Why Ukraine won’t just give up its territory

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. He has said publicly that a peace deal will require “land swapping,” though reports indicate Russia is only willing to “swap” small bits of territory in other regions.

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. Zelenskyy said that the issue of territorial concessions would be settled in a potential future three-way meeting, including Putin and cryptically thanked Trump “for the map,” suggesting the issue had been discussed in some detail. Zelenskyy was also asked by a Fox News reporter if he would be willing to “redraw the map” rather than sending thousands more Ukrainians to their deaths. Zelenskyy deflected the question. The Financial Times reported that Zelenskyy and the European leaders compared giving away the rest of Donetsk to Trump giving away eastern Florida, an analogy the US president was struck by.

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 setting a precedent that legitimizes militaries seizing territory by force.

Russian troops or Russian-backed proxies have occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk 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, as the Fox News host did, 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.

“Ukraine has essentially anchored its defense in Donetsk on the towns of Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, and a few other urban settlements,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, an Austrian defense analyst who travels frequently to the front lines in Ukraine. “From a topographical perspective, these defensive lines are quite strong.”

Despite some recent Russian successes in pushing through the Ukrainian front lines in the Donbas, Gady assesses that “the Russians don’t really have the manpower to engage in urban combat. So they could get a very bloody nose if they have to fight house for house for Kramatorsk or Slovyansk.”

Trump may accept Russian assurances that they have no further plans to conquer more Russian territory at face value — his envoy Steve Witkoff says these assurances would be enshrined in Russian law if a peace deal is signed — 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. For most of the Cold War, the US and other Western countries did not recognize Soviet control of the three Baltic countries, which they viewed as having been illegally annexed.

Similarly, the vast majority of countries do not recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and continue to consider it part of Ukraine, though Trump has reportedly proposed “de jure” US recognition of Russian control as part of a peace deal and told Zelenskyy to give up on Crimea in a Truth Social post.

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, who is not as popular as he used to be, 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.”

Voluntarily signing away Ukrainian territory could have global repercussions as well. The UN Charter expressly forbids “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

While international law, in general, has taken a beating in recent years, the norm against taking another country’s territory by force has mostly held. When it’s been violated — Iraq’s attempt to annex Kuwait in 1990, or Argentina’s attempt to seize the Falkland Islands in 1982, for instance — those attempts have almost all failed.

Russia was already challenging this norm with its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for Georgia’s pro-Russian separatist enclaves, but for the most part the international community held those moves to be illegitimate. In the modern era, a deal to hand over the Donbas would be an unprecedented stamp of political approval for a war of conquest.

“There is an important difference between de jure and de facto recognition,” said Tanisha Fazal, a professor at the University of Minnesota who studies sovereignty and armed conflict. “De jure recognition would accept a clear violation of the law, and explicitly accept the primacy of force over law. De facto recognition allows the law to retain at least some power in this case.”

Russia is hardly the only country with long-running territorial claims against its neighbors. And Fazal worries that a seal of approval for the seizure of the Donbas could set a precedent others would follow.

“I think about a country like Venezuela, which has laid claim to Guyanese territory,” she said. “My best guess is that the Venezuelan government would take official recognition of the transfer of Ukrainian territory to Russia as an encouraging sign.”

China’s ambitions in Taiwan also loom over this conflict. While Beijing would dispute the comparison — its position is that Taiwan has long been Chinese territory and it’s the US that is backing local separatists — Chinese leaders would no doubt welcome a US president that takes a more transactional view of these issues.

Trump, the former real estate mogul who has spoken of the US acquiring Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Gaza, clearly takes a more transactional and fluid view of the world map than his modern predecessors. The choice of Alaska, a former Russian territory purchased by the United States in the 19th century, for last week’s summit, was interpreted by many as harkening back to an era when dealmaking over sovereign territory was more common. But that was also an era when wars over territory were far more common.

There are a number of possible reasons why national borders change a lot less often than they used to, but at least one reason is that the US has been consistently opposed to the forceful redrawing of international borders — a remarkably consistent position across every recent presidential administration, until this one.

Trump “simply doesn’t appreciate nationalism and the power of territory,” said Monica Duffy-Toft, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “He thinks this is just a land swap. He doesn’t appreciate the attachment to place that many nations, many members within nations, have to particular pieces of land.”

Trump has expressed his admiration for William McKinley, the president who annexed territories, including Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. A number of commentators have observed that he aims to bring back a 19th century-style world in which great powers bargain over the territory of lesser states.

But what 19th century-style territorial conflict would look like in a world of ballistic missiles, drones, AI, and nuclear weapons is anyone’s guess.