President Vladimir Putin warned Wednesday of a drawn-out military intervention in Ukraine more than nine months into a conflict the Kremlin had hoped would end after a days-long assault on Kyiv.
His comments came after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said fresh Russian strikes on a market and gas station had killed six people and wounded several more in the frontline region of Donetsk.
With the one-year mark of the conflict approaching, Russian forces have missed most of their key military goals including toppling the Ukrainian government, capturing the Donbas region and annexing four regions.
Moscow had expected fighting to last just days before Ukraine’s capitulation, but on Wednesday Putin warned results could be a long time coming.
Civilian casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war
“As for the long process of (seeing) results of the special military operation, of course, this is a lengthy process,” Putin said during a televised meeting with the Kremlin’s human rights council.
But he praised the announced annexation of four Ukrainian territories into Russia after Moscow proxies held a referendum — denounced in the West as a sham — and announced their integration in September.
“New territories appeared — well, this is still a significant result for Russia and this is a serious issue,” Putin said.
The Russian leader formalised the annexation of the four southern and eastern territories — Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — at a ceremony in the Kremlin in September.
But Russian troops at no point controlled all of any of these regions and last month were forced out from the regional capital of the southern Kherson region after a months-long Ukraine counter-offensive.
That same month Putin announced Russia was mobilising hundreds of thousands of Russians to bolster Moscow’s struggling force after a series of battlefield setbacks, particularly in the Kharkiv region in northeast Ukraine.
Zelensky, who visited the frontline Donetsk region a day earlier, said fresh Russian strikes there had killed six people
On Wednesday he said half the Russians called up for military service in September had been deployed to Ukraine.
“Out of 300,000 of our mobilised fighters, our men, defenders of the fatherland, 150,000 are in the area of operations,” said Putin, adding that about 77,000 were in combat units.
Since the capture of Kherson city, fighting in Ukraine has focused on the industrial Donbas region, where Russian forces have been pushing to capture the frontline city of Bakhmut.