As US-led efforts to end Russia’s war against Ukraine lurch forward, there is one considerable obstacle that could derail an agreement: territorial concessions.
Russia and the US are demanding that Kyiv withdraw from roughly a quarter of Donetsk province and a sliver of neighbouring Luhansk province still under Ukrainian control – an area that is politically important to Kyiv, and its most heavily fortified bulwark against Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
Donetsk and Luhansk provinces together form what is known locally as the Donbas – a sprawling eastern steppe roughly half the size of the island of Ireland.
The area, filled with metallurgical plants and coal mines, once served as the Soviet Union’s industrial powerhouse. Home to a complex mix of ideologies and languages – a blend of Russian and Ukrainian called surzhyk is common today – it has been notoriously difficult for outside powers to control.
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In a 1921 letter to his Soviet comrades, Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky wearily described the Donbas as so toxic a “political gas mask” was required to deal with it.
The question of the Donbas remains just as vexed today, with the territories emerging as one of the most contentious elements of peace talks to end the largest war in Europe since 1945.
By seeking to claim the land through negotiations, the Kremlin has attempted to acquire what it failed to conquer at immense military cost since 2014. Controlling the Donbas would mean seizing a “fortress belt” of cities – Pokrovsk, Kostyantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk – that have remained a rampart against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.
But Russian troops have been advancing. They now claim much of Pokrovsk and are already at the southern entrance to Kostyantynivka, according to Ukrainian military officials and analysts. Ukraine’s top general Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Tuesday he had ordered a partial withdrawal of forces around part of Pokrovsk after their positions became untenable.
A sizeable portion of the more than $1 billion that Ukraine spent on defences last year went to the Donbas, the focus of Russia’s ground assaults. Some of the fortifications are visible from the highways that cut through the region: layered labyrinths of defensive lines composed of razor wire, trenches, minefields and other obstacles.
The terrain there also makes for a strong barrier for Ukraine, with its natural cliffs and valleys, as well as the man-made quarries and slag heaps that dot the landscape.
West of the defensive line, however, the steppe flattens out, and Russia could have open fields and less densely populated areas to sweep through, analysts say.
It would be easier for Russia to move deeper into Ukraine should its forces take the fortress belt cities – or be given them, as the US has suggested, as part of a peace deal.
Trump administration officials, notably the US president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, have pushed Ukrainian negotiators in recent weeks to accept a “land swap” that they see as an inevitable part of any peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow, according to several people familiar with the talks.
This would entail ceding ground in Donetsk that Russia has lost tens of thousands of troops trying to capture through countless ground offensives supported by swarms of suicide drones and heavy bombardment.
Witkoff, who has met Russian president Vladimir Putin in person six times this year, was “obsessed” with the idea that if Kyiv just handed over the remaining 25 per cent of the eastern Donetsk province under its control to Moscow a fair peace could be achieved and a longer, more devastating war could be avoided, said two senior Ukrainian officials.
US president Donald Trump, for his part, has argued that Ukraine “doesn’t have the cards” and stands to lose much more in battle next year if it refuses what he considers reasonable territorial concessions now.
Mykola Bielieskov, a senior analyst at Come Back Alive, a group that procures military equipment for the Ukrainian army, said the US idea of a unilateral Ukrainian withdrawal “seems to be the Trump team’s best attempt to bridge Russian and Ukrainian positions” in peace talks.
But he warned the debate around the Donbas had no good outcomes for his country, as a weak agreement would create “fissures inside Ukraine while leaving open nearby regions for further Russian advances”. The alternative would be refusing to cede ground – and risk Washington withdrawing its support.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been adamant – and many European officials and military analysts agree with him – that Ukraine handing over territory without a fight would mean forcibly swallowing a poison pill.
Zelenskiy reiterated his position to reporters in a WhatsApp chat on Monday, saying he has no legal or moral right to cede territory to Russia. Most analysts in Ukraine expect the public backlash over territorial concessions to be fierce.
Early drafts of Trump’s 28-point plan included a proposal for a “neutral, demilitarised buffer zone” to be created following the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the area of Donetsk province.
Under the plan, the zone would be “internationally recognised as territory belonging to the Russian Federation”, it said. “Russian forces will not enter this demilitarised zone,” it added.
Trump last month dispatched Dan Driscoll, US Army secretary, to Kyiv to secure Zelenskiy’s buy-in. Instead, he found a deeply uneasy Ukrainian administration and a group of European ambassadors stunned by the proposals. One described the briefing as “nauseating”.
Driscoll said the Trump administration was prepared to provide guaranteed security for Ukraine as part of the deal, along what would be the world’s “most high-tech demilitarised zone” along the eastern front line. “We will provide the strongest line of anything in the world,” he said, according to several European ambassadors present at the meeting.
Ukrainian officials involved in the talks have said what the US is pushing is a DMZ-like area similar to that dividing North and South Korea since an uneasy armistice was signed there more than 72 years ago.
But rather than a lasting peace, Zelenskiy has long viewed a DMZ as a path to a frozen conflict where a short-term pause in fighting would grant Moscow time to regroup before launching a new offensive.
Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst with the Finland-based Black Bird Group, said Russia’s claims about a demilitarised zone could not be trusted.
“Ukraine could in principle agree to the handover if it had strong western security guarantees behind it, including troops stationed in Ukraine,” he said.
But western boots on the ground, especially a force obliged to respond to renewed Russian aggression, remains a distant prospect and is not spelt out in the current version of the peace plan. Zelenskiy told reporters on Tuesday that elements of security guarantees remained undecided.
As long as this element is missing from any peace deal that includes a demilitarised zone, Kastehelmi said, “the handover of Donetsk will probably seem too high a risk for Ukraine”.
He added: “The risk level will increase further if there is a possibility that the West would lift sanctions on Russia and reduce military aid after the handover of Donetsk.”
Michael Kofman, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the technical elements of any plan were crucial.
“The proposal does not convey what a demilitarised zone means, considering today’s battlefield dynamic dominated by sizeable drone engagement zones, minefields and supporting artillery fires,” he said.
For example, he said, it mattered greatly whether “this is a complete withdrawal from Donetsk or an equidistant removal of forces from a midpoint line”.
A senior Ukrainian official who has viewed the proposal in its latest form said it did not call for Russia to withdraw its forces from what would be the eastern border of the demilitarised zone.
“The question is,” Kofman said, “what does demilitarised mean in the current context, and how will either side control for the presence of small drone teams able to fly 20-25km beyond the front line?”
Two flawed peace accords known as Minsk I, in September 2014, and Minsk II, in February 2015, loom large over the talks. Those accords – hammered out in the Belarusian capital under similar circumstances when Russian forces had the upper hand – dialled down the intensity of the armed conflict and in effect froze the front line.
But the accords, which were conceived as roadmaps to a lasting peace, never served their purpose nor provided Ukraine with security guarantees.
“How did Putin use these eight years [after the Minsk accords]?” asked Oleksandra Matviichuk, Ukraine’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate who heads the Kyiv-based non-profit organisation Center for Civil Liberties. “He transformed Crimea and the Donbas into military bases from which Russia launched the full-scale war.”
Even if Ukraine were to surrender the remainder of the Donbas, Matviichuk said, it would not be enough to satisfy Russia’s imperialist appetites. “Putin will not stop ... He sees Ukraine as a bridge to Europe,” she said. “He thinks about his legacy, he wants to restore the Russian empire.”
Putin’s appetite, she added, quoting a famous Soviet-era proverb, “grows during the eating”. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
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