President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, under pressure from increased Ukrainian strikes at home, appeared in fatigues in a rare frontline visit to a support post late Friday, where he touted battlefield progress and threatened to take more of Ukraine outside the Donbas region.
Mr. Putin’s appearance was the latest indication that he was doubling down in the face of Ukraine’s expanding barrages. It appeared designed to show the Russian public that the heightened Ukrainian strikes in recent weeks would receive a response and won’t derail the Russian leader’s battlefield aims.
The visit took place two days after Mr. Putin launched one of the biggest attacks on Kyiv of the war, which left at least 30 people dead and was widely seen as a delayed response to a string of Ukrainian successes of late that have brought the war home for more Russians.
In recent weeks, Ukraine has caused fuel shortages across Russia with widespread strikes on Russian oil refineries and launched the biggest drone attack on Moscow of the war. Kyiv has also escalated an air campaign to cut off and squeeze Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, causing rolling power outages and fuel and water shortages.
During Friday’s appearance, Mr. Putin warned that the more Ukraine attacked Russia’s civilian infrastructure, the more territory he would take as a “security zone” in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions.
“This, like other territories we are discussing today, is historically Russian land,” Mr. Putin said in response to a presentation from one of his commanders about Russian operations in those Ukrainian regions.
Kyiv’s recent successes far from the battlefield have led to a shift in global perception of the war, with the Ukrainians appearing to be more on the front foot, despite facing troop shortages that have prevented them from retaking significant territory on the front line.
In recent days, the Kremlin has aggressively sought to challenge the emerging narrative by touting Russia’s battlefield progress, even though Moscow’s forces have been moving particularly slowly in recent months owing to a conflict zone that is now saturated with drones.
Any narrative of Ukrainian momentum would undermine one of the Kremlin’s key arguments in peace talks with President Trump: that Kyiv should hand over territory in the Donbas region that Russia hasn’t taken yet, because its loss is inevitable.
The Donbas comprises the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine. Mr. Putin has vowed to take the entirety of both regions, but Ukraine still holds a heavily fortified area of the Donetsk region that is about the size of Delaware.
Ukraine’s increased strikes on Russia and Crimea also come against the backdrop of growing exhaustion with the war among the Russian public and a worsening economic situation.
During the command post visit on Friday, Mr. Putin denounced what he called Ukraine’s “imaginary achievements” and “successes that we know don’t actually exist.”
He called Ukrainian leaders play actors who “don’t really know how to do anything else and haven’t been trained to do anything else,” a pointed dig at President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, a former comedian.
Mr. Putin said Ukraine’s “blustery announcements” about those successes would play into Russia’s hands because Kyiv’s leaders were deceiving themselves as well as their backers.
Mr. Zelensky has said his strikes on Russia are aimed at pressuring Mr. Putin to end the war. They also help shore up Ukraine’s reputation with its Western backers and U.S. negotiators by countering the narrative that Ukraine has no cards left to play.
Mr. Putin spent most of the visit sitting beside battlefield maps and receiving highly specific reports from his military commanders, who included Russia’s top military officer, Gen. Valery Gerasimov. The intended messaging was clear: Mr. Putin is moving forward with his battlefield ambitions and won’t be deterred, even as Ukraine erodes his ability to isolate Russians from the war.
Over the course of the conflict, which is now in its fifth year, visits by the Russian leader to the battlefield have been relatively rare.
When he has traveled to the front line, he has almost always appeared in nondescript battlefield command rooms like the one pictured Friday, in contrast to Mr. Zelensky, who has donned bulletproof vests in frontline hot spots and publicly visited rank-and-file troops.
When Mr. Putin does appear near the front in fatigues, it is almost always at some inflection point in the war, when the Kremlin is trying to underscore a victory or make a point.
Last year, for example, Mr. Putin appeared at a command post shortly after Russia retook control of a part of its western Kursk region that had been occupied by Ukrainian troops.
Advancements in Ukrainian drone and missile production have enabled Kyiv to send bigger barrages against Russian territory that can overwhelm air defenses. Ukraine, however, still lacks Russia’s arsenal of destructive ballistic missiles.
During his meeting with commanders, Mr. Putin demanded that their forces pursue “massive strikes against the infrastructure of Ukraine’s military-industrial complex.”
The Russian leader also issued a vague threat against Ukraine’s European allies, calling for an “analysis” of the involvement of each nation in each Ukrainian operation “for possible responsible decision-making in the future, in case we may need it.”
Valerie Hopkins contributed to this report.
