Ahead of new peace talks, Zelensky says eying Russia neutrality demand

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday his government is "carefully" considering a Russian demand for Ukrainian neutrality, a key point of contention as negotiators for both sides prepare for a fresh round of talks aimed at ending the brutal month-long war.

"This point of the negotiations is understandable to me and it is being discussed, it is being carefully studied," Zelensky said during an interview with several independent Russian news organisations.

The UN estimates that at least 1,100 civilians have died and more than 10 million have been displaced in a devastating war that has gone on far longer than Moscow leaders expected.

The new talks -- starting in Turkey on either Monday or Tuesday, according to conflicting reports -- come after the Russian army said it would begin focusing on eastern Ukraine in a move some analysts saw as a scaling back of Moscow's ambitions.

But US President Joe Biden questioned that interpretation -- and may have roiled the coming talks by saying in Warsaw that Russian President Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power".

The ad-libbed remark sparked outrage in Moscow and sowed widespread concern in Washington and abroad, seeming to undercut Biden's own efforts on a European visit to underscore a carefully crafted unity in support of Kyiv.

Asked by reporters Sunday if he had been calling for regime change, Biden responded: "No." German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also told the media that was "not the objective of NATO, nor that of the US president."

But France's President Emmanuel Macron warned that any escalation "in words or action" could harm his efforts in talks with Putin to agree on evacuating civilians from the devastated port city of Mariupol.

Neither intense diplomacy nor steadily mounting sanctions have persuaded Putin to halt the war.

But as the Russians face serious tactical and logistical problems, Ukraine's intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said Putin might be seeking to divide the country in Korea-like fashion -- to "impose a separation line between the occupied and unoccupied regions".

"After a failure to capture Kyiv and remove Ukraine's government, Putin is changing his main operational directions. These are south and east," he wrote on Facebook. "It will be an attempt to set up South and North Koreans in Ukraine."