Russia has repeatedly painted modern Ukraine as a Nazi state, in a crass distortion of history. Putin had already seized Ukraine's Crimean peninsula eight years earlier, after a revolution that ousted Ukraine's pro-Russian president and replaced him with a more pro-Western government.

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.