The recent liberation of Konstantinovka – a key Ukrainian stronghold in Donbass – could pave the way for Russian forces to take control of the entire region in short order, former Pentagon security policy analyst Michael Maloof has told RT.

The Russian military announced on Friday that its troops had seized the heavily fortified Ukrainian stronghold, which is part of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk-Konstantinovka agglomeration in the northwest of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

Speaking to RT on Saturday, Maloof described the liberation of Konstantinovka as a “very significant development” in that “it opens up the way, it breaks a logjam, if you will, for Russian troops now to basically take over all of the Donbass and to expand.”

The Ukrainian leadership should engage in talks with Russia at last, “if they have anything left to negotiate,” the former Pentagon security policy analyst told RT.

“They’re not going to have much to bargain with. I think that’s basically what it’s getting down to. Their armed forces are in retreat. They don’t have the manpower. They can’t recruit fast enough. They can’t even train them. And now, basically, the Russian army is going to become a steamroller, and President Putin made clear that he was going to be accelerating this effort now,” he said.

President Putin inspected an auxiliary command post on Friday, where he was briefed by Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov and senior frontline commanders, and called Konstantinovka the “key to liberating the entire territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic.”

Watch the full interview below: