Putin made the remarks in St. Petersburg during a meeting with Russian Navy personnel, according to state news agency TASS, framing Kyiv's western regions as historically Polish, Hungarian and Romanian land now on borrowed time.
"I am convinced that sooner or later Ukraine will lose its western territories, lands that once belonged to Poland, Hungary and Romania", he said. "Maybe it won't happen tomorrow or the day after. It could take a year, two years, 10 or 15 years, but history will ultimately put everything in its place".
He said those territories had only ended up under Kyiv's control because Soviet leader Josef Stalin folded them into Ukraine as part of a single unified state, never anticipating today's split between Moscow and Kyiv.
Putin also repeated Moscow's long-standing narrative that Russia, not the West, had been the true guarantor of Ukraine's territorial integrity, until Kyiv turned against Moscow and came to treat it as an enemy.
He blamed the broader war on what he described as years of escalating Western aggression, including NATO's eastward expansion despite past assurances it would not happen, saying this ultimately forced Russia into launching its "special military operation".
Recalling events preceding the war, Putin said Ukraine's president at the time had favored EU membership but had opposed joining NATO — a position he said was upended by what he called an unconstitutional, bloody coup.
"The entire West acted as if nothing had happened, as if that was how things were supposed to be", he said.
"It was these aggressive actions, intensifying year after year, that led to today's conflict in Ukraine", Putin said. "They forced us to launch the special military operation to end hostilities that had earlier been started by the West and the authorities in Kyiv on part of the territory of what was then Ukraine".
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Source: Polish Radio