KYIV — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy plans to offer Russia a straight-up land exchange to end its three-year war if United States President Donald Trump manages to bring both countries to the negotiating table.
“We will swap one territory for another,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with the Guardian published Tuesday, saying Kyiv would yield part of the Kursk region it has held since its surprise August incursion into Russia.
As for which Russian-occupied areas Ukraine would demand in return, the Ukraine leader refused to be drawn: “I don’t know, we will see. But all our territories are important, there is no priority.”
Trump has repeatedly said he plans to end Russia’s war against Ukraine soon, and claims to have made progress toward that end already in conversations with President Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader, Trump says, “wants people to stop dying in the war” — the U.S. president’s team concedes, however, that both sides will have to give something up to end the conflict.
Russia, meanwhile, has launched several massive drone attacks against Ukrainian energy infrastructure recently, continues to advance in the Donetsk region in the east of the country, and does not seem to be open to deals.
“In the Kursk region, the neo-Nazis operating there … [control] an area of approximately two meters and a depth of one and a half meters,” said Maria Zakharova, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, in a Telegram post on Tuesday. “Zelensky makes similar statements in order to hide the true scale of the disaster for the Armed Forces in this direction.”
Russian forces occupied an additional 3,600 square kilometers of Ukraine’s territory last year and now controls about 20 percent of the country. Kyiv’s troops, by contrast, control about 500 square kilometers in Russia’s far-west Kursk region.
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