For President Donald Trump, the map of Ukraine on an easel in the Oval Office had a clear message. Russia had seized a large swath of territory in an eastern region known as the Donbas. That territory, shaded in red, was lost. Ukraine needed to reach a peace deal, or risk losing more.
For Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the map, which was shown at a meeting Monday with the two presidents and European leaders, presented a much more complicated picture. This wasn't a trade deal or a poker game. It was personal.
Away from the cameras, he told Trump that his grandfather had fought in World War II to liberate the cities of Donbas from the Nazis. He couldn't just give up.
On Wednesday, hours after returning to kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, Zelensky reiterated his point.
Zelensky told reporters that “there were many such families” who fought to liberate Donbas. “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’s not as simple as it may seem to some.”
It's unclear exactly where the recent wave of Trump-led diplomacy to end Europe's deadliest war since World War II will lead. But the Donbas—a mineral-rich territory consisting primarily of two regions, Donetsk and Luhansk—will be at the center of any negotiations.
The Donbas, almost the size of West Virginia, is where much of this war has been fought. Tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides have died there for the smallest gain. Russia is now trying to seize the last 6,474 square kilometers of Donbas still under Ukrainian control.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded that Ukraine hand over all of Donbas. His demand even includes the part ruled by Kyiv, where more than 200,000 Ukrainians live in cities like Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, places Zelensky's grandfather fought to defend.
For years, Putin has sought to use Donbas to manipulate the Ukrainian government. Before invading, he used a Russian-backed insurgency in the region as a wedge against Ukraine's hopes of joining Western organizations like NATO. And now, in the fourth year of this war, he not only wants to seize Donbas, but use it to politically destroy Zelensky, analysts said.
The majority of Ukrainians remain opposed to ceding any territory to Russia, according to polls, and the Ukrainian Constitution prohibits its surrender. Zelensky faces the choice of supporting something unpopular with Ukrainians or risking Trump's wrath.
“It’s a poisoned pill,” said Vadym Prystaiko, a former foreign minister. “Ukraine will have to swallow it, and then we’ll see how it digests.”
Zelensky has avoided reporters' questions about whether he would give up land, saying he could only discuss the issue with Putin, who has yet to agree to meet with him.
Former Ukrainian officials and political analysts said the only way Zelensky could convince Ukrainians to cede territory would be to offer a U.S.-backed security guarantee. That has eluded Ukraine since Trump ruled out NATO membership.
But the guarantee would have to be solid, with some mix of European troops and American air support, for example, to deter Russia from future attacks.
Balazs Jarabik, a former European Union political adviser in Kyiv, said Ukraine may have reached a point where it could agree to cede territory “in exchange for a peace deal that brings Western security guarantees to Ukraine.” He added: “If in return it has to give up the Donbas, I think it would do it.”
Trump has framed these territorial concessions as “land swaps,” and has suggested that Russia, which controls nearly 20 percent of Ukraine, could return some territory, possibly small portions of land in northeastern Ukraine.
The Trump administration believes “that these territory swaps are actually beneficial for Ukraine because they believe that Donbas will soon fall, and then Ukraine will have no more cards to negotiate with,” said Maksym Skrypchenko, president of the Transatlantic Dialogue Center, 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 Donbas now would also mean surrendering cities and fortifications that could help Russia launch a future invasion.
Donbas used to be considered a pro-Russian backwater. Many of its 6.7 million inhabitants 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 fostered separatist movements that, with the help of Russian soldiers, seized a third of the Donbas in a low-scale conflict that foreshadowed the current war.
The Ukrainian government considered granting self-rule to certain areas of Donbas to resolve the conflict following a February 2015 peace deal brokered in Belarus, although Putin wanted any autonomous Donbas to have veto power over kyiv, especially over its hopes of NATO membership.
“The point was to turn Ukraine into a country that couldn’t exercise its full sovereignty, especially when it came to its foreign policy,” said Harry Nedelcu, director of Rasmussen Global, a research organization.
As negotiations dragged on, Zelensky, a political novice, ran in the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election promising to achieve peace with Russia.
Zelensky won. At the time, he was open to the idea of a compromise solution and granting “special status” to the Donbas region. He believed he could reach an agreement to end the war at a peace summit in Paris with Putin in December 2019. But at home, he faced political pressure to avoid any agreement that would involve relinquishing 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 the prisoner exchange and seemed interested in negotiating.
“As soon as the meeting in Paris took place, I think Zelensky was the first person to realize that an agreement with Russia couldn't be reached,” he said. “He did a U-turn in Paris, and that infuriated Putin.”
In February 2022, Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, destroying cities in the Donbas and driving millions of people from their homes. Shaken by the invasion, Zelensky appeared to reconsider granting any form of autonomy to the Donbas.
"We can discuss and find a compromise solution on how these territories will continue to live," he told ABC News a week after the invasion.
But after Ukrainian soldiers pushed back Russian forces and the mass killings of Ukrainian civilians became public, his views changed again. He pushed for Ukraine to regain the Donbas, including the parts Russia had seized before the invasion.
Jarabik, now an analyst at R. Politik, a European political analysis firm, said Ukraine then moved away from that stance, epitomized by the bloody battle to hold the town of Bakhmut. It began a slow retreat after prolonged fighting that cost Russia many troops.
Ukraine was “essentially trading territory for Russian lives,” Jarabik said.
As Russia pushed forward on the battlefield, Zelensky first spoke last fall of the idea of temporarily ceding occupied territory to Russia in exchange for the security guarantee that NATO membership entails.
Trump dismissed that idea.
But in a victory for Zelensky, Trump said last week that the United States would participate in security guarantees for Ukraine. Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state and national security adviser, is leading the effort to hammer out the details.
The real question is whether Russia would accept such guarantees. Ukraine wants NATO-like protections, but Russia started the war in 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 Rasmussen Global analyst. Unless Putin is forced to change, he said, “nothing will happen” with the peace talks in the near future. Instead, he added, “I see more fighting.”
