Anatomy of the ‘most difficult’ issue in the Russia–Ukraine peace talks: territory
President Volodymyr Zelensky says that territory remains the “most difficult” issue in the ongoing peace talks to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. Vladimir Putin says the Trump administration’s controversial 28-point plan “could serve as the basis for a final peace settlement.” He continues to insist that Ukraine withdraw from the parts of the Donbas region it still holds. Ukraine has so far refused to cede the territory, despite coming under pressure from Washington. Though the most recent meeting between Russian and U.S. negotiators failed to resolve the impasse, both Kyiv and Moscow appear to be shifting their positions to focus on territory as their main red line. Using maps, graphs, and military theory, Meduza analyzes where each side stands and what it might take to end the war.
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Where has this round of peace talks left us?
The latest round of peace talks kicked off on November 19, after reports surfaced that Russia and the United States were quietly drafting a new plan to end the war in Ukraine. The 28-point proposal leaked that same day and immediately drew criticism for resembling a Kremlin “wishlist.” Two days later, Vladimir Putin said publicly that the plan could serve as “the basis for a final peace settlement.”
The ensuing negotiations have been chaotic, with phone calls between the negotiators leaking to the press and delegations crisscrossing continents for in-person meetings. Volodymyr Zelensky and his European allies have put forward amendments to narrow the 28-point plan, but the public has yet to see an updated proposal, and territorial issues remain a major sticking point.
Putin has repeatedly insisted that Ukraine withdraw its troops from the parts of the Donbas it still controls, which Kyiv maintains it will not do. According to Zelensky, territory remains the “most difficult” issue in the ongoing talks. After a five-hour meeting in the Kremlin on December 2, President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner failed to wring any compromises out of Putin. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters as much after the talks, underscoring that territory was still the “main issue” for the Russian side. “Some American proposals are acceptable to the Russian Federation, and some are not,” he said.
Donald Trump’s eagerness to strike a deal to end the war has produced a cyclical and volatile negotiation process in which the U.S. alternately pressures both sides — a strategy laid out in 2024 by Keith Kellogg, then Trump’s future (and now outgoing) Ukraine envoy.
As for Russia and Ukraine, their actual goals in the negotiations remain less clear. Earlier in the process, it seemed that Moscow and Kyiv were jockeying to convince Trump that the other side was the real obstacle to peace, and therefore deserved U.S. punishment. Meanwhile, both Moscow and Kyiv were prepared to keep fighting unless their opponent surrendered its positions completely. However, the latest round of talks suggests that neither Russia nor Ukraine is opposed to peace in principle, and their terms for ending the war appear to be converging. In all likelihood, pressure from Trump isn’t the only influential factor here: developments on the front lines, economic considerations, and domestic politics are also at play.
What does Trump’s 28-point plan say about territorial control?
According to the document that leaked to the press, “territories” is point 21 of the Trump administration’s peace plan. It says that:
- Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk will be recognized as de facto Russian, including by the United States.
- Kherson and Zaporizhzhia will be frozen at the line of contact, amounting to de facto recognition along that line.
- Russia will relinquish other agreed territories it controls outside the five regions.
- Ukrainian forces will withdraw from the part of Donetsk region that they currently control, and this withdrawal zone will be considered a neutral demilitarized buffer zone, internationally recognized as territory belonging to the Russian Federation. Russian forces will not enter this demilitarized zone.
Are Russia and Ukraine willing to compromise on territory?
While Putin appears committed to controlling the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which together make up the Donbas, he has not formally abandoned the goal of seizing Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions too. (Russia formally annexed all four territories in September 2022.) Instead, he repeats the same line about Ukraine withdrawing “from the territories it occupies.”
That said, there are signs that the Russian authorities are mulling a compromise in accordance with Trump’s plan. After Putin met with Trump in Alaska in August, Kremlin officials stopped explicitly demanding the handover of all four regions. Then, in his leaked conversation with Ushakov, Witkoff said: “I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere.” He made no mention of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. (Russia already occupies all of the Luhansk region, as well as Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.)
Whether Putin would accept the status of the territories that would be ceded to Russia under the American proposal remains unclear. Specifically, he may take issue with creating a demilitarized buffer zone and/or the lack of international recognition that these territories are part of Russia. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Russian official recently told NBC that there are “three pillars” on which Moscow won’t compromise: “One is the territory of the Donbas. The second is a limit on Ukraine’s armed forces. The third is the recognition of territory by America and Europe.”
Based on negotiations between Ukraine and the United States, it appears that Kyiv remains opposed to the idea of a land swap. Zelensky has also said that the territorial issue should only be discussed after a ceasefire is in place. (Meanwhile, Kremlin officials insist that there can only be a ceasefire after Ukraine withdraws its troops.)
Compared to statements a year ago, it would appear that some progress has been made. In 2024, Ukraine was still promoting a peace formula that called for the full restoration of its territorial integrity and a complete withdrawal of Russian troops. And the Kremlin maintained that Ukraine should immediately withdraw its forces from the Donbas, as well as from the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, otherwise “each subsequent proposal will be worse.”
Why is a small piece of the Donbas a major point of contention?
The parts of the Donbas that remain under Kyiv’s control fall mainly within the Kramatorsk and Sloviansk agglomeration — and they hold limited strategic value, especially compared to the areas that Russia already occupies in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.
The 28-point plan envisions Russia relinquishing territories it controls outside of Crimea and the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions. However, exchanging occupied areas of the Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions for the remainder of the Donbas wouldn’t give the Russian army a noticeable military advantage. Kramatorsk is cut off from Kharkiv by the Severskiy Donets River, and from Dnipro by a sparsely populated, hilly plain broken up by rivers and ravines.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, less than 700,000 people lived in the areas of the Donbas under Ukrainian control. Many of them have since evacuated as the front line crept westward.
Part of the territory to the northeast of Kramatorsk was devastated during the fighting and occupation in 2022. The region’s economy and industry have been destroyed, and the front line now runs through Ukraine’s largest and most important industrial asset — the main producer of coking coal for the ferrous metals industry, the Pokrovsk Coal Company.
The Severskiy Donetsk–Donbas canal would be of great importance for a Russia-controlled Donbas, because it’s the main water source for Donetsk and other cities. The canal originates from a water intake facility near Sloviansk, which is under Ukrainian control. However, seizing the entire canal wouldn’t guarantee a solution to the water crisis in Donetsk, since the reservoirs supplying it are located in the Kharkiv region, which Ukraine controls. Moreover, some of the reservoirs have now dried up because their hydraulic systems have been destroyed.
However, these points are largely secondary, since these territories are of greater symbolic rather than practical significance. It’s no surprise that even the issue of security guarantees somehow seems less important than the issue of the Donbas.
How might the two sides reach a peace agreement?
In recent decades, economists and historians have developed rationalist explanations for war using game theory. These arguments reduce war to a competition over certain “benefits” (or “goods”) — be it control over territories, borders, or other states, or tangible trade advantages, increased security, and so on. Typically, a state that engages in this “competition” is acting on incomplete information, particularly when it comes to its opponent’s intentions and strength, and its own relative military capabilities. In many cases, a state (regardless of its political system) believes that its theoretical advantages will allow it to obtain certain “benefits” by force, rather than through negotiations. Also lacking complete information, its opponent believes it can mount a defense. These dynamics often contribute to wars breaking out.
The war itself is then a process of acquiring missing information — about a state’s own strength, its opponent’s capabilities, and the intentions of potential allies and enemies — through a series of battles.
Political scientist Dan Reiter studied the conclusions of military conflicts through the lens of game theory in his monograph How Wars End. And many elements of his model are applicable to the Russia–Ukraine war. (Meduza used Reiter’s model to analyze a previous round of peace talks here.)
According to Reiter, the outcomes of battles influence proposals for ending the war, which may change accordingly. (For example, if a state sees virtually no chance of victory, it is inclined to make concessions to end the war.) Final peace plans emerge when both sides acquire sufficient information about their military prospects and decide that the risks of continuing the war outweigh the benefits. So, unless one side achieves a series of decisive wins, the process of reaching this “equilibrium” gets dragged out.
When the Kremlin undertook the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it expected an immediate and total victory (hence the initial attempt to encircle Kyiv). It acted on lessons drawn from the Donbas War in 2014–2015, when the Ukrainian army was unable to resist Russia’s invasion. The war in Syria also taught the Russian command that the Aerospace Forces were an effective tool for suppressing pockets of resistance, and that battalion tactical groups deployed by brigades and regiments were quite suitable for combat operations. It’s also likely that Kremlin officials believed that Ukrainian society and the government would fail to mobilize and deploy a fighting force, and that the West would only provide Ukraine with symbolic support.
All of these assumptions turned out to be false. So, after a series of unsuccessful battles, the Russian command adopted a new strategy in mid-2023, which no longer envisioned a quick victory. Since then, the Kremlin has attempted to overwhelm Ukraine in a war of attrition. Accordingly, Putin has managed to convince Kyiv and its Western allies that any infringement on Ukraine’s sovereign territory would be a victory for Russia (this is due in part to the inflated expectations of Ukraine and the West in 2023, when Kyiv still aimed to liberate all of the occupied territories by force.)
According to Reiter’s model, if a state is fighting for a “good” it considers “indivisible,” then it will tend to seek an absolute outcome, even if the chances of achieving it are small and the risks are great. In the current context of the Russia–Ukraine war, the issue of sovereignty has been diluted, with control over all of the Donbas becoming an “indivisible good” for both sides. Kyiv has no plans to cede the Donbas without a fight, and the Kremlin would be unable to declare a victorious end to the war without seizing the entire region. (After all, “protecting the people of the Donbas” was a pretext for Russia’s 2022 invasion.)
Based on the fighting in recent months, the Kremlin has drawn new conclusions, leading it to believe that its manpower and, to some extent, equipment and organizational advantages mean it can expect to occupy the remaining 21.6 percent of the Donetsk region in the foreseeable future (about a year’s time). That said, invading forces have captured half as much territory as this would require in the past 12 months (around 12 percent), with Russia mainly advancing in the Zaporizhzhia region and within its own internationally recognized borders, pushing Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk region.
The other Ukrainian territories that Russia claims to have annexed but does not fully control, the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, may not be of such great symbolic importance for the Kremlin. (Even if the Constitution now lists them as “new subjects” of the Russian Federation.) Perhaps more importantly, the Russian military can’t seriously expect to conquer these two regions completely: this would mean crossing the Dnipro River, which seems technically impossible given Ukraine’s current tactics (massive attacks on communications and logistics) and the current balance of power.
In his book, Reiter argues that a struggle over an “indivisible good” may complicate reaching a peace agreement, but it doesn’t exclude ending a war. Historical examples of this include:
- Germany ultimately ceding Alsace Lorraine to France in the 1918 armistice that ended World War I;
- Finland giving up parts of Karelia to the Soviet Union in the Moscow Armistice of 1944;
- The Korean War ending despite South Korea refusing to sign the 1953 armistice with the U.S., North Korea, and China because it insisted on a unified Korean Peninsula.
Kyiv also appears to have learned from its experience on the battlefield. Although it has so far failed to stop the Russian army’s creeping advance, Ukraine does not appear vulnerable to a swift and crushing defeat. This is due to the tactics developed by both sides — namely, the massive use of reconnaissance, artillery, and kamikaze drones as the main means of inflicting damage. Drone warfare prevents the enemy from concentrating large numbers of troops along the front line, ruling out deep breakthroughs and the encirclement of large formations (in other words, a crushing defeat). The country’s major cities — Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Dnipro — aren’t at risk of rapid capture either.
All of these facts give Kyiv hope that if not an “absolute” outcome, it may be able to end the war on more favorable terms. If Ukraine manages to hold out for another year, it’s possible that Russia will make even greater concessions due to the war’s rising costs. (As Reiter explains, rising costs may push a state to accept a “limited” outcome instead of an absolute one, even if it’s still winning battles.)
As Reiter notes, third parties also influence how wars end. In this case, a lot depends on allies. If the E.U. is able to come up with hundreds of billions of dollars to support Ukraine (for example, by using frozen Russian assets as collateral for loans to Kyiv, as is currently under consideration), and the U.S. agrees to continue arms sales to Europe, then there would still be hope.
However, there are also risks. The Russian army’s plans include not only attacking the areas of the Donbas still under Ukraine’s control, but also pushing forward in the Zaporizhzhia region. This offers both military advantages (forcing the Ukrainian army command to deploy precious reserves to this area) and political ones. If the war ends with the Zaporizhzhia region divided along the front line, then Ukraine risks losing a significant amount of territory in the coming months.
And there’s always the risk that if Ukraine suffers further defeats, Putin will make his proposed peace terms even worse for Kyiv.
According to Reiter, concerns about the enemy’s compliance with a peace treaty often prompt a state to ignore the results of battles and strive for absolute victory, which is perceived as the most durable of all guarantees. Capturing a “good” that strengthens the odds that the war will not resume — such as an important strategic position or an economic facility critical to the enemy — may convince the winner to agree to limited victory. But because there’s no way of ensuring eternal compliance with a peace treaty, many wars become cyclical.
The “guarantees issue” was the biggest obstacle during initial Russia–Ukraine peace talks in spring 2022. However, this issue has seemingly become less significant over the past three and a half years, especially compared to the issues of sovereignty and territory. Kyiv continues to insist on its bid to join NATO, and the Kremlin insists on Ukraine radically reducing the size of its army. But the war-weary sides seem willing to settle for weak guarantees from the United States. Together with formally unresolved territorial disputes, this increases the risk of another war under even less favorable conditions for both sides (for example, after the enemy has had the chance to recuperate and rearm, or in the midst of a domestic crisis.)
However, all empirical models have their limits, and because large interstate wars are relatively rare, available data remains limited. Each war is unique, just like the ensuing conditions for peace. Nevertheless, we can cautiously assume that since both sides have filled in much of their “incomplete information,” the war between Russia and Ukraine could be approaching its end. Still, empirical data shows that the final stages of achieving a “logical” ceasefire can be drawn out. In the case of the Korean War, this only happened two years after the front line had stabilized.
Meduza’s Razbor (“Explainers”) team