'Neutral' is a movable feast - Ireland is neutral (well kind of) with military capabilities only marginally greater than your local police force. Finland is also kind of neutral, with an army of 200,000, fast jets, artillery, surface to air missiles etc...
Switzerland is properly neutral, and is tooled up to fuck.
I rather suspect that when Putin says neutral, he means Ukraine being firmly within the Russian sphere of interest, plugged into the Russian electricity grid, no fast jets, a coastguard instead of a Navy, a barely armed and barely existing army, and constitutional links with Russia...