“There is a simple way to end this war, and that is for Russia to withdraw the troops it sent to Ukraine in February 2022, as it is the Russians who are responsible for the escalation,” he said.

At the same time, the French Prime Minister raised the issue of Paris’s support for Kyiv.

“We are doing this because they are fighting for the values we defend. Freedom, democracy, values for which people who were not French, young people, came to fight for us here in 1944,” he added.

The French government is considering sending military instructors to Ukraine. This was stated by the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi. According to him, the instructors would train Ukrainian soldiers to operate French weapons and military equipment.

An official representative of the French Ministry of Defense stated that the issue of sending instructors to Ukraine is under review. A final decision will be made soon.

France has been providing significant military assistance to Ukraine, including anti-tank missile systems Milan, self-propelled artillery units Caesar, howitzers TRF1, and other weapons. In addition, France has provided Ukraine with financial assistance amounting to over 1 billion euros.

Putin was speaking with reporters from international news agencies on the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

“According to our estimates, the Ukrainian army loses about 50,000 people every month,” Putin said in response to a question, adding that the ratio of sanitary and irrecoverable casualties was “about 50-50.”

While not specifying the number of Russian casualties, Putin said the number of irrecoverable losses was at least five times less than those incurred by Kiev’s forces. There are currently 1,348 Russian servicemen held in Ukraine as prisoners of war, while 6,465 Ukrainian servicemen are in Russian captivity, the president revealed.

Ukraine is capable of mobilizing about 30,000 troops a month and “there aren’t very many volunteers,” Putin explained.

“It doesn’t solve the problem,” the Russian leader said, “All of the people they are able to mobilize go to replace the battlefield losses.”

It is “an open secret” in Ukraine that the push to lower the age of conscription has come from the US, Putin added.

In April, Kiev amended the rules to allow the drafting of 25-year-olds, down from the previous threshold of 27. According to Putin, Washington wants to revise it to 23, “then to 18, or maybe directly to 18,” and has already convinced Ukraine to require 17-year-olds to register for mobilization.

The acute shortage of frontline troops has driven Kiev to consider accepting deserters who have chosen to return to the battlefield, according to an instruction from the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) to AFU commander-in-chief Aleksandr Syrsky, published on Wednesday.

Russia is considering “asymmetric” measures against Kiev’s sponsors due to Ukraine’s use of Western-supplied weapons against its territory, Putin said.

“We have no illusions in this regard,” Putin added, repeating his prior comments that Ukrainian troops might be pulling the trigger but the US and its allies are providing the intelligence and targeting information.

Russia will respond by boosting air defenses and destroying these missiles, he continued.

“Secondly, if someone deems it possible to supply such weapons to the war zone, to strike our territory… why shouldn’t we supply similar weapons to those regions of the world, where they will be used against sensitive sites of these countries?” the Russian president added.

“We can respond asymmetrically. We will give it a thought.”

If the West continues to escalate, such actions “will completely destroy international relations and undermine international security,” Putin noted.

“If we see that these countries are being drawn into a war against us, and this is their direct participation in the war against Russia, then we reserve the right to act in a similar way. This is a recipe for very serious problems,” he warned.

The Russian president also brought up the fact that some military instructors and advisers from NATO countries have already been deployed to Ukraine, and that a number of them were killed in Russian strikes.

The US and its allies have insisted that providing weapons and equipment to Ukraine does not make them party to the conflict with Russia, and maintained certain restrictions on their use to preserve that perception. Last month, however, as Russian troops began advancing towards Kharkov, Ukraine began to demand the relaxation of those rules. A British-led pressure campaign eventually resulted in Washington complying with Kiev’s wishes.

The tragic events currently unfolding in Ukraine started with the US-backed 2014 coup d’etat in Kiev, Putin stated, stressing that the West is to blame for the conflict.

“Everyone [in the West] believes that Russia started the war in Ukraine. But no one – I want to emphasize this – no one in the West, in Europe, wants to remember how this tragedy began,” the president said.

“It began with a coup in Ukraine – an unconstitutional coup d’etat. This is the beginning of the war. Well, is Russia to blame for this coup? No.”

The Russian leader pointed out that everyone seems to have forgotten how the foreign ministers of Poland, Germany and France arrived in Kiev and signed the Minsk agreements as guarantors on peacefully resolving the crisis in Ukraine.

These countries now prefer not to remember this, instead they decided to resolve the conflict by use of arms against civilians in Eastern Ukraine, Putin added.

“No one planned to execute the Minsk agreements, they publicly state they are not going to implement it,” the Russian president stressed, adding, “We were deceived.”

According to Putin, following the coup, Moscow made every attempt to settle the bloodshed in Donbass “by peaceful means.”

Following the US-backed coup, the then-Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, known as Donbass, with predominantly Russian-speaking populations refused to accept the new government, which increasingly embraced nationalist ideology. The regions proclaimed their independence and Kiev responded with a military campaign that led to a years-long conflict.

“We recognized people who voted to be independent,” Putin stressed.

Asked about Western arms supply to Ukraine, the Russian leader called it a direct participation in the conflict which will ultimately completely destroy global relations and undermine international security. Russia reserves the right to respond in a similar way, according to the president.

Ukrainian parliament member Yehor Cherniev confirmed that US-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) have hit Russian logistics and artillery locations inside of Russia near Ukraine’s northeast region of Kharkiv, where Moscow is conducting an offensive.

“We have already achieved some success and forced the Russians to stop shelling the city,” said Cherniev, the deputy chairman of the Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence in Ukraine’s parliament, in a text message.

“Also, thanks to the HIMARS strikes, we managed to reduce the offensive potential of Russian troops in this area.”

Unconfirmed videos shared on Russian Telegram sites appeared to show the aftermath of a HIMARS strike that caused an explosion in the Belgorod region of Russia, which borders Kharkiv.

The Biden administration last week announced a change in policy to allow Ukraine to strike inside of Russia from the region of Kharkiv.

The reversal was only partial, allowing for strikes in Russia from Kharkiv, where Russian forces are pressing forward in a major offensive. Ukraine is also prohibited from using the US-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) or long-range artillery to hit Russia, and from hitting civilian infrastructure.

Cherniev added Russia is still bombing Ukraine with guided bombs and pressed for more “air defense systems and permission from the United States to fire ATACMS missiles at Russian military airfields”.

Cherniev and other Ukrainian lawmakers had pressed Washington to reverse the policy after Russia launched the Kharkiv offensive in May. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other government officials in Kyiv also pushed the Biden administration on the issue, which Washington had in place to avoid escalation with Russia as Moscow continues to rattle the nuclear saber.

Ukraine has struck into Russia repeatedly during the more than two-year war, but until now has used its own weapons, including cheap drones that have targeted oil refineries.

The US weapons, however, will give Kyiv the ability to blunt Russian attacks from Belgorod and deal much more damage to military infrastructure.

Asked Tuesday if Ukraine using US weapons inside of Russia has helped to beat back Russia’s advance, Jake Sullivan, the White House national security advisor, said it was a “dynamic situation”.

But Sullivan added Ukraine was in a “deep hole” after a months-long delay of US military aid to the embattled country, and the arrival of more weapons was allowing Kyiv to “firm up the lines”.

“We certainly have seen the fact that weapons arriving on the battlefield, at scale at quantity in the last few weeks have made a difference, have made an impact,” he told reporters.

“And we hope they will continue to do so and that ultimately it will allow Ukraine not just to hold the line but to push back against Russian forces.”