diplomatic effort in Switzerland that begins Saturday, and showed that he is “afraid of a real peace.”
“Ukraine have never wanted this war but more than anyone in the world wants it to be over,” the ministry said.
Russian forces have been making incremental advances on the battlefield, where Ukrainian troops have suffered from shortages of soldiers, ammunition and air defenses, as well as delays in Western military aid. And Mr. Putin has projected renewed confidence about Russia’s position in the war, talking about the conflict more regularly and touting Moscow’s reserves of personnel and economic resilience.
With his announcement, Mr. Putin seemed to be sending a message to Ukraine, the West, and also nonaligned states in Asia, Africa and Latin America that have come to be called the Global South. Russia and the West have been competing for their sympathies amid increasing calls that neither side can achieve a full victory in Ukraine.
Speaking at a meeting with his top diplomats in Moscow, Mr. Putin described Russia’s demands as “very simple.” He said that Ukraine must withdraw its troops from its entire Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions, which he officially claimed as part of Russia in September 2022, even though Russia does not control all of the territory. Ukrainian forces control the two major cities in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
Mr. Putin also said that Ukraine must abandon its plans to join NATO and that the West must lift all sanctions imposed on Russia. Under those conditions, he said, Russia would “immediately issue an order to cease fire and start negotiations.”
By regularly stating his willingness to enter talks, Mr. Putin has tried to cast himself as a willing peacemaker, while at the same time setting out maximalist conditions that he knows Ukraine and its Western backers will not accept.
He also may be hoping that certain Western officials and their constituents, who are weary of a war that is now in its third year, could cite his willingness to negotiate as a reason to end support for Ukraine or pressure Kyiv into making concessions, said Nigel Gould-Davies, Britain’s former ambassador to Belarus, who is now a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“It changes the political psychology, and Putin knows this,” Mr. Gould-Davies said. “The conditions Putin is articulating are unacceptable, and there is no evidence he would accept them as a long-term outcome. His objectives remain unchanged.”
The Russian leader has regularly called into question Ukraine’s existence as an independent nation in its current borders, laying broad claims to much of its territory with spurious interpretations of history.
He has not backed off that rhetoric, leading to doubts about whether, over the long term, he would stop at the four regions he cited Friday. He has, for example, proclaimed Odesa, a Ukrainian-controlled port city outside those four regions, a Russian city.
Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation who has called for exploring talks, said the comments appeared to represent a hardening of Mr. Putin’s position on territory, which previously had been more nebulous. Still, he said, it is common for both sides to set out maximalist demands before any talks.
“What we know for sure is that the declared public position has hardened,” Mr. Charap said. “That doesn’t mean that necessarily, if they were to sit down, they wouldn’t budge from this.”
In his comments on Friday, Mr. Putin said that with its offer, Russia was not talking about “freezing the conflict, but its final resolution.”
“Today we are making another concrete, real peace proposal,” the Russian leader said. “Our principled position is that Ukraine’s status must be a neutral, nonaligned, free of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Speaking about the upcoming peace conference in Switzerland, Mr. Putin said that without Russia, “it would be impossible to reach a peaceful solution on Ukraine and overall on global European security.”
He has been backed in that view by China and Brazil, which have underscored the futility of peace talks without one side at the table.
Last month, China and Brazil, which both have retained friendly relations with Russia, presented a joint proposal to start peace negotiations that would include both Kyiv and Moscow. Neither China nor Brazil is sending a high-level delegation to the Switzerland conference.
Anton Troianovski and Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.