Piece For Peace

Russia's demands of a piece of Ukraine will not lead to peace

Photo by Nithin Najeeb on Unsplash

The planned meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin on August 15 has been short on specifics. On August 10, U.S. Vice President JD Vance told Fox News that a potential meeting between Trump, Putin, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is being worked out, although it seems unlikely that Putin would ever be in the same room as the Ukrainian leader. It's also not yet clear where in Alaska the meeting is taking place.

Ahead of the planned summit, Russia's negotiating position has come into focus. According to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, last week in Moscow, Putin told Trump's top negotiator, Steve Witkoff, what his demands for a ceasefire are. They include Kyiv withdrawing from all of Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, which Moscow only partially controls. The front line would be frozen in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions that Russia also claims all of. Putin would demand international recognition for its claims to the Donetsk region as well as the Luhansk region and Crimea, which it illegally seized in 2014. According to the German tabloid Bild, Witkoff interpreted that Russia had backed down from demanding all of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson; however, the paper reported that Russia in fact, hadn't made a concession, and that Witkoff may have misunderstood Putin. Bild added that Witkoff may also have misinterpreted Putin's offer for an energy infrastructure and long-range strikes ceasefire as a general ceasefire that would stop all frontline military activity.

Russia's position is old wine in new bottles; its demands for a ceasefire remain maximal. Withdrawing from the one-third of the Donetsk Oblast which Ukraine controls would be strategically disastrous for Kyiv. It would mean abandoning a series of fortified lines that Ukraine has built that have repelled Russian attempts to advance in 2014 and 2022 -- with no guarantee that fighting would stop permanently.

In this respect, Putin's terms echo Hitler's demand to Western powers in September 1938 at the Munich conference that Czechoslovakia cede its German-speaking Sudetenland region to Berlin. Western powers told Czechoslovakia to give up its most fortified and mountainous region at a conference it wasn't even invited to. Western leaders wanted "peace," believing Hitler's lies that it would be the last "piece" of territory he wanted. Months later, Hitler invaded all of Czechoslovakia and the democratically-elected government in Prague surrendered to Hitler's forces.

It's doubtful that Trump knows any of this history; he touted "some swapping of territories" while talking in the White House on August 9.