The Trump administration is pressuring Ukraine to surrender the part of the eastern Donbas region that the Ukrainian Army stills controls, offering American security guarantees if Kyiv withdraws, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview published on Wednesday.
The U.S. position aligns with a Russian demand that Ukraine hand over a roughly 50-mile-by-40-mile zone in the Donetsk region, part of the larger Donbas, as a condition for ending the war. Ukraine has refused, arguing that ceding the heavily fortified area would give Russia a staging ground for future attacks that would threaten not just Ukraine but also Europe.
Simply handing over the land would allow Russia to escape the immense costs it would incur in trying to seize the territory militarily. Ukraine says such a push would take the Russian Army years and inflict hundreds of thousands of losses on it.
Mr. Zelensky’s interview, with the news agency Reuters, offered a sign of how far apart Kyiv and Moscow remain in peace talks that have stalled during the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
Ukraine has long said that it cannot agree to a peace settlement before signing security guarantees with its Western partners. To do otherwise would leave Ukraine vulnerable to another Russian invasion, Ukrainian officials argue.
“The Americans are prepared to finalize these guarantees at a high level once Ukraine is ready to withdraw from Donbas,” Mr. Zelensky said. He made clear how heavy a concession that would be.
“President Trump, unfortunately, in my opinion, still chooses a strategy of putting more pressure on the Ukrainian side,” Mr. Zelensky said.
He added that retaining the part of the Donbas that Kyiv still controls would in itself help ensure Ukraine’s future security. “I would very much like the American side to understand that the eastern part of our country is part of our security guarantees,” he said.
More broadly, Mr. Zelensky said Ukraine was seeking clarity on how its partners would fund Kyiv’s future weapons purchases to defend itself after the fighting ends and how these countries would help protect Ukraine if Russia attacked again.
Mr. Zelensky has given a series of interviews to international news outlets as he tries to keep attention on the war in Ukraine while the world’s focus shifts to the war in the Middle East. He told the BBC last week that he had a “very bad feeling” about how the war on Iran would affect Ukraine’s own war.
The Ukrainian leader has said that Russia’s continuing attacks on Ukraine show that President Vladimir V. Putin is not interested in peace. In his interview with Reuters, Mr. Zelensky said that Russia intended to drag out the peace talks until the Trump administration lost interest. Mr. Zelensky said there was a chance that could happen.
Talks involving Russia, Ukraine and the United States have been on pause since the war in Iran began late last month. Mr. Zelensky’s comments to Reuters came after a round of talks in Miami over the weekend between Ukrainian negotiators and Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s envoy for peace talks, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law.
The status of the Donbas has long been one of the most intractable issues in any discussion of peace between Ukraine and Russia.
As early as 2022, when the full-scale war began, Mr. Putin demanded that Ukraine recognize parts of the region as breakaway states run by Russian proxies. At the time, those demands, along with calls for Ukraine to recognize Crimea as Russian and abandon any ambition to join NATO, were viewed in Kyiv as unacceptable.
In polls, a growing number of Ukrainians now acknowledge the possibility that Ukraine might lose the region, though the military has rejected any suggestion of withdrawing.
Ukraine has offered a cease-fire along the current front line in the Donbas. This year, negotiators explored a possible American-backed compromise in which a demilitarized zone would be created in the region.
In a post on social media on Thursday, Mr. Zelensky said that Russia was trying to convince the United States that Moscow’s forces would eventually take the Donbas anyway, so Ukraine should go ahead and concede it now.
But in reality, Mr. Zelensky said, Russia understands “how long it would take them to capture this territory, with losses of 28, 30, even 35 thousand soldiers per month.”
“And it’s still not certain they would succeed in seizing it,” he added.
Ukrainian military experts say it would be highly dangerous to leave the territory. “There are no peace talks; there is an attempt to force Ukraine to capitulate,” said Mykhailo Samus, the director of the independent New Geopolitics Research Network in Kyiv.
Russia has intensified its offensive operations in the area, according to Ukraine’s commander in chief, though Ukrainian forces do not appear to be at immediate risk of a collapse on the front.
Russian forces are seeking to make civilian life untenable for the roughly 190,000 inhabitants of the Ukrainian-controlled area. On Monday, Russia struck a dam with two guided aerial bombs, and water rationing schedules will be introduced in the region.
Nataliia Novosolova contributed reporting.
Maria Varenikova covers Ukraine and its war with Russia.
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