Amid a fast-paced flurry of diplomacy over a US push for a peace deal, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on December 8 that Kyiv has no legal or moral right to cede any of its land.
"Of course, Russia insists that we give up territory. We certainly do not want to give anything up. That is what we are fighting for," saidZelenskyy, whose country has battled Russian military aggression since 2014 and a full-scale invasion by Moscows forces since February 2022.
Sounds straightforward. But in the same online chat with journalists, he said that negotiations with Washington involve complex issues concerning territory and that no compromise has been found there yet.
Heres a look at territorial control in Ukraine, one of the highest hurdles on the path to peace.
The Donbas
Theobjectives and obsessionsthat drove Russian President Vladimir Putin to launch theinvasion go far beyond a land grab, encompassing adesire to subjugateUkraine, weaken the West, and roll back some of the results of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet empire. But control over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which make up the Donbas, is clearly acore aim. And along with dominion over Crimea and parts of the Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions, it may be the least Putin believes he can accept, for the time being, without being seen at home as failing in a war he initially hoped would bring Ukraine to its knees within weeks.
The problem, for Putin, is that his forces have been unable to seize the entirety of the Donbas. All but a few patches of land in the Luhansk region are Russian-occupied, part of the nearly one-fifth of Ukraine that Moscow controls. But Donetsk has proved harder: Russian troops control about 77 percent of the region after inching forward in a long and grueling offensive, but they have failed to definitively take the ruined city of Pokrovsk, and several other population centers remain under Kyivs control.
The massive cost in terms of Russian soldiers killed may have reinforced Putins determination to complete the capture of the region, lest the bloodshed be seen as having taking place in vain. In any case, he has made full control over the Donbas a fundamental demand in any peace deal, saying last week that Russia would seize the remaining part by force if diplomatic efforts do not result in a Ukrainian withdrawal.
