Russian President Vladimir Putin met on Tuesday with Yevgeny Balytskyi, Russia’s appointed acting governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, which Putin has declared annexed in September 2022, where they discussed security issues and the volunteer battalion, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, citing CNN. .

“Various issues related to the development of the Zaporizhia region, the functioning of the economy and other aspects of the socio-economic situation were discussed,” Peskov told the Russian state news agency TASS.

Peskov also reported that “Balytsky raised the issue of the status of the volunteer battalion named after Sudoplatov before the president.”

In an interview with Crimea 24 TV channel on Monday, Balytskyi said that the “unsettled issue” of the status of volunteer battalions makes it difficult for them to obtain weapons.

At the end of September 2022, Putin announced that Russia had captured almost a fifth of Ukraine, including the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson regions. This move came after so-called referendums in these regions, which Ukraine and Western countries generally dismissed as “fake”.

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