Putin wants US to formally recognize all land Russia has taken in Ukraine

PHOTO CAPTION: Illustrative photo — a Pro-Russian service member stands in a street during the battle of Mariupol, Ukraine, March 31, 2022. (Reuters)

MOSCOW (Reuters) -     President Vladimir Putin wants U.S. President Donald Trump to formally recognise all four Ukrainian regions that Moscow has claimed as its own in addition to Crimea, Russia's Kommersant daily reported.

Citing unnamed sources who attended a private business event with Putin on Tuesday, Kommersant said that Putin wanted the U.S. to formally recognise the four regions - Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson - as part of Russia along with Crimea, which Moscow seized and annexed in 2014.

Russia, though advancing on the battlefield, does not fully control any of the four regions. 

In return for recognition and if it happened "in the near future", Kommersant said Putin would undertake not to lay claim to the Ukrainian port city of Odesa and other Ukrainian territory.

Asked about the Kommersant report on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin and Trump had not discussed the idea on their call on Tuesday.

But he confirmed, without elaborating, that Putin had discussed the conflict in Ukraine at Tuesday's closed door meeting with members of Russia's business elite. 

Peskov did not confirm, however, whether Putin had floated the idea of the U.S. recognising the four regions in addition to Crimea at the meeting.  

 (Reporting by Dmitry Antonov; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Alison Williams)