Putin’s plan to split Ukraine ‘like Korea’ amid battle for Moscow-held regions

Ukraine’s head of military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov said despot Vladimir Putin was planning to carve-up his country to “create North and South Korea in Ukraine”

Vladimir Putin wants to split Ukraine in two like North and South Korea, a military official has claimed.

Ukraine ‘s head of military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov said the despot was planning to “create North and South Korea in Ukraine”.

Mr Budanov was referring to the carving-up of Korea into two separate states after World War Two.

He predicted Russian forces will be pushed back with a new phase of military action that he called “Ukrainian guerilla safari”.

He said: “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.”

It comes as the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged the West to give Ukraine tanks, planes and missiles to help fend off the Russian forces, which the Kyiv government said were increasingly targeting fuel and food depots.

In its latest military assessment, the British Ministry of Defence said Russian forces appeared to be concentrating their efforts on encircling Ukrainian troops directly facing separatist regions in the east.

“The battlefield across northern Ukraine remains largely static with local Ukrainian counterattacks hampering Russian attempts to reorganise their forces,” the ministry said.

After more than four weeks of conflict, Russia has failed to seize any major Ukrainian city and Moscow signalled on Friday it was scaling back its ambitions to focus on securing the Donbass 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 recognise.

Moscow says the goals for what Putin calls a “special military operation” include demilitarising and “denazifying” its neighbour. Ukraine and its Western allies calls this a pretext for an unprovoked invasion.

The invasion has devastated several Ukrainian cities, caused a major humanitarian crisis and displaced an estimated 10 million people, nearly a quarter of Ukraine’s total population.

In a late-night television address on Saturday, Zelenskiy demanded that Western nations hand over military hardware that was “gathering dust” in stockpiles, saying his nation needed just 1% of NATO’s aircraft and 1% of its tanks.

Western nations have so far given Ukraine anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles as well as small arms and protective equipment, but have not offered any heavy armour or planes.

“We’ve already been waiting 31 days. Who is in charge of the Euro-Atlantic community? Is it really still Moscow, because of intimidation?” Zelenskiy said, suggesting Western leaders were holding back on supplies because they were frightened of Russia.

Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Vadym Denysenko said on Sunday that Russia had started destroying Ukrainian fuel and food storage centres, meaning the government would have to disperse stocks of both in the near future.

Appearing to confirm that, the Russian defence ministry said its missiles had wrecked a fuel deposit on Saturday as well as a military repair plant near the western city of Lviv, just 60 km (40 miles) from the Polish border.