Russian President Vladimir Putin says peace talks with Ukraine had hit a dead end, using his first public comments on the conflict in more than a week to vow his troops would win and to goad the West for failing to bring Moscow to heel.
Addressing the war in public for the first time since Russian forces retreated from northern Ukraine after they were halted at the gates of Kyiv, Putin on Tuesday promised that Russia would achieve all of its "noble" aims in Ukraine.
In the strongest signal to date that the war will grind on for longer, Putin said Kyiv had derailed peace talks by staging what he said were fake claims of Russian war crimes and by demanding security guarantees to cover the whole of Ukraine.
"We have again returned to a dead-end situation for us," Putin, Russia's paramount leader since 1999, told a news briefing during a visit to the Vostochny Cosmodrome 5550km east of Moscow.
Asked by Russian space agency workers if the operation in Ukraine would achieve its goals, Putin said: "Absolutely. I don't have any doubt at all."
Russia will "rhythmically and calmly" continue its operation but the most important strategic conclusion was that the unipolar international order which the United States had built after the Cold War was breaking up, Putin said.
Putin said Russia had no choice but to fight because it had to defend the Russian speakers of eastern Ukraine and prevent its former Soviet neighbour from becoming an anti-Russian springboard for Moscow's enemies.
The West has condemned the war as a brutal imperial-style land grab targeting a sovereign country. Ukraine says it is fighting for its survival after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and on February 21 recognised two of its rebel regions as sovereign.
Putin dismissed the West's sanctions, which have tipped Russia towards its worst recession since the years following the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, as a failure.
"That Blitzkrieg on which our foes were counting did not work," Putin said. "The United States is ready to fight with Russia until the last Ukrainian - that is the way it is."
Putin, who had been ubiquitous on Russian television in the early days of the war, had largely retreated from public view since Russia's withdrawal from northern Ukraine two weeks ago.
His only public appearance in the past week was at the funeral of a nationalist lawmaker, where he did not directly address the war. On Monday he met the visiting chancellor of Austria at a country residence outside Moscow but no images of that meeting were released.
Meanwhile, Ukraine on Tuesday said it arrested the Kremlin's most prominent ally in the country.
In February, Ukraine said Viktor Medvedchuk, the leader of the Opposition Platform - For Life party, escaped from house arrest after the authorities opened a treason case against him.
The pro-Russian figure, who says Putin is godfather to his daughter, has denied wrongdoing. On Tuesday a spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
"Pro-Russian traitors and agents of the Russian intelligence services, remember - your crimes have no statute of limitations," Ukraine's security service posted on Facebook alongside a photo of Medvedchuk in handcuffs.
Operatives "conducted this lightning-fast and dangerous multi-level special operation", the head of the organisation Ivan Bakanov said.
A Kremlin spokesman was cited by the Tass news agency as saying he had seen the photo and could not say whether it was genuine.
'BUCHA IS FAKE'
Putin dismissed Ukrainian and Western claims that Russia had committed war crimes as fakes.
Since Russian troops withdrew from towns and villages around the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Ukrainian troops have been showing journalists corpses of what they say are civilians killed by Russian forces, destroyed houses and burnt-out cars.
Reuters saw dead bodies in the town of Bucha but could not independently verify who was responsible for the killings. Ukraine says Russia is guilty of genocide and United States President Joe Biden has accused Putin of war crimes and called for a trial.
Putin said he had told Western leaders to think a little about destruction by the United States of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the former de facto capital of the Islamic State caliphate, and in Afghanistan.
"Have you seen how this Syrian city was turned to rubble by American aircraft? Corpses lay in the ruins for months decomposing," Putin said. "Nobody cared. No one even noticed."
"There was no such silence when provocations were staged in Syria, when they portrayed the use of chemical weapons by the Assad government. Then it turned out that it was fake. It's the same kind of fake in Bucha."
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has found that poison gas was used repeatedly in Syria, including in Ghouta, an opposition-held suburb of Damascus. Russia has objected to those findings that implicated its ally Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
Washington and its allies have denied targeting civilians in the 2017 air strikes on Raqqa, a Syrian city that had become the headquarters of the Islamic State militant movement the US-led coalition was fighting.
Putin, who says Ukraine and Russia are essentially one people, casts the war as an inevitable confrontation with the United States, which he accuses of threatening Russia by meddling in its backyard.
Sixty one years to the day since the Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin blasted off into the history books by becoming the first man in space, Putin drew an analogy between Soviet space successes and Russia's defiance today.
"The sanctions were total, the isolation was complete but the Soviet Union was still first in space," he said.
"We don't intend to be isolated," Putin added. "It is impossible to severely isolate anyone in the modern world - especially such a vast country as Russia."
MARIUPOL DENOUEMENT
Moscow's nearly seven-week long incursion, the biggest attack on a European state since 1945, has seen more than 4.6 million people flee abroad, killed or injured thousands and led to Russia's near total isolation on the world stage.
Russia says it launched what it calls a "special military operation" on February 24 to demilitarise and "denazify" Ukraine. Kyiv and its Western allies reject that as a false pretext.
Russian tanks pulled out of northern Ukraine after failing in what the West believes was a mission to swiftly capture the capital Kyiv. Many of the towns they left behind were littered with the bodies of civilians killed in what Kyiv says was a campaign of murder, torture and rape.
Russia says its campaign now aims to capture more territory on behalf of separatists in two eastern provinces, a region known as the Donbas. It includes Mariupol port, which has been reduced to a wasteland under Russian siege.
Ukraine says tens of thousands of civilians have been trapped inside that city with no way to bring in food or water, and accuses Russia of blocking aid convoys.
The battle for Mariupol appeared on Tuesday to be reaching a decisive phase, with Ukrainian marines holed up in the Azovstal industrial district. Reuters journalists accompanying Russian-backed separatists saw flames billowing from the Azovstal district.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the eastern Donetsk region, which includes Mariupol, said he had seen incident reports on possible chemical weapons use in the city but could not confirm them.
"We know that last night around midnight a drone dropped some so-far unknown explosive device, and the people that were in and around the Mariupol metal plant, there were three people, they began to feel unwell," he told CNN.
They were taken to hospital and their lives were not in danger, he said.
Late on Tuesday, Ukraine said its forces in the east had beaten off six Russian attacks, destroying two vehicles and three artillery systems as well as shooting down a helicopter and two drones. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
