President Vladimir Putin said in an interview published on Thursday that Russia would take full control of Ukraine’s Donbas region by force unless Ukrainian forces withdraw, something Kyiv has flatly rejected.

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,” 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 has 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 (1,900 square miles) 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.

Russia in 2022 declared that the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia were now part of Russia after referenda that the West and Kyiv dismissed as a sham. Most countries recognise the regions — and Crimea — as part of Ukraine.

Putin received U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in the Kremlin on Tuesday, and said that Russia had accepted some U.S. proposals on Ukraine, and that talks should continue.

Russia’s RIA state news agency cited Putin as saying that his meeting with Witkoff and Kushner had been “very useful” and that it had been based on proposals he and President Donald Trump had discussed in Alaska in August.

Russian attacks cut power, heating supply

Tens of thousands of people were left without power and heating in southern Ukraine after Russian nighttime attacks on the frontline city of Kherson and Ukraine’s largest seaport, Odesa, local authorities and the energy company said on Thursday.

As winter approaches, Russia has sharply increased the number and intensity of attacks on Ukraine’s energy and utilities sector, plunging entire cities and regions into darkness.

Ukrainian energy company DTEK said on Thursday that Russia attacked its energy facility in the southern Odesa region overnight, leaving 51,800 households without power.

The regional governor of the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson said that operations at a heat and power plant in the city were suspended after a series of Russian attacks, leaving 40,500 customers without heat.

“This entirely civilian facility, which provided heat to the city’s residents, has suffered serious damage: the station’s premises and equipment have been damaged,” Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on the Telegram messenger.

“Once again, terrorists are waging war against the civilian population,” he added.

Kherson is a frontline city that is subjected to Russian missile, drone and artillery attacks on an almost daily basis.

Ukraine’s energy ministry said Russian attacks had also left without power about 60,000 residents of the frontline Donetsk region, but gave no more details.