New Delhi: With Russian President Vladimir Putin doubling down on his demand of Ukraine ceding the eastern Donbas region before any ceasefire deal can be signed, and US President Donald Trump backing off from his Thanksgiving deadline, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is fast running out of options.
The latest hardline comments from Putin come after a week of hectic negotiations between Russia and the US, and Washington with its allies in Europe and Ukraine, to find an end to the almost four-year long conflict.
“If Ukraine’s troops leave the territory occupied (in Donbas), then military action will stop. If they won’t leave, then we will achieve that by armed force,” Putin declared at a press conference in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek. These were his most expansive comments on the peace negotiations in the last week, with particular emphasis on his maximalist demands outlined to end the conflict.
Russia has made some battlefield gains in recent months with progress around the key cities of Kupyansk and Pokrovsk. Moscow has long struggled to gain territory in Eastern Ukraine, making some significant gains but at high costs, according to media reports.
Putin demanded immediate recognition from the US and EU of Russian control over the Donbas region. However, he doesn’t expect immediate Ukrainian recognition of the transfer of territory. “We need this confirmation, but not from Ukraine, of course. I’m sure, in the future, we’ll be able to talk to Ukraine,” he said.
The Russian president’s strong comments on peace terms come after reports that the 28-point US-backed peace plan has been altered. Negotiations between US and Ukraine officials in Geneva significantly cut down the terms seen by the EU and Ukraine as too close to conceding to Russian demands.
US State Secretary Marco Rubio met Ukrainian official Andriy Yermak in Geneva last Sunday. The week saw intense negotiations which got the 28-point peace plan down to 19-points, reported Financial Times, citing a member of the Ukrainian delegation, Sergiy Kyslytsya.
Russian officials maintained a week of quiet, merely saying that any peace plan should stick to the “spirit of Alaska”. The original 28-point peace plan was seen by Putin and other Russian officials as based on negotiations at the Alaska summit between Putin and Trump this August.
European leaders were blindsided by the plan and many of them reportedly became aware of it from the media. The EU leadership spent the weekend at the G20 summit in Johannesburg in an attempt to return to a seat at the negotiating table.
The original plan would have seen Kyiv ceding territory to Moscow, namely the provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea. Kyiv continues to control around a quarter of the territory in Donetsk. The Eastern regions, especially Donetsk and Luhansk, are commonly referred to as the Donbas.
Russia launched a “special military operation” against Ukraine in February 2022, starting the current phase of open warfare between the two countries. Since 2014, the Crimean peninsula has been occupied by Moscow, while the eastern provinces had attempted to split from Ukrainian control.
The whittling down of the 28-point peace plan to a 19-point plan has seemingly triggered Moscow. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to travel to Russia in the first half of next week to deliver the latest plan discussed by Washington with European allies and Kyiv.
Europe too had come up with a counter-proposal to the US-backed peace plan. There were critical disagreements between the two, mainly around territorial transfers to Russia, a cap on the size of the Ukrainian military and Ukraine’s relationship with NATO with the associated security guarantees.
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Ceding of territory & cap on troops
“Putin wants legal recognition for what he has stolen to break the principle of territorial integrity and sovereignty. And that’s the main problem,” Zelenskyy said this week, appearing on video at the Fourth Parliamentary Summit of the Crimea Platform at the Swedish Riksdag (parliament) in Stockholm.
The European counterplan text, as published by Reuters, did not rule out transfer of territory. It said negotiations on territorial swaps will start from the line of contact between the Russian and Ukrainian armies.
The US-backed plan, on the other hand, proposed that Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be “recognised de-facto” as Russian, even by the US. The legal implications of this phrasing are not clear.
Zaporizhzhia and Kherson will have the front lines frozen and no further territorial claims will be made by Russia, according to the 28-point plan. Russia does not control large parts of Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, but holds territory elsewhere, including in areas bordering Sumy where Russia had launched an offensive.
The European plan further called for an 8,00,000 cap on troops in the Ukrainian military in peacetime while the 28-point plan called for a 6,00,000 cap on ‘Ukrainian Armed Forces’. There is room for interpretation on the definition of armed forces considering reserves and paramilitary units.
For comparison, in the midst of war in 2025, Ukraine’s army has active personnel of around 9,00,000. In the pre-war era before 2022, Ukraine had around 2,00,000 active personnel, according to Global Firepower that ranks the military strength of nations.
NATO membership & Kyiv’s domestic troubles
One contentious issue is Ukraine’s “freedom to choose future alliances”, also considered as a root cause behind the Russian invasion.
A week before the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin had raised concerns over Ukraine’s NATO membership bid in Moscow, after meeting with then German chancellor Olaf Scholz.
For Ukraine, joining NATO is a matter of sovereignty and a vital security guarantee against future Russian aggression.
“No third country has the right of veto, or has the right to block our choice, I mean a Ukrainian choice, the choice of our people to choose any alliances,” the Ukrainian foreign minister had told ThePrint this March.
The 28-point plan called for Ukraine’s constitution to enshrine neutrality, ruling out any membership of NATO. The EU plan, however, removed this stipulation.
EU’s insistence on Ukraine having an option to join NATO has been a red line for Russia and is often cited by Moscow as a reason for the start of war.
Zelenskyy’s administration is, meanwhile, hit by corruption scandals that further pressure his position during negotiations.
Two senior ministers resigned amid allegations of kickbacks from a nuclear contract. Calls to fire his close aide and chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, have grown, alleging that he had knowledge of the scandal. Yermak led talks on the Ukrainian side with Rubio in Geneva this week.
After repeated claims of progress from his officials, Trump said to reporters that he doesn’t have a deadline for the agreement and posted on his TruthSocial platform Wednesday that he wouldn’t meet Putin or Zelenskyy until a deal is finalised or is “in its final stages”.
Negotiations to end the almost four-year conflict have brought to the fore the fault lines between the Trump administration, European powers and Kyiv.
Trump’s administration has, according to reports, attempted to mediate from a position of neutrality, despite almost $70 billion worth of military aid given to Ukraine.
For the EU, which had long dominated European affairs, the efforts by Moscow and Washington to apparently side-step Brussels indicate its diminishing power to address the conflict at its door.
Aditya GV is an alum of ThePrint School of Journalism, currently interning with ThePrint
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)