When Poland sought a U.S. military base in 2018, it pitched the idea as Fort Trump.
When Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a peace pledge at the White House last year, they called the transport link it created the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.
But the most improbable instance of President Trump’s name being lent to a geopolitical flashpoint may be one that has remained out of public view until now. In Ukraine peace talks in recent months, Ukrainian officials have suggested that the slice of the country’s Donbas region that Russia is still fighting for could be named “Donnyland.”
The moniker, a reference to “Donbas” and “Donald,” was described by four people familiar with the negotiations, who all spoke about it on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding them.
When a Ukrainian negotiator first mentioned the term, partly in jest, it was as part of an attempt to convince the Trump administration to push back more against Russia’s territorial demands, according to three of the people familiar with the talks. President Vladimir V. Putin has vowed to keep fighting until Russian forces reach a key administrative boundary on the edge of the Donbas, the industrial region in eastern Ukraine where the Kremlin first started waging war in 2014.
That a name evocative of Disneyland has been applied to a depopulated, decimated swath of Ukrainian coal-and-steel country could appear jarring as Europe’s deadliest fighting since World War II continues to rage. But it also reflects a global reality in which governments appeal to Mr. Trump’s vanity in order to get American might on their side.
For Ukraine, the effort has not yet paid off. The term has continued to be used in the talks, though it is not known to be written into any official documents. Negotiators have also floated the possibility of Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace playing a role in administering the area, though neither Russia nor Ukraine have joined it so far, according to four people familiar with the talks.
But Russia has not agreed to an arrangement that would be acceptable to Ukraine. That has left the fate of the area the Ukrainians proposed calling Donnyland — about 50 miles long and 40 miles wide — as one of the main sticking points in the negotiations.
The Ukraine talks have ticked along behind the scenes in recent weeks, even as the lead U.S. negotiators — Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s close friend and special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law — have been focused on the war with Iran. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said this month that he was expecting Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner to visit Ukraine soon. But a person familiar with the talks said that the Americans were still waiting for enough progress to warrant such a trip and that they intended to make another visit to Russia as well.
“Ukraine is moving along. I wish they could get along,” Mr. Trump told reporters last week. “We’ll see what happens. There’s things happening there.”
Mr. Trump, of course, promised in his presidential campaign that he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. He and his top negotiators have now spent more than a year trying to forge a peace deal, spending hours in talks with Mr. Putin and frustrating Ukrainian officials with the appearance that they were acting like mediators rather than defending Ukraine.
“Donnyland” was one way in which the Ukrainians tried to get Mr. Trump to be more on their side. Ever since Mr. Trump met with Mr. Putin in Alaska last August, the Trump administration has signaled that it could support a peace deal in which Ukraine withdrew to the administrative border of the Donetsk region, one of the provinces in the Donbas — a move that critics saw as a major concession to the Kremlin.
Ukrainian officials say about 190,000 people live in this territory now. Others close to the talks say the real number may be about half that. It is so close to the front that the main highway into the area is draped in netting to protect against Russian exploding drones.
Little is left of the local economy other than one working coal mine and businesses serving the soldiers based in the area, including shops selling balloons and flowers for soldiers to buy for visiting wives or girlfriends.
Ukraine insists it can defend this area and that it will not give it up. But in December, Mr. Zelensky signaled openness to a compromise that would form a demilitarized zone or a free economic zone under neither warring party’s full control.
The Ukrainians considered, but did not endorse, proposals for a neutral administrator or a governing body that would have both Russian and Ukrainian representatives, so long as Russia could not claim the land after the war.
The Kremlin said Russia could be open to the formation of a demilitarized zone if Russian police or national guard soldiers were allowed to patrol it — a measure that was unacceptable for Kyiv.
Ukraine wanted the Trump administration to pressure Moscow to soften its position further. Ukrainian negotiators took to calling the proposed zone Donnyland, an area that would not be fully controlled by either side and branded as an accomplishment for Mr. Trump.
Samuel Charap, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation think tank who has followed the negotiations closely, argued that both Moscow and Kyiv have shown some flexibility on the future of this part of the Donbas that Ukraine still controls.
For Ukraine, a key concern is the risk that ceding that territory, along with the fortifications Ukraine has built there, could make it easier for Russia to renew its invasion in the future. Mr. Charap said that Ukraine appeared to see a security benefit in having Mr. Trump’s name attached to the area.
“Having a Trump imprimatur on a free economic zone, I think, probably, they would consider to be something of a deterrent,” Mr. Charap said, referring to Ukraine.
Another suggestion called the postwar arrangement the “Monaco model,” a reference to the city-state on the French Mediterranean. Like Donnyland, it referred to a possible, semiautonomous ministate that would benefit from a status as an offshore economic zone. The phrase Monaco model appeared in treaty drafts, while Donnyland only came up in discussions, according to a person with direct knowledge of Ukraine’s negotiating strategies.
But the talks stalled in late February on the territorial issue, just as the Iran war distracted the U.S. negotiating team. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said Russia would accept only full legal control of the Donbas. And Mr. Zelensky downplayed the prospects of trading land for peace, saying doing so would be a “big mistake.”
Russia and Ukraine haven’t budged since on control of territory, even as talks continued on other issues, including U.S. commitments to guaranteeing Ukraine’s postwar security, according to people familiar with the talks.
A Ukrainian negotiator did create a flag for Donnyland — colored green and gold — and a national anthem, using ChatGPT, the person with knowledge of Ukraine’s negotiating strategies said. It’s not clear that the U.S. side ever saw them.
Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.
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