By Guy Faulconbridge and Vladimir Soldatkin

St Petersburg, Russia (Reuters) -Russian President Vladimir Putin withdrew on Friday that according to him, the whole Ukraine was “ours” and warned that the advancement of Russian forces could take over the city of Sumy’s Ukraine as part of an offer to carve a Buffer area along the border.

Putin, who ordered the troops in Ukraine in 2022 after eight years of fighting in Eastern Ukraine, also said he was not seeking the capitulation of Ukraine or denying the sovereignty of Ukraine, but that Ukraine had to be neutral.

Russia currently controls about one -fifth of Ukraine, including crimes, more than 99% of the Luhansk region, over 70% of the Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kersson regions, and fragments of Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnpropetrovsk.

Asked about the fresh Russian advances, Putin told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that he regarded the Russians and the Ukrainians as a people and “in this sense the whole Ukraine is ours.”

Kyiv and its Western allies say Moscow’s claims for four Ukrainian and Crimea regions are illegal, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly rejected the idea that the Russians and Ukrainians are a people.

He also said Putin’s conditions for peace are similar to capitulation.

Putin said on Friday that he was not questioning Ukrainian independence or her people’s attempt to sovereignty, but he underlined that when Ukraine declared independence after the Soviet Union fell in 1991, he had also declared its neutrality.

Putin said that Moscow wanted Ukraine to accept the reality on the ground if there was a chance for peace – Russia’s short of control over Russia over part of Ukraine’s territory greater than the US state of Virginia.

“We have a saying, or a parable,” Putin said. “When the foot of a Russian soldier step. That’s ours.”

Putin said Russian forces were carving a buffer area in the Sumy region of Ukraine to protect Russian territory and said he did not exclude the same troops taking control of Sumy’s regional capital.

The depth of the area under Russian control in the Sumy region was 8-12 km, Putin said.

“The other is the city of Sumy, the regional center. We have no duty to get it, but in principle I do not exclude it,” he said.

(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Osborn)