Reuters reported on Thursday that Russia’s demands for a peace deal in Ukraine include Ukrainian forces withdrawing from the Donbas, a guarantee that Ukraine won’t join NATO, and for Ukraine to keep Western troops out of the country.
Russian sources told Reuters that Putin had compromised on his initial conditions, which included the Ukrainian withdrawal from the territory in the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. Under the current offer, Russia is willing to freeze the lines there and also return small amounts of territory it controls in Kharkiv, Sumy, and Dnipropetrovsk.
For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has publicly rejected the idea of ceding the territory Ukrainian forces still control in the Donbas, and European leaders appear to be backing his position.
When it comes to NATO, the Reuters report said that Moscow is seeking a legally binding pledge from the alliance that it wouldn’t move further eastwards. A guarantee that Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO was one of Russia’s main demands to avoid the invasion, but the Biden administration refused to engage on the issue.
While the Trump administration has ruled out the idea of Ukraine joining NATO as part of a potential peace deal, the alliance’s leadership is still insisting on its “open door” policy. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said this week that Ukraine is on an “irreversible path” to NATO membership.
Russia’s other condition is related to the security guarantees for Ukraine that are being discussed by the US and its European allies, who are insisting on some sort of arrangement where European troops are deployed to Ukraine and backed by US air power. But Russia has made clear repeatedly that the idea is completely unacceptable, and the insistence on it could tank the peace process.
Sources speaking to Reuters floated the idea of some kind of three way deal between the US, Russia, and Ukraine on security guarantees or revisiting an idea from short-lived peace talks in 2022 that would have involved the five permanent members of the UN Security Council providing the guarantees, which was also brought up by Russian Foreign Minsiter Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday.
While Russia continues to engage in negotiations, it has also made clear that it’s willing to continue the war if its conditions aren’t met. “There are two choices: war or peace, and if there is no peace, then there is more war,” one of the sources told Reuters.
