President Vladimir Putin says Ukraine’s weeks-long ongoing incursion in Russia’s Kursk region is aimed at slowing the Russian advance in the Ukrainian region of Donbas, but it has failed.

Speaking at the Eastern Economic Forum in Russia’s Vladivostok, Putin said on Thursday that capturing Donbas was Moscow’s main aim in the full-scale war launched in 2022 and Ukraine’s move against Russian border regions had simply weakened its forces along the rest of the front.

“The aim of the enemy was to make us worry … and to stop our offensive in key areas, especially in the Donbas, the liberation of which is our primary objective,” he said.

“Did it work? No.”

Russian forces, which control 18 percent of Ukraine, have been advancing in eastern Ukraine since the failure of Kyiv’s 2023 counteroffensive to achieve a significant breakthrough.

Kursk incursion

On August 6, in the biggest foreign attack on Russian sovereign territory since World War II, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers smashed through the Russian border aided with swarms of drones, heavy weaponry and artillery, some Western-made.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Kursk attack was an attempt to bring the war to Russia, to force Putin to peace and to carve out a buffer zone to prevent Russian attacks on the neighbouring Sumy region.

Ukraine’s top commander, General Oleksandr Syrskii, said one of the objectives of the Kursk attack was to divert Russian forces from other areas, primarily in eastern Ukraine near Pokrovsk and Kurakhove.

“By transferring rather large and well-trained units to these border areas with us, the enemy weakened itself in key areas, and our troops accelerated offensive operations,” Putin said. He said the Russian advance on Pokrovsk was successful.

Putin also said it was Russia’s “sacred duty” to expel the invaders.

“Our armed forces have stabilised the situation [in Kursk] and started gradually squeezing [the enemy] out from our territory,” he claimed.

Putin said he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while the Kursk offensive was ongoing.

The president said the talks would have to be based on an aborted deal between negotiators of both countries reached in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2022, the terms of which were never made public.

“Are we ready to negotiate with them? We have never refused to do so, but not on the basis of some ephemeral demands, but on the basis of those documents that were agreed and actually initialled in Istanbul,” Putin said.

The Kremlin has repeatedly claimed Russia and Ukraine were on the verge of a deal in 2022, shortly after Moscow launched its invasion.

“We managed to reach an agreement, that is the whole point. The signature of the head of the Ukrainian delegation who initialled this document testifies to this, which means that the Ukrainian side was generally satisfied with the agreements reached,” Putin said.

“It did not come into force only because they were given a command not to do so, because the elites of the United States, Europe – some European countries – wanted to achieve a strategic defeat of Russia,” Putin added.

There was no immediate reaction from Ukraine on Putin’s claims.