Putin: Offers Part of Crimea to End War

the Russian President Vladimir Putin Russia is prepared to share sovereignty over Crimea with Ukraine under a stunning “new peace plan”, the MailOnline reports.

According to the report, the Kremlin leader sent his trusted Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev to the United States with new proposals to end the war the dictator started, sources in both Moscow and Kiev said. Despite the sanctions imposed on him, Kolokoltsev entered the United States ostensibly to attend a meeting of police chiefs at the United Nations.

But this was a ruse that allowed him to travel to Washington on a VIP plane from Putin’s presidential fleet, to convey to the US government the dictator’s real demands for a peace deal, it is alleged.

Dmitry Gordon, a prominent Ukrainian TV journalist, said he received details of the package from “our intelligence sources,” while Russia’s Gosdomskaya Telegram channel — which cites inside sources in Moscow — separately relayed a similar set of demands from Putin.

The package is likely to be unacceptable to Ukraine, which would have to give up vast swaths of territory lost since the Russian invasion and be barred from joining NATO, but it is a plan that involves concessions from Russia on Putin’s demands that were reached in May.

Based on this proposal, Putin will emerge from the war victorious. “The main purpose of his arrival [του Κολοκόλτσεφ] “The goal was to deliver the Russian peace plan to the American authorities,” Gordon said, describing it as Putin’s plan “to end the war.”

The demands were that Ukraine would completely withdraw from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which Russia has now partially annexed. But Russia would hand over to Ukraine the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant and the nearby town of Enerhodar. The possibility of transferring the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions to Ukrainian control would be discussed.

Crimea will become a “specially demilitarized administrative region with dual affiliation to Ukraine and the Russian Federation.” All this if the proposal can be accepted as he put it.

“Ukraine must provide legally binding international guarantees that water supplies to Crimea will not be disrupted,” Gordon said, reading from a document. Putin seized the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and has vowed never to return it to Ukraine.

Ukraine would also control a 62-mile “demilitarized zone” along the Dnieper River. Ukraine’s military would be at its maximum legal size and the country would be barred from NATO membership, something Zelensky wants but Putin will never accept. Putin, however, would not seek to block Ukraine’s EU membership, and the West would move to lift sanctions on Russian oil and gas, as well as its banking sector.

Gordon estimated the size of the army at 350,000, but the Gosdomskaya Telegram channel said 150,000. Gordon said the UN meeting attended by the Russian minister was a “diversionary maneuver.”

“The Donetsk and Luhansk regions cannot be brought under Ukrainian control because that would lead, as the Russians say, to the genocide of the region’s population, a third of whom took part in the hostilities against Ukraine,” Gordon said.

There has been no official comment from the United States, Russia or Ukraine about the alleged behind-the-scenes contacts surrounding Kolokoltsev’s visit. Interestingly, the Russian minister’s plane was spotted with former US President Donald Trump’s plane upon its arrival in Washington.

Trump has vowed he can quickly end the debilitating war if re-elected and has hinted that would include ceding territory in Ukraine in exchange for security guarantees that it would be nothing more than a NATO member.

Kolokoltsev, 63, was Putin’s interior minister and head of the Russian police for 12 years.