After more than four weeks of conflict, Russia has failed to seize any major Ukrainian city and signaled on Friday it was scaling back its ambitions to focus on securing the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainian army for the past eight years.

A local leader in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic said on Sunday the region could soon hold a referendum on joining Russia, just as happened in Crimea after Russia seized the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014.

Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine and join Russia — a vote that much of the world refused to recognize.


"In fact, it is an attempt to create North and South Korea in Ukraine," Kyrylo Bu
danov, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, said in a statement, referring to the division of Korea after the Second World War.

He predicted Ukraine's army would repel Russian forces.

No reason to trust Russian rhetoric, says UN ambassador Bob Rae
"In addition, the season of a total Ukrainian guerrilla safari will soon begin. Then there will be one relevant scenario left for the Russians, how to survive," he said.

Ukraine's foreign ministry spokesperson also dismissed talk of any referendum in Eastern Ukraine.

"All fake referendums in the temporarily occupied territories are null and void and will have no legal validity," Oleg Nikolenko told Reuters.

However, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that Ukraine is willing to become neutral and compromise over the status of the Donbas region as part of a peace deal.

Zelensky took his message directly to Russian journalists in a video call that the Kremlin pre-emptively warned Russian media not to report, saying any agreement must be guaranteed by third parties and put to a referendum.

"Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it," he said, speaking in Russian.

In a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan agreed to hold talks this week in Istanbul and called for a ceasefire and better humanitarian conditions, his office said. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators confirmed that in-person talks would take place.

Moscow says the goals for what Putin calls a "special military operation" include demilitarizing and "denazifying" its neighbour. Ukraine and its Western allies call this a pretext for unprovoked invasion. Ukraine has described previous negotiations, some of which have taken place in Russian ally Belarus, as "very difficult."