Russia will seize Donbas as well as Ukraine’s southern and eastern regions one way or another, President Vladimir Putin warned Thursday in an interview with the India Today television channel.

“It all comes down to this. Either we liberate these territories by force of arms, or Ukrainian troops leave these territories and stop fighting there,” Putin told the Indian news station ahead of a visit to New Delhi, where he is due to meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Russian leader’s statement comes during yet another round of peace efforts spearheaded by American officials and reaffirms that he has no intention of backing down from his maximalist war goals.

According to open-source maps of the conflict, Russian forces now control about 80 percent of the Donbas region, made up of Donetsk and Luhansk. Russia this week claimed it had — after more than a year of fighting — captured the key city of Pokrovsk, which Ukraine has rejected.

Ceding Donbas was one of the points in the 28-point-plan, circulated by U.S. President Donald Trump’s team, which drew criticism from Ukrainian and European officials as heavily lopsided in Russia’s favor. An updated proposal watered down some of the more pro-Russian aspects of the initial plan.

Meetings between U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Putin to discuss the updated plan yielded no progress toward ending the war in Ukraine, and instead saw the Kremlin blaming Europe for thwarting the peace process.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly vowed that Ukraine will not give up Donbas as part of the ceasefire deal as that would give Putin a springboard for a future invasion.