Putin's Ukraine proposal backed by Trump centres on Donbas. Here's why

Straits Times

4 hours ago

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Since the full-scale invasion, the Donbas has been the site of the war's deadliest battles, and is the main focus of Russia's summer offensive.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – The proposal to end the war in Ukraine that emerged from
the summit in Alaska between US President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia centres on persuading Ukraine to give up the Donbas, the industrial region in the east.
The traditionally Russian-speaking area has been at the heart of what Mr Putin calls the 'root causes' of the war, and taking it over is near the top of his list of territorial and political demands.
He has tried to control the Donbas since 2014, first through separatist proxies and then by invading and annexing the region in 2022. Since the full-scale invasion, the Donbas has been the site of the war's deadliest battles, and is the main focus of Russia's summer offensive.
The Kremlin's forces and its separatist allies have conquered about 87 per cent of the Donbas since 2014, according to data from DeepState, a Ukrainian group that tracks battlefield developments. Russian forces are now chipping away at the 6,734 sq km of the region that remain in Ukrainian hands with very heavy losses. Without a ceasefire, the battle for the Donbas is almost certain to stretch into next year and cost tens of thousands of lives, military analysts say.
The region's fate could shape the outcome of the war.
What is Putin offering?
The substance of a peace deal discussed by Mr Trump and Mr Putin in Alaska on Aug 15 remains murky. The few known details come from the US president's telling of the discussion in a later call to European officials.
Mr Putin is demanding the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the Donbas, according to two senior European officials who were briefed on the call. In return, he is offering to freeze the conflict in the rest of Ukraine along the current front lines and to provide a written promise not to attack again, according to the senior European officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks.
Mr Trump has called on President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to take the deal. 'Russia is a very big power, and they're not,' he said on Fox News after meeting Mr Putin.
Mr Zelensky has categorically rejected giving up any territory not already under Russian occupation. 'We will not leave the Donbas,' he told reporters last week. 'We cannot do that.'
Mr Zelensky is scheduled to meet Mr Trump at the White House on Aug 18.
Ukrainian authorities estimate that more than 200,000 civilians still live in the corner of the Donbas that they control, primarily in the densely populated and heavily fortified industrial sprawl in and around the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
Why is Putin demanding the Donbas?
Since invading Ukraine in 2022, Russia annexed four Ukrainian regions after holding referendums widely denounced as shams. These regions included Donetsk and Luhansk, which together make up the Donbas.
Of the four annexed regions, Russia fully controls only one, Luhansk.
Mr Putin's ground forces have fought in eight other Ukrainian regions since 2022, eventually withdrawing from some and occupying slivers of others.
It is the Donbas, however, that is at the centre of his vision of the war, one shaped by his belief in the historical unity of Russian speakers across the former Soviet Union.
Mr Putin has initially presented the invasion as the defence of the region's pro-Russian separatists, who had fought against the government in Kyiv with the Kremlin's military and financial support since 2014.
That pledge makes control of the Donbas a crucial condition for Mr Putin to declare the job done in Ukraine, said Konstantin Remchukov, an editor in Moscow with Kremlin ties.
Mr Remchukov and other Kremlin commentators have speculated that Mr Putin may be willing to trade other occupied territory to get the rest of the Donbas.
'Donetsk is perceived as way more 'ours' than Dnipro, Sumy or Kharkiv,' said Mr Sergei Markov, a Moscow-based political scientist and former Kremlin adviser, referring to Ukrainian regions with a limited presence of Russian troops.
What are Putin's claims based on?
The Donbas has been contested since Ukraine first emerged as a state in the early 20th century, when Ukrainian nationalists, Communists and Russian monarchists battled for the region's industrial riches in a chaotic period after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Most of the region's population was Ukrainian until Josef Stalin's campaigns of forced industrialisation and terror led to the migration of Russian workers to the region's coal mines and factories, mass killing of Ukrainian farmers and the suppression of the Ukrainian language.
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, about two-thirds of residents of the Donbas considered Russian their first language, according to census data. Russian cultural identity and the language became even more dominant during the first decades after Ukrainian independence.
About 90 per cent of Donbas voters cast ballots for Viktor F. Yanukovych, a pro-Russian candidate, in Ukraine's 2010 presidential election. The toppling of Mr Yanukovych, then president, by protesters in Kyiv four years later led Mr Putin to seize Crimea from Ukraine and engineer an insurgency in the Donbas.
The insurgency created an anti-Russian backlash in the region. In Ukraine's last presidential election, in 2019, the Ukrainian-held part of Donbas voted overwhelmingly for Mr Zelensky, a Russian speaker who promised to bring peace without sacrificing Ukrainian sovereignty.
Mr Putin, meanwhile, was turning to increasingly bellicose nationalism to try to rally domestic support after years of economic stagnation. His propaganda machine tried to rally Russians to the cause of the Donbas, a path that eventually led to a full-scale war.
These propaganda efforts never achieved wide appeal in Russia.
An independent poll conducted a few days before the invasion found that just a quarter of Russians supported bringing Donetsk and Luhansk into the Russian Federation.
Will Putin stop at the Donbas?
Mr Putin has periodically alluded to annexing other parts of Ukraine, leading Ukrainian officials and many Western politicians and analysts to argue that the war would continue after Russia takes the Donbas, whether by force or diplomacy.
Their views are shared by Russian nationalists and many Russian soldiers, who have called on Mr Putin to carry on fighting for the rest of the land in the two other annexed regions, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
Other pro-war commentators have said Russia would keep fighting until toppling the government of Mr Zelensky and installing a more pliant one.
Many independent analysts, however, doubt whether Russia has the economic and military resources to press its offensive much farther beyond the Donbas. The Russian economy is stagnating, and its revenues are falling.
This will make it difficult for the Kremlin to maintain the current pace of the fighting into the next year without significantly reducing the Russians' living standards.
Mr Putin's authoritarian rule and weakening economic outlook may persuade him to settle for the Donbas, at least for now, according to some analysts.
'Russian society is in such a deplorable state that it would be willing to accept almost any outcome of the war,' said Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian politics expert at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. 'We can imagine various degrees of discontent from certain marginal segments of society – 'ultra-patriots' and the likes of them – but the Kremlin can manage it.' NYTIMES
Additional reporting by Steven Erlanger from Berlin and Constant Méheut from Kyiv.