US President Donald Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine answer questions from reporters in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. Photo / Doug Mills, The New York Times
For United States President Donald Trump, the map of Ukraine on an easel in the Oval Office had an obvious message.
Russia has taken a big chunk of territory in an eastern region known as the Donbas. That territory, shaded in red, was gone. Ukraine needed to make a deal to get peace, or it risked losing more.
For President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, the map, displayed at a meeting last week with the two presidents and European leaders, presented a far more complicated picture.
This was not a business deal or a poker game. This was personal.
Away from the cameras, he told Trump that his grandfather had fought in World War II to free the cities of the Donbas from the Nazis. He could not just give it up.
On Thursday, hours after he returned to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, Zelenskyy reiterated the point.
“There were many such families” who fought to free the Donbas, Zelenskyy told reporters.
“Many fell and many were wounded. And I explained that this is a particularly painful moment in our history and a particularly painful part of life in Ukraine. It is not as simple as it may appear to some.”
It is not clear where exactly the recent flurry of diplomacy spearheaded by Trump to end the deadliest war in Europe since World War II will lead.
But the Donbas — a mineral-rich territory that consists mainly of two regions, Donetsk and Luhansk — will be at the centre of any negotiations.
The Donbas is where much of this war has been fought.
Tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides have died there for the smallest of gains.
Russia is now trying to seize the last 6475sq km of the Donbas still under Ukrainian control.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia has demanded that Ukraine give up all of the Donbas.
His demand includes even the part run by Kyiv, where more than 200,000 Ukrainians live in cities like Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, places Zelenskyy’s grandfather fought to defend.
For years, Putin has tried to use the Donbas to manipulate the Ukrainian Government.
Before invading, he exploited a Russian-backed insurgency in the region as a wedge against Ukraine’s hopes to join Western organisations like Nato.
And now, in the fourth year of this war, he wants to not just seize the Donbas, but to use it to politically torpedo Zelenskyy, analysts said.
Most Ukrainians still oppose ceding any territory to Russia, polls show, and the Ukrainian Constitution prohibits surrendering it.
Zelenskyy faces the choice of either supporting something unpopular with Ukrainians or risking Trump’s ire.
“It is a poison pill,” said Vadym Prystaiko, a former Foreign Affairs Minister. “Ukraine will have to swallow it and then we’ll see how Ukraine will digest it.”
Zelenskyy has avoided questions from journalists about whether he would give up land, saying he could discuss this issue only with Putin, who has not yet agreed to meet him.
Former Ukrainian officials and political analysts said the only way Zelenskyy could convince Ukrainians to cede territory would be to deliver an American-backed security guarantee. That has eluded Ukraine since Trump ruled out Nato membership.
The guarantee would have to be strong, with some mixture of European troops and US air support, for example, that would deter Russia from future attacks.
Balazs Jarabik, a former political adviser for the European Union in Kyiv, said Ukraine may have reached a point where it could accept ceding territory “for a peace deal which brings Western security guarantees for Ukraine”.
He added: “If in exchange, it should get rid of the Donbas, I think it would”.
Trump has framed these territorial concessions as “land swaps”, suggesting that Russia, which controls nearly 20% of Ukraine, might return some territory, possibly small slivers of land in northeastern Ukraine.
The Trump Administration believes “that these land swaps are really beneficial for Ukraine because they believe Donbas will fall soon, and then Ukraine will have no cards to negotiate further”, said Maksym Skrypchenko, the president of the Transatlantic Dialogue Centre, a research group in Kyiv.
Ukrainians see it differently, he added.
Russia’s advance in the region has been slow over the past three years.
Giving up the rest of the Donbas now would also mean handing over cities and fortifications that could help Russia begin a future invasion.
The Donbas used to be seen as a pro-Russian backwater.
Many of the 6.7 million residents spoke only Russian and no Ukrainian, and nine out of 10 people voted for a pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2010.
When pro-European protests forced Yanukovych to resign in early 2014, Russia reacted swiftly.
First it seized the Crimean Peninsula. Then it fomented separatist movements which, with the help of Russian troops, seized a third of the Donbas in a low-scale conflict that foreshadowed the current war.
Ukraine’s Government considered granting self-government to certain areas of the Donbas to settle the conflict after a peace accord negotiated in February 2015 in Belarus, although Putin wanted any autonomous Donbas to have veto power over Kyiv, especially over its hopes to join Nato.
“The point was to turn Ukraine into a country which could not exercise its full sovereignty, especially when it came to its foreign policy,” said Harry Nedelcu, a senior director at Rasmussen Global, a research organisation.
As negotiations dragged on, Zelenskyy, a political novice, ran for Ukrainian president in 2019 on the promise of bringing peace with Russia.
Zelenskyy won. Back then, he was open to the idea of a compromise and granting “special status” to the Donbas region.
He thought he could make a deal to end the war at a peace summit in Paris with Putin in December 2019.
At home, he faced political pressure to avoid any deal that would relinquish Ukrainian control over the Donbas.
“It seemed like you could get along” with the Russians, said Ihor Novikov, a presidential adviser at the time, noting that Moscow had agreed to prisoner swaps and seemed interested in negotiating.
“As soon as that meeting in Paris happened, I think Zelenskyy was actually the first person to realise that you can’t make a deal with Russia,” he said.
“And he did a U-turn in Paris, and it angered Putin.”
In February 2022, Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, chewing up cities in the Donbas and driving millions from their homes.
Shocked by the invasion, Zelenskyy appeared to reconsider granting some form of autonomy to the Donbas.
“We can discuss and find a compromise on how these territories will live on,” he told ABC News a week into the invasion.
After Ukrainian troops pushed back Russian forces, and after mass slaughters of Ukrainian civilians became public, his views changed again.
He pushed for Ukraine to reclaim the Donbas, even the parts Russia had seized before the invasion.
Jarabik, now an analyst at R. Politik, a political analysis firm in Europe, said Ukraine then shifted from that position, embodied in the bloody battle to keep the city of Bakhmut.
It began making slow retreats after long fights that forced Russia to lose many soldiers.
Ukraine was “essentially trading territory for Russian lives”, Jarabik said.
As Russia pushed on the battlefield, Zelenskyy for the first time last northern autumn talked about the idea of temporarily ceding occupied territory to Russia in exchange for the security guarantee of joining Nato.
Trump jettisoned that idea.
But in a win for Zelenskyy, Trump said last week that the US would participate in security guarantees for Ukraine. Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State and national security adviser, is leading efforts to work out the details.
Whether Russia would accept such guarantees is the real question.
Ukraine wants Nato-like protections, but Russia started the war in the Donbas a decade ago in part to block Kyiv’s path to Nato.
Why would Russia allow serious security guarantees now?
“So basically, we’re back to square one,” said Nedelcu, the analyst from Rasmussen Global.
He said unless a change were forced on Putin, “nothing will happen” with the peace talks in the near future.
Instead, he added, “I see more fighting happening”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kim Barker and Constant Meheut
Photographs by: Doug Mills, Tyler Hicks
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