Kyiv is being offered surrender, not a deal.
Following Friday’s talks between US President Donald Trump and Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin in Alaska, a deal is reportedly in the works that would have Ukraine cede the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (colloquially known as the Donbas) while allowing Moscow to freeze the lines elsewhere.
Kyiv would also be barred from joining NATO, a Moscow-imposed restriction that overrides Ukraine’s sovereign decision.
In return, Moscow would reportedly pull back from the Kharkiv and Sumy regions and accept security guarantees for Kyiv akin to NATO’s Article 5 – while being permanently barred from joining the alliance.
We all know how the Budapest Memorandum worked out – how Ukraine was sold out after agreeing to give up the vast nuclear arsenal it had inherited from the defunct Soviet Union.
As President Volodymyr Zelensky is set to meet Trump on Monday and potentially be offered the rumored deal, Kyiv Post would like to state, for the record, that these are precisely the official war goals of Moscow in 2022 – and much more, besides.
Moscow’s official war goals
In 2022, Russia listed the goals for its so-called “special military operation” as follows:
The main aims of the special operation in Ukraine are:
- The consolidation in the Constitution of Ukraine of the new outlines of the country’s border (without Crimea, the Donetsk and Luhansk regions), the permanent neutral status of Ukraine, implying the refusal to participate in any military alliances and a prohibition on the deployment of any foreign military bases on its territory.
- Demilitarization, entailing a major reduction of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, a prohibition on the possession of nuclear weapons, offensive weapons and military infrastructure that poses a potential military threat to neighboring states.
- Denazification, the result of which should be the eradication of any supposed, as interpreted by Russia, Ukrainian neo-Nazi, misanthropic and discriminatory ideology against any groups of citizens by nationality or other feature, which should be enshrined in the permanent legislation of the country. Moreover, laws deemed discriminatory by Russia, that have already been adopted, should be repealed, nationalist associations prohibited, and lustrated.
The rumored deal – which would effectively weaken Ukraine while ceding lands Russia has yet to occupy – achieves nearly every war aim Moscow set in 2022, while additionally handing the occupied parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions on a silver platter.
Handing Ukraine over on a silver platter
As Kyiv Post found in its analysis, the current deal would see Russia withdraw from a tiny fraction of the lands it has occupied, while receiving recognition for swathes of territories it has captured.
As of Aug. 12, the percentage of Ukrainian territories captured stood as follows:
- Kharkiv region — 4%
- Zaporizhzhia region — 73%
- Luhansk region — 99%
- Kherson region — 69%
- Donetsk region — 75%
- Sumy region — less than 1%
Every inch of the 25% of Donetsk still under Ukrainian control has been paid for in blood. Handing it to Moscow without a fight would betray the thousands of families who gave their lives to defend it.
In layman’s terms, Moscow offers mere peanuts in exchange for a huge payoff – there’s no compromise on both sides, as US officials claim, only from Ukraine.
As the saying goes, those who forget history – in this case, the annexation with impunity of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland by Hitler in 1938 in the interest of “peace for our time” – are bound to repeat it.
If we are wiser and have learned anything from our modern history, we should avoid repeating such grave mistakes.