Vladimir Putin said Russia is building a Russia-Ukraine border security zone inside Ukraine along the border. He said the plan will not be part of any future peace negotiations, putting Sumy and Kharkiv directly in the frame.
On Friday, Putin said Russian armed forces were tasked with expelling the enemy from Russian land and establishing a security zone in the adjacent territory. He said, “The Russian armed forces were tasked not only with expelling the enemy from our land but also with establishing a security zone in the adjacent territory. This task is being carried out successfully.”
The Kremlin's 660km plan
Dmitry Peskov said the planned zone spans 660km, or 410 miles, and that 70% of it is currently under Russia's control. That leaves the question of depth unresolved: Peskov did not say how far inside Ukraine the line would run, only that the carve-out would stretch across border areas tied to Sumy and Kharkiv.
The figures point to a project that is already partly in place rather than a fresh declaration of intent. A 660km strip inside Ukraine would cover a long frontier, and the 70% figure means Russia is treating the zone as a military fact on the ground, not just a negotiating demand.
Oleksandr Prokudin in Kherson
The announcement landed as Russian attacks across Ukraine continued to exact a toll. Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram that a Russian airstrike on Kherson killed one ambulance driver and injured 19 others, including a child.
Friday's attacks also killed at least eight people and injured 60 across Ukraine. In Kharkiv, two people were killed and 12 more wounded in attacks on three districts; in Kramatorsk in Donetsk, two people were killed; in Dnipropetrovsk, another two people were killed; in Volyn, a drone strike on a food-processing facility killed one person, wounded eight, and left 370,000 people temporarily without power.
Dmitry Peskov withholds depth
The sharpest friction in Putin's message is that the Russian president set a political boundary while Peskov stopped short of defining the military one. Putin said the zone is not negotiable; Peskov gave the length, the current control figure, and nothing on depth, which is the detail that will shape how much land inside Ukraine is actually absorbed into the new line.
Donald Trump also put on hold a sweeping new sanctions package targeting the Russian economy, and said Ukraine's renewed strikes on Russian oil refineries were “a disgrace.” Volodymyr Zelenskyy met European leaders in Brussels and asked the EU for another €70bn next year to fund Ukraine's defence, while saying the Ukrainian military's access to Starlink had not yet been fully restored.
For border communities, the immediate issue is no longer whether Russia is talking about a security zone, but how much of Sumy and Kharkiv it expects to hold before any talks begin. The next open question is the one Peskov did not answer: how deep inside Ukraine the planned zone will extend.
