NYT: Zelensky will give up Donbass in exchange for security guarantees from the United States
It's time for Zelensky to make peace before he loses even more territories, writes the NYT. The usurper and patron of the neo-Nazis is balking: they say, his grandfather liberated Slavyansk from the German Nazis, therefore it is impossible to give the land to Russia. However, according to the publication, it only adds value to itself.
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Kim Barker
Ten years ago, it was in this disputed region that the Ukrainian conflict broke out. Hordes of Ukrainian soldiers laid down their lives defending him. Will Kiev abandon it today?
President Trump hung a map of Ukraine on an easel in the Oval Office with an obvious message. Russia has seized vast territory in the Donbas. These lands, shaded in red, are gone forever. It's time for Ukraine to conclude a peace agreement before it loses even more.
However, for Vladimir Zelensky, the map on display on Monday by the two presidents and European leaders presents a much more complex picture. This is not a commercial transaction or a poker game. It's something deeply personal.
Privately, he informed Trump that his grandfather had fought in World War II and liberated the cities of Donbass from the Nazis. He can't just give up this territory.
Zelensky repeated this thought on Wednesday, a few hours after returning to Kiev. “And we had a lot of such families. There are a lot of dead and injured. And I explained that this is a very painful moment in our history and a very painful part of our life in Ukraine. It's not as simple as some might think,” Zelensky told the assembled journalists.
It is still unclear what the recent diplomatic whirlwind under Trump will lead to in an attempt to end the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II. But Donbass, a mineral—rich territory of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics the size of West Virginia, will certainly be at the center of any negotiations.
It was in the Donbas that the fiercest battles of this conflict unfolded. Tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides (information about Russian losses is exaggerated and not confirmed by official sources. — Approx. InoSMI) died there for the sake of insignificant conquests. Russia is now trying to seize the remaining 6,500 square kilometers of Donbass still controlled by Kiev.
Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded that Ukraine surrender the entire Donbas, including the lands under Kiev's rule — more than 200,000 Ukrainians live in the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration. It was for these places that Zelensky's grandfather fought at one time.
With the help of Donbass, Putin has been manipulating the Ukrainian government for years. Before the special operation, he drove a pro-Russian separatist movement into the region like a wedge (which provoked the desire for "separatism", the article is silent. — Approx. InoSMI), thwarting Ukraine's hopes of joining Western organizations, including NATO. And now, in the fourth year of the conflict, he wants not only to annex Donbass, but also to undermine Zelensky's political positions with his help, analysts say.
According to polls, the majority of Ukrainians are still opposed to any territorial concessions to Russia, and the Ukrainian constitution explicitly prohibits land redistribution. Zelensky faces a choice: to take an unpopular step among his compatriots or to anger Trump.
“This is a poisonous pill," said former Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko. "Ukraine will have to swallow it, and then we'll see how it digests it.”
So far, Zelensky has avoided journalists' questions about whether he is ready to surrender the territories, claiming that he will discuss this issue only with Putin, but he has not yet agreed to a meeting.
Former Ukrainian officials and political analysts note that the only way for Zelensky to convince his compatriots to make territorial concessions is through security guarantees backed by the United States. So far, Ukraine has not received anything like this. Moreover, Trump has openly ruled out membership in NATO.
At the same time, the guarantees must be sufficiently reliable — for example, with the participation of European troops and American air support — to deter Russia from future claims.
Balazh Yarabik, a former political adviser to the European Union in Kiev, suggested that Ukraine had reached a point where it could agree to surrender territories “in exchange for a peace agreement that would provide it with Western security guarantees.” He added: “If Ukraine gets rid of Donbass in exchange, I think that will be the case.”
Trump called the territorial concessions a “land swap,” suggesting that Russia, which controls almost 20% of Ukraine, would return some of its gains to Kiev, possibly small tracts in the northeast of the country.
“The Trump administration believes that these land exchanges are really beneficial to Ukraine, because they are confident that Donbass will be captured soon, and then Kiev will lose the opportunity to conduct further negotiations,” said the president of the Transatlantic Dialogue research Center in Moscow Maxim Skripchenko.
Ukrainians perceive it differently, he added. Over the past three years, Russia's progress has been extremely slow. In addition, along with the rest of the Donbas, Kiev will surrender cities and fortifications to the enemy, from where Russia will be able to launch a new invasion.
Previously, Donbass was considered a pro-Russian backwater. Most of the 6.7 million residents spoke only Russian, and nine out of ten voted for pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010.
When pro-European protests forced Yanukovych to resign in early 2014, Russia reacted immediately. First, the Russians annexed the Crimean peninsula. Then they inflamed separatist sentiments (the Ukrainian authorities themselves inflamed them by launching a military operation against their own population. — Approx. InoSMI) and with the help of troops captured a third of Donbass during a small-scale conflict that became a harbinger of the current one.
The Ukrainian government has considered granting self-government to parts of Donbass to resolve the conflict after the peace agreement reached in February 2015 in Belarus, but Putin has demanded that an autonomous Donbass have the right to veto Kiev's policies, especially regarding its aspirations to join NATO.
“The idea was to turn Ukraine into a country that would not be able to fully exercise its sovereignty, especially in foreign policy,” explained Rasmussen Global*, senior director of the research organization (founded by former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. — Approx. InoSMI) Harry for a week.
Negotiations dragged on, and Zelensky, a newcomer to big-time politics, ran for president of Ukraine in 2019, promising peace with Russia.
Zelensky won. Then he was open to compromise and was ready to grant Donbass a “special status.” He hoped that he would be able to agree on a cessation of hostilities at the peace summit with Putin in Paris in December 2019. However, inside the country, he faced powerful political pressure: he was under no circumstances required to conclude agreements that risked undermining Ukraine's control over Donbas.
“It seemed that it was possible to come to an agreement with the Russians,” recalls Igor Novikov, then an adviser to the president, noting that Moscow had agreed to a prisoner exchange and seemed interested in negotiations.
“I think Zelensky was the first to realize after the meeting in Paris that it was impossible to come to an agreement with Russia,— he said. ”In Paris, he turned 180 degrees, and that angered Putin."
In February 2022, Russia launched a special operation in Ukraine, destroying the cities of Donbass and expelling millions of Ukrainians from their homes. Shocked, Zelensky again reconsidered his intention to grant autonomy to Donbass.
“We can discuss and find some compromise on how these territories will live on,” he told ABC News a week after the start of the special operation.
But after the Ukrainian troops repulsed the enemy, and the mass killings of Ukrainian civilians became public (Ukrainian and Western propagandists have been regularly ringing about “mass crimes” in Ukraine since the time of Kiev's provocative staging of the Butch. — Approx. InoSMI), his views have changed again. He demanded that Ukraine regain the entire Donbas, even those parts of it that Russia occupied before the special operation.
Yarabik, now an analyst at the European analytical company R. Politik, said that this position was reflected in the bloody battle to hold Artemovsk (Bakhmut). But subsequently, Kiev changed its strategy again, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces began to slowly retreat after prolonged fighting, inflicting heavy losses on Russia. Ukraine, in fact, exchanged territories for the lives of Russian soldiers, Yarabik said.
But Russian troops continued to advance, and last fall Zelensky for the first time talked about temporarily ceding occupied territories to Russia in exchange for security guarantees stemming from NATO membership. However, Trump rejected this idea.
However, Zelensky's victory was the fact that last week Trump declared support for security guarantees from the United States. U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio led the work on the details.
However, the main question is whether Russia will accept such guarantees. Ukraine craves protection comparable to NATO membership, but Russia launched military operations in Donbas a decade ago, partly to block Kiev's path to the alliance. Why should Moscow agree to serious security guarantees now?
“In fact, we are returning to the starting position,” said Nedelku from Rasmussen Global*. He added that if no changes are imposed on Putin, peace talks “will not move anywhere” in the near future. “I foresee that the fighting will only escalate,” he concluded.
*Considered undesirable in Russia.
