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MOSCOW: Russia will seek a peace deal in Ukraine that safeguards its own long-term security and will not retreat from the gains it has made in the conflict, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday in comments to relatives of soldiers killed there.
Putin also took an indirect swipe at French President Emmanuel Macron, saying Western leaders should not underestimate the Russian people and should keep in mind the fate of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose invasion of Russia in 1812 ended in disaster.
“We must choose for ourselves a peace option that will suit us and that will ensure peace for our country in the long term,” Putin told a group of Russian women who have lost loved ones during the three-year war in Ukraine.
Asked by the mother of one fallen soldier if Russia would retreat, Putin said he did not intend to do that. Russia currently controls just under a fifth of Ukraine — or about 113,000 square km.
At times during the meeting some women wiped away tears.
US President Donald Trump has upended Western policy on the Ukraine war, opening up bilateral talks with Moscow and pausing military aid to Kyiv after clashing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House last week.
Reuters reported in November that Putin was open to discussing a Ukraine peace deal with Trump but ruled out any major territorial concessions and would insist that Kyiv abandon ambitions to join NATO.
In comments last summer setting out his terms for ending the war, Putin also said Ukraine must withdraw all its forces from the entire territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed and partly controlled by Russia.

Trump’s dramatic change of US policy on Ukraine has raised hopes for peace talks but has also alarmed Washington’s European allies who this week have reaffirmed their support for Kyiv.
France’s Macron angered Moscow on Wednesday when he said in an address to the nation that Russia was a threat to Europe.
Macron said Paris could discuss extending its nuclear umbrella to allies and that he would hold a meeting of army chiefs from European countries willing to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine after any peace deal.
Russia mocked Macron, calling him “Micron.” Russian cartoons cast him as France’s Emperor Napoleon riding toward defeat in Russia in 1812.
“There are still people who want to go back to the time of Napoleon, they forget how it ended,” Putin said on Thursday, without mentioning Macron by name.
“All the mistakes of our enemies and opponents began with this: in underestimating the character of the Russian people and representatives of Russian culture in general,” Putin added.

BUCHAREST: Romania detained six people on charges of trying to overthrow the state with Russia’s help, prosecutors said on Thursday, and a 101-year-old former army major general said his home had been raided as part of the investigation.
The suspects were detained on Wednesday, the same day Romania — a European Union and NATO member state — declared the Russian embassy’s military attache and his deputy personae non grata for what it said were acts contravening diplomatic rules.
Moscow has said it will respond to the move.

“The members of the criminal group repeatedly contacted agents of a foreign power, located both in Romania and the Russian Federation,” anti-organized crime prosecutors agency DIICOT said in a statement, which did not name the suspects.
Romania’s intelligence agency SRI said the two expelled Russian diplomats “collected information in areas of strategic interest and took measures to support the anti-constitutional moves of the group.”
Russia’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

MILITARY STRUCTURE
Prosecutors said the group had a military-type structure, with judicial sources naming 101-year-old former army major general Radu Theodoru as a suspect.
Theodoru, a Holocaust denier who has repeatedly praised Romania’s fascist World War Two leadership, said in a recorded interview with his daughter posted on his Facebook page that he believed the current government represented “an anti-Romanian state, a system organized to rob this country.”
“They wasted this country and now they defend themselves and find reasons to misinform the public,” he added. Theodoru did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Prosecutors said the group had taken steps to negotiate with external forces regarding the potential withdrawal of Romania, which shares a border with Ukraine, from the NATO military alliance.
They said the group aimed to install a new government and dissolve the current constitutional order, introducing a new flag, national anthem and changing the country’s name.
Political tensions have been running high in Romania since its top court voided the presidential election in December amid accusations of Russian interference — denied by Moscow — in favor of far-right frontrunner Calin Georgescu.
Georgescu is himself under investigation on six charges, all of which he denies.
The investigation announced on Thursday is unrelated to Georgescu, prosecution sources said. Judicial sources quoted by TV station Antena3 said one of the expelled Russian officials was loosely tied to a suspect in the Georgescu investigation.