When it seemed even more difficult, Vladimir Putin did it again: with a single phone call last week, not only did he thwart any deal between Donald Trump and Ukraine to deliver an indefinite amount of long-range Tomahawk missiles, but he once again managed to make Trump and his team buy into his narrative after previously stating that Russia was losing the war and was "a paper tiger." During the Friday meeting, the Financial Times reports that Donald Trump ended up shouting and dismissing the frontline maps in Ukraine brought by Zelensky's delegation, insisting that the Ukrainian president hand over the entire Donbas region to Putin, "otherwise Putin would destroy all of Ukraine." A couple of weeks ago, Trump said that Russia was simply "a paper tiger" and that Zelensky was "a very strong leader."
The second test of this new swing, according to White House sources, is that Steve Witkoff, President Trump's favorite negotiator, entered the room where the Ukrainian delegation was waiting to pressure them with an idea: Kiev must hand over the entire Donetsk region without a fight "because many Russian speakers still live there." Donald Trump himself had said, hours earlier, that the war should stop wherever the front line was at that moment without delays and without excuses. The President of the United States not only contradicts what he promised Zelensky but also contradicts what he himself said days before.
This Sunday, the Washington Post publishes some details about that call in which Vladimir Putin thwarted the U.S. approach to Ukraine and arranged to meet Trump on the red carpet in Budapest with Viktor Orban as the host. In that conversation of over two hours, in which Putin once again massaged Trump's ego without restraint, the Russian autocrat spoke of a new "peace offer" that, depending on how it is interpreted, could be something akin to a realistic starting point for negotiations or the same maximalist proposal he has been repeating since February. "We will not give anything to the Russian Federation and we will not forget anything," Volodymyr Zelensky concluded that night.
According to the American newspaper, Putin now offers to keep the entire Donetsk and Luhansk regions (the latter already fully conquered) in exchange for some parts of the occupied regions of Kherson and Zaporizhia, partially conquered by Russia in the early weeks of the war.
If this is the version, it does offer a novelty, as until last week the Kremlin repeated that it could not give up a single meter of those Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts because "they already belong to Russia according to its constitution". Recall that at the end of 2022, Moscow held referendums with no democratic validity, yielding a resounding result (as expected) in favor of joining Russia. Some sources go further and claim that the return of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant and a direct route to the Sea of Azov would be on the table, but it seems hard to believe, as Russia has been trying to connect the plant to its power grid for some time.
The problem is that the areas supposedly to be handed over by the Kremlin are yet to be defined and would join those of Sumy, Kharkiv, and Dnipro, which are small border areas with much less strategic importance than the defensive belt of Donetsk, where Ukraine has strengthened its position since 2014.
Almost no one in Ukraine believes a word of what Putin offers, and another perhaps more pessimistic or realistic interpretation has been given: what Putin offered Trump, a matter not clearly defined in the articles published in the United States, is not to hand over anything, but to stop claiming the entirety of the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions, something he did in previous calls with the U.S. President. In Russia's negotiating strategy, it is a classic to demand not only what has been conquered but much more at the beginning of each negotiation.
In any case, both the old proposal and the one from last week's call are unfeasible for Ukraine with or without Tomahawks. German military analyst Nico Lange also believes that in reality, the Russian autocrat is not giving up anything: "Putin wants Ukraine to hand over the unconquered part of the Donbas, while with this offer, he would simply stop claiming the unconquered parts of Zaporizhia and Kherson on paper."
"The surrender of the rest of the Donetsk region as a prerequisite for a ceasefire without a commitment to a definitive peace agreement to end the war would force Ukraine to abandon the main fortified defensive line in the Donetsk region since 2014, with no guarantee that combat will not resume," says the Institute for the Study of War. "Putin's announced proposal requires Ukraine to give up this critical defensive position, which Russian forces currently have no way to quickly envelop or penetrate, apparently in exchange for nothing."
The Donbas (short for Donetskii Bassein, Donetsk Basin) is a territory that many Ukrainians have never been to and have no intention of going to. In reality, many have come to know it reluctantly as part of their brigade's war effort, but here they are deployed in their country's largest military effort. It is not only a Russian-speaking area but was forcibly Russified by Stalin in the 1950s, after suffering significant depopulation due to hosting several battles during World War II. Its subsoil hides the country's richest mineral resources, such as coal, gas, mercury, uranium, and iron, the basis of steel production, power generation, and the chemical industry.
It was in that region where Vladimir Putin cooked up this war in the spring of 2014, and it is that region where this invasion will be decided: the Russian autocrat demands not only the portion of Donetsk he has managed to occupy over these 11 years but also demands all its territory up to the border of the Dnipro and Kharkiv oblasts. In other words, the entire Luhansk and Donetsk regions, despite his army being unable to conquer the latter despite all the military and human resources Russia has expended to achieve it.