The Ukrainian president said his government is "carefully" considering Russia's demand of neutrality, a key point of disagreement as negotiators from both sides are expected to convene in Turkey for a fresh round of talks aimed at ending the war.
"This point of the negotiations is understandable to me and it is being discussed, it is being carefully studied," President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said during an interview with several independent Russian news organizations.
The United Nations estimates that at least 1,100 civilians have died and more than 10 million have been displaced in a devastating war that has gone on far longer than Moscow leaders expected.
The new talks – starting in Turkey on either Monday or Tuesday, according to conflicting reports – come after the Russian army said it would begin focusing on eastern Ukraine in a move some analysts saw as a scaling back of Moscow's ambitions.
But U.S. President Joe Biden questioned that interpretation – and may have roiled the coming talks by saying in Warsaw that Russian President Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power."
The ad-libbed remark – which the White House swiftly tried to roll back – sparked outrage in Moscow and sowed widespread concern in Washington and abroad, seeming to undercut Biden's own efforts on a European visit to underscore a carefully crafted unity in support of Kyiv.
France's President Emmanuel Macron warned that any escalation "in words or action" could harm his efforts in talks with Putin to agree on evacuating civilians from the devastated port city of Mariupol.
Neither intense diplomacy nor steadily mounting sanctions have persuaded Putin to halt the war.
But as the Russians face serious tactical and logistical problems, Ukraine's intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said Putin might be seeking to divide the country in a Korea-like fashion – to "impose a separation line between the occupied and unoccupied regions."
"After a failure to capture Kyiv and remove Ukraine's government, Putin is changing his main operational directions. These are south and east," he wrote on Facebook. "It will be an attempt to set up South and North Koreas in Ukraine."
Russia may try to establish a quasi-state of occupied zones with its own currency, he said, while adding that Ukrainian forces could foil those plans.
A neutral Ukraine?
A key demand from Putin, even before his troops rolled into Ukraine on Feb. 24, was that it renounce its stated intention of eventually joining NATO.
The Kremlin earlier this month said Sweden and Austria offered models of neutrality that Ukraine could adopt.
Kyiv rejected the proposal, and in his interview with Russian journalists, Zelenskyy accused Putin of dragging out negotiations and prolonging the conflict.
NATO's 1949 treaty gives any European nation the right to apply for membership, and U.S. deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman said in January that "we will not slam the door shut on NATO's open-door policy."
But NATO members have said Ukraine membership is a distant option at best. Were Kyiv to join the 30-member Western alliance, NATO would be committed to helping defend it against any future attack.
The new round of talks come as Russia has de facto control over the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics in the country's eastern Donbass region.
The head of Ukraine's Luhansk separatist region said it may hold a referendum on becoming part of Russia – a move immediately slammed by Kyiv.
As Russian forces continued a devastating siege of Mariupol – a key obstacle to Moscow's ambition of gaining unbroken control from the Donbass to the Crimean Peninsula – its residents have recounted harrowing scenes of destruction and death.
Ukraine was making a new push to get civilians out on Sunday, with an aid route agreement for people to leave by car or bus, said Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk.
Several earlier attempts at establishing safe exit routes for the 170,000 civilians trapped in the city have collapsed amid mutual finger-pointing.
Macron said Sunday he would speak to Putin in the next two days to organize "a cease-fire and then the total withdrawal of (Russian) troops by diplomatic means" to allow full evacuation.
"If we want to do that, we can't escalate either in words or actions," he told broadcaster France 3, moving to dial down Biden's blunt words against Putin.