Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday rejected the idea of ceding the Donbas to Russia, and Russian and Ukrainian officials restarted peace talks in Abu Dhabi.
In a long post on X, Zelensky said that the US had offered security guarantees “similar” to NATO membership in exchange for Ukraine ceding the territory.
“Similar? But you don’t want the answer about Donbas to be ‘similar.’ You want a clear answer about Donbas. This is your goal. And this is Putin’s goal, for today. What will you do if we have security guarantees but not NATO?” Zelensky said in the post, which was an excerpt of an interview he did with Denmark’s DR Nyheder.
“Nobody trusts Putin to stop if we leave Donbas. He will pause. Then he will come back in one year, two years, or five years. And who will be guilty?” Zelensky added.
Since late 2022, when Russia declared it had annexed the Donbas oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as the southern oblasts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Moscow’s demands to end the war have included Ukraine withdrawing from all of the territory it controls in the four regions.
But during peace talks last year, media reports said Russia was willing to freeze the lines in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia while insisting on full Ukrainian withdrawal from the Donbas. President Trump had publicly called for Ukraine to cede the Donbas, saying it would eventually lose it anyway, but Zelensky refused.
Territory is expected to be one of the major stumbling blocks in the Abu Dhabi talks, and the other is the issue of security guarantees, as Russia would almost certainly reject any arrangement that gives Ukraine a guarantee similar to NATO’s Article 5, which Zelensky appears to be asking for.
Ahead of Tuesday’s talks, the White House said that security guarantees would be discussed, but there was no sign of a breakthrough, though a second day of negotiations will be held on Wednesday.
