Ukrainian forces still control 2,550 square miles of the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas, an area roughly the size of Delaware. For many, including President Donald Trump, who met with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday at the White House, that might seem like a small price to pay for ending a war that has lasted three and a half years and killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians.
After a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska last week, Trump appeared to shift his position on the end of the war, dropping his demand for an immediate ceasefire and telling European leaders he favored a plan that involves Ukraine ceding territory that has not yet been conquered by Russia.
While the details of what this would involve are still murky, Putin’s position at the Alaska summit was reportedly that Ukraine should give up the entirety of the regions that comprise the Donbas — Donetsk and Luhansk — meaning the Ukrainians would be withdrawing from their current positions. The front lines in two other regions Russia has claimed — Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — would be frozen.
It’s not clear exactly how much pressure Trump put on Zelenskyy to make this sacrifice when they met at the White House on Monday. But in fact, the concessions outlined in Russia’s latest proposal — as reported — could have far more profound implications for Ukraine’s security, and the globe’s, than the US administration appears to realize. It could lead to a more vulnerable, divided Ukraine as well as set a precedent that legitimizes militaries seizing territory by force.
Why Ukraine won’t part with the Donbas without a fight
Russian troops or Russian-backed proxies have occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions since 2014, and the Russian government formally annexed the regions in 2022, despite the fact that it still did not control all of them. Russian forces currently occupy all but a sliver of Luhansk and about 70 percent of Donetsk, so even foreigners sympathetic to Ukraine might wonder why it’s worth continuing to sacrifice Ukrainian lives over them.
For much of the war, the official Ukrainian position was that its forces would continue to fight until every square mile of Ukrainian territory was liberated, including areas Russia had occupied since 2014. Any movement on that position would be a painful sacrifice for Ukrainians, as Olena Halushka, a Kyiv-based activist and co-founder of the International Center for Ukrainian Victory, told Vox.
Still, particularly since Trump came to office, the public statements of Ukrainian officials have appeared to suggest that this might not be possible in the immediate future. And polls suggest most Ukrainians would support giving up some territory to end the war.
But there are major differences between an agreement freezing the current front lines in place, and ceding territory that Russia hasn’t yet won.
The first difference is what the agreement would require Ukraine’s military to do moving forward. Though Ukraine may only control a fraction of the Donbas, that fraction is a strategically important corridor known as Ukraine’s “fortress belt,” a roughly 50-kilometer line consisting of four cities and several towns that Ukraine has spent more than a decade building into heavily fortified defensive positions. The US-based Institute for the Study of War estimates it will take Russia years to take these cities at its current rate of advance, whereas if Ukraine ceded them, they would have to build up new defensive lines in much less favorable rural terrain.
Trump may accept Russian assurances that they have no further plans to conquer more Russian territory at face value, but Ukraine is unlikely to trust any Russian assurances. This is part of why Zelenskyy and the European leaders who visited the White House on Monday put such an emphasis on post-war security guarantees. But even with such guarantees, Ukraine will be very reluctant to agree to a settlement that leaves Russia in a far stronger position to make another attempt to push toward Kyiv.
The second reason is political. Even as he has conceded that Ukraine likely does not have the military might to retake all of its territory by force, Zelenskyy has maintained that under the Ukrainian constitution, he does not have the power to “give up territory or trade land.”
These two positions might seem irreconcilable, but they’re not. There’s precedent for agreeing to a deal that freezes territorial war in place, without conceding the other side’s claims. The Korean War technically never ended, even as the Koreas have mostly avoided outright combat since the signing of an armistice agreement in 1953. Even if the Russian-occupied regions remained under de facto Russian control, Ukraine and most of the world wouldn’t officially recognize that control.
There’s a significant difference between pragmatically accepting military realities, and signing a treaty that grants territory to Russia that it doesn’t currently control. At this point, Zelenskyy could probably sell Ukrainians on a deal that freezes the current front lines, painful as that might be. The country could still preserve the hope that it would one day be reunited with its lost regions, just as the Baltic countries regained their de facto independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Signing away land Ukrainian troops have been defending would be another matter.
“The battles for Bakhmut and Avdiyivka were among the fiercest of this war,” said Halushka, referring to two long sieges where the Ukrainians took heavy losses but managed to slow Russia’s advance through the Donbas. “What was the point then? The Russians can't break us on the battlefield, so they are aiming to break our morale.”
You can read Josh's full story on the Vox site here.
