US Presses Putin on His Idea of Demilitarized Zone in Ukraine

In this pool photograph distributed by Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin meets with participants in the Everything for the Victory forum in Tula on February 2, 2024. U.S. State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller shot down Putin’s proposal to build a demilitarized buffer around the front lines in Ukraine by pushing the fighting deeper into Ukrainian territory.

The U.S. State Department denounced the Kremlin’s proposal for a “demilitarized” zone between Russian territory and the front lines in Ukraine, an idea floated by Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week.

“I’m struggling to understand how a demilitarized zone between Russia and Ukraine would be implemented when Russian forces are currently inside Ukraine,” State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters at a briefing Thursday. “Kind of tough to have a demilitarized zone when Russian forces continue to operate on the Ukrainian side of the border.”

During a meeting with his so-called election “proxies” on Wednesday, Putin called for moving the over 600-mile front line deeper into Ukrainian territory to create a buffer between the fighting and Russia’s territory, including the Moscow-occupied regions in southern and eastern Ukraine. The goal would be to place Russia’s territory beyond the range of Ukraine’s front-line and long-range artillery systems.

But Miller told reporters during Thursday’s briefing that Putin “has made clear” that Moscow’s goals remain the same since launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which is to “conquer and subjugate Ukraine.”

“So I think … if Russia really wanted to show interest in a demilitarized zone, the thing they could do is start by demilitarizing the parts of Ukraine where there are currently Russian forces,” Miller added.

Newsweek reached out to Russia’s Ministry of Defense via email for comment on Friday night.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, also dismissed Putin’s proposal on Friday, saying that a demilitarized zone will be established following the end of the war in Ukraine but that it will follow “completely different parallels and meridians” than those pitched by Putin.

“This demilitarized zone will extend as far as Moscow, as far as to St. Petersburg, and we will definitely move it,” Danilov said, according to a report by Ukrainian broadcaster Espreso. “Believe me, it will definitely happen. Because the response of the civilized world to the crimes committed by those terrorists led by a modern-day [Adolf] Hitler named Putin will not be unpunished, they will definitely be held accountable.”

Putin and Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky have not shown signs that either country is ready to discuss negotiations to bring the nearly two-year war to an end. The Kremlin leader has said that Moscow will finish its “special military operation” after it has achieved “denazification” and “demilitarization” in Ukraine. Putin has also demanded that Ukraine remain neutral, meaning that Kyiv must forgo its plans to join NATO and the European Union.

Zelensky said last month that Ukraine will continue to fight the “tyranny” of Russia’s invasion. The Ukrainian leader has said that the war cannot end unless all territory is returned to Kyiv’s control.

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