Putin’s remarks came as Switzerland prepared to host scores of world leaders – but not from Moscow – this weekend to try to map out first steps toward peace in Ukraine.

They also coincided with a meeting of leaders of the Group of Seven leading industrialised nations in Italy and after the US and Ukraine this week also signed a 10-year security agreement that Russian officials, including Putin, denounced as “null and void”.

Putin blasted the Switzerland conference as “just another ploy to divert everyone’s attention, reverse the cause and effect of the Ukrainian crisis (and) set the discussion on the wrong track”.

His proposal came in a speech at the Russian foreign ministry and was aimed at what he called a “final resolution” of the conflict rather than “freezing it”, and stressed the Kremlin is “ready to start negotiations without delay”.

Broader demands for peace that Putin listed included Ukraine’s recognition of Crimea as part of Russia, keeping the country’s non-nuclear status, restricting its military force and protecting the interests of the Russian-speaking population. All of these should become part of “fundamental international agreements”, and all Western sanctions against Russia should be lifted, Putin said.

“We’re urging to turn this tragic page of history and to begin restoring, step-by-step, the unity between Russia and Ukraine and in Europe in general,” he added.

Putin’s remarks, made to a group of somber foreign ministry officials, represented a rare occasion in which he clearly laid out his conditions for ending the war in Ukraine, but it didn’t include any new demands. The Kremlin has announced before that Kyiv should recognize its territorial gains and drop its bid to join NATO.

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he believed Putin would not stop his military offensive even if his ceasefire demands were met.

“These are ultimatum messages that are no different from messages from the past,” he said to Italy’s SkyTG24 news channel on the sidelines of a G7 summit.

“He will not stop,” he stated, comparing Putin’s peace conditions to ultimatums given by German dictator Adolf Hitler in the lead-up to World War II.

“It is the same thing that Hitler used to do … This is why we should not trust these messages,” Zelensky added.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry called Putin’s plan “manipulative”, “absurd” and designed to “mislead the international community, undermine diplomatic efforts aimed at achieving a just peace, and split the unity of the world majority around the goals and principles of the UN Charter”.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg also slammed the conditions set out by Putin for initiating Ukraine peace talks.

“This is not a proposal made in good faith,” Stoltenberg told reporters.

“This is a proposal that actually means that Russia should achieve their war aims, by expecting that Ukrainians should give up significantly more land than Russia has been able to occupy so far,” he continued, adding, “This is a proposal of more aggression, more occupation and, and it demonstrates, in a way, that Russia’s aim is to control Ukraine.”

Besides wanting to join NATO, Ukraine demands that Russia withdraw its troops from all of its territory, including the Crimean Peninsula that was illegally annexed in 2014, restoring its territorial integrity, holding Russia accountable for war crimes and paying reparations to Kyiv.

Russia launched its a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. After Ukrainian forces thwarted a Russian drive to the capital, much of the fighting has focused in the south and east – and Russia illegally annexed regions in the east and the south, although it doesn’t fully control any of them.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, said on social media that there was nothing new in Putin’s proposal and that the Russian leader “voiced only the ‘standard aggressor’s set,’ which has been heard many times already”.

“There is no novelty in this, no real peace proposals and no desire to end the war. But there is a desire not to pay for this war and to continue it in new formats. It’s all a complete sham,” Podolyak wrote on X.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated at NATO headquarters in Brussels that Putin “has illegally occupied sovereign Ukrainian territory. He is not in any position to dictate to Ukraine what they must do to bring about a peace”.

Austin added that Putin “started this war with no provocation. He could end it today if he chose to do that”.

Putin insisted Friday that Kyiv should withdraw from all four annexed regions entirely and essentially cede them to Moscow within their administrative borders. In Zaporizhzhia in the southeast, Russia still doesn’t control the region’s namesake administrative capital with a pre-war population of about 700,000, and in the neighboring Kherson region, Moscow withdrew from Kherson’s biggest city and capital of the same name in November 2022.

Putin stated that if “Kyiv and Western capitals” reject his offer, “it is their business, their political and moral responsibility for continuing the bloodshed”.

Throughout the war, the Kremlin has repeatedly aired its readiness for peace talks with Kyiv and blamed the West for undermining its efforts to end the conflict.

Putin went further Friday and claimed that his troops never intended to storm Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, even though they approached the city.

“In essence, it was nothing other than an operation to force the Ukrainian regime to peace. The troops were there to push the Ukrainian side to negotiate, to try and find an acceptable solution.”

Moscow withdrew from Kyiv in March 2022 and described it as a goodwill gesture as peace talks between the two began, but the pullback took place amid fierce Ukrainian resistance that significantly slowed down Russia’s battlefield advances.

Putin also claimed that in that same month, he told one foreign official he wasn’t ruling out withdrawing forces from the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and ceding occupied parts of them back to Ukraine, as long as Kyiv allowed Russia to have a “strong land connection” to Crimea.

He said the official planned on bringing that proposal to Kyiv – which Moscow “welcomed” as it generally welcomed “attempts to find a peaceful resolution of the conflict”. But the Kremlin then annexed both regions, along with the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, citing the results of sham “referendums” it staged there. Putin mentioned those and added that “the matter is closed forever and is no longer up for discussion”.

The security agreement was sealed on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Italy and declares Washington’s commitments to further Kiev’s goal of joining NATO by supporting and developing its military for years to come. Ukraine has similar arrangements with multiple other Western nations.

The terms do not include specific targets for military assistance or a pledge by the US to defend Ukraine, according to Western media reports. However, Washington has vowed to hold high-level consultations with Kiev within 24 hours if Ukraine is attacked in the future.

Zakharova on Friday called the deal a “scrap of paper” and claimed “some press releases are more important” than the document. She cited the lack of specifics and judicially binding power when explaining her dismissive attitude.

“Zelensky is a master of public relations and show business… He uses his entire artistic range to misrepresent bad things as good,” the official told journalists, referring to the politician’s previous career as a comedian and actor. The agreement is primarily meant “to show to the citizens of Ukraine, whom Zelensky has not yet sent to the slaughter, that the world community is supposedly with them”.

Biden described the deal as accelerating “Ukraine’s integration into the European and… trans-Atlantic communities” and furthering its objectives in the conflict with Russia, as he announced it at a joint press conference with Zelensky.

The document, however, is not a treaty ratified by the US Congress, so any future US leader can nullify it, US officials told The Washington Post. Ex-President Donald Trump has criticized the Biden administration for overspending on the Ukrainian armed forces. The Republican politician has claimed on multiple occasions that he could end the conflict “in 24 hours”, if elected again. WaPo sources said “they hoped the agreement would transcend political divisions within the United States,” should Trump win in the November election.

Moscow perceives the hostilities with Kiev as part of a proxy war that the US and its allies are waging against Russia. The West’s goal is to contain and damage its opponent, Russian officials have claimed, and it would fuel the conflict “to the last Ukrainian”.

Moscow rejects Kiev’s claims of sovereignty over five formerly Ukrainian regions, four of which have joined Russia amid the ongoing hostilities. People in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions voted for the transition in late 2022, though hostilities continue in all of them.

Ukrainian forces must be removed from these territories, Putin said on Friday at a meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other senior Russian diplomats.

“I stress: the entire territory of those regions as defined by their administrative borders at the time they joined Ukraine [in August 1991],” Putin stated.

“Our side will order a ceasefire and start negotiations the minute Kiev declares that it is prepared to take this decision and starts actual withdrawal of troops from those regions, and also formally informs us that it no longer plans to join NATO,” the Russian leader pledged.

Putin outlined the conditions after condemning Kiev’s Western backers for allegedly preventing it from holding peace talks with Moscow while accusing Russia of rejecting negotiations.

“We are counting on Kiev to take such a decision on withdrawal, neutral status, and dialogue with Russia, on which the future existence of Ukraine depends, independently based on the current realities and guided by the true interests of the Ukrainian people and not at Western orders,” Putin added.

At this point, Moscow will not accept a frozen conflict, which would allow the US and its allies to rearm and rebuild the Ukrainian military, Putin claimed. The full resolution of the issue will involve Kiev recognizing the four new regions as well as Crimea as part of Russia, he insisted.

“In the future, all those basic principled positions have to be enshrined in fundamental international agreements. Naturally, that includes the lifting of all Western sanctions against Russia.”

Accepting these terms will allow everyone involved to turn the page and gradually rebuild damaged relations, the president said. Eventually, a pan-European security system that works for all nations on the continent could be created, Putin added, noting that Moscow has sought this outcome for years.

The Russian president’s keynote remarks came ahead of a Swiss-hosted summit supposedly meant to further peace in Ukraine. Kiev has insisted that Moscow could not be invited to the event because it would try to “hijack” it by promoting alternatives to the “peace formula” pushed by the Ukrainian government.

Putin claimed that the event was meant to distract public opinion from the “true roots” of the conflict, and that President Volodymyr Zelensky has usurped power in Ukraine after his presidential term expired last month. Nothing but demagoguery and accusations against Russia can come out of the Swiss gathering, he predicted.

Europe needs to maintain good relations with Moscow if it wants to retain its status as one of the centers of world development, Putin suggested.

He stressed that Russia is prepared to work together with Europe and insisted that Moscow bears no ill intent, pointing out that all the recent statements made by Western officials about a supposed Russian attack are “nonsense.”

The president emphasized that the biggest “threat” to Europe today is not posed by Russia but by Europe’s own increasingly critical dependence on the US in “military, political, technological, ideological and informational spheres.”

“Europe is increasingly being pushed out to the margins of global economic development and is being plunged into the chaos of migration and other pressing problems,” Putin continued, adding that European nationals are also being deprived of international subjectivity and cultural identity.

Putin also noted that today, many of Europe’s political leaders and representatives of the European bureaucracy appear to be more afraid of falling out of favor with Washington than losing the trust of their own people. This fact has also become obvious following the results of the latest EU parliamentary elections, the Russian president stated.

Meanwhile, the US is simply “exploiting” European leaders by forcing them to buy American liquefied natural gas, which is nearly “three-four times more expensive than gas in the US”, and pushing them to boost military aid to Ukraine, even threatening sanctions against those who do not comply, Putin said.

The Russian President also pointed out that Europe is being tricked into wasting money and resources on expanding its production of artillery shells, suggesting that such munitions will be completely useless after the conflict between Moscow and Kiev ends and will do nothing to ensure Europe’s military security. The US, on the other hand, continues to invest in military technologies of tomorrow, which will determine the military-political potential of countries, Putin observed.

He stressed that the simple idea that Europe’s future lies in friendly relations with Russia was well understood in the past by politicians of a “truly pan-European and global scale”, such as France’s Charles de Gaulle and Germany’s Helmut Kohl, who Putin described as “patriots of their countries” and “people who thought in historical categories” as opposed to today’s “extras” who can only follow someone else’s will.

Nevertheless, Putin expressed hope that the legacy of the wise leaders of the past would eventually once again be embraced by a new generation of European politicians.