Volodymyr Zelenskyy has admitted that Ukraine cannot overpower Russia militarily to beat it back from the territories it has annexed.

The Ukrainian president said that the only way that Crimea and eastern Ukraine could be brought back under Kyiv’s control was via diplomacy.

His comments mark a change from his previous stance, in which he had declared that Ukraine could reconquer the territory ceded in 2014 and since the 2022 invasion.

It came as Keir Starmer urged Donald Trump not to go back on US support for Ukraine, as the president-elect prepares for power in January.

Mr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday: “We cannot give up our territories. The Ukrainian constitution forbids us to do so.

“De facto, these territories are now controlled by the Russians. We do not have the strength to recover them,” he told Le Parisien, a French newspaper.

“We can only count on diplomatic pressure from the international community to force Putin to sit down at the negotiating table.”

Russia took Crimea, a prized peninsula jutting from the south of Ukraine into the Black Sea, via a dubious referendum ten years ago.

Kremlin-linked forces also took much of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and most of the area is now under Russian control.

Russia has also conquered much of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, without seizing the main cities in either. The Kremlin has said that both regions are legally Russian, a claim that Ukraine and its Western allies reject.