Putin Sticks to His Demands on Donbas, No-NATO – Reuters

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to demand that Ukraine give up all of the Donbas region, renounce its NATO ambitions while remaining neutral, and keep Western troops out of the country, three sources familiar with top-level Kremlin thinking told Reuters.

In effect, little has changed since Putin and US President Donald Trump met in Alaska on Friday, Aug. 15. It was the first Russia-US summit in more than four years, and it forced European leaders to coalesce behind Ukraine due to fears that Trump might cut a deal that would pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky to capitulate.

Trump and Putin and spent almost all of their three-hour closed meeting discussing what a compromise on Ukraine might look like, according to the Reuters sources who requested anonymity.

Speaking afterwards beside Trump, Putin alluded to the possibility of peace in Ukraine – but both remained circumspect about what exactly they discussed.

Through its sources, Reuters was able to outline “the contours of what the Kremlin would like to see in a possible peace deal” to end the Russo-Ukrainian War begun in February 2022 with Russia’s full-scale invasion, which failed to achieve Moscow’s maximalist objectives.

The Russian sources told Reuters that Putin has essentially compromised on territorial demands he laid out in June 2024, which required Kyiv to cede the entirety of the four regions Moscow claims as part of Russia: Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine – which make up the Donbas – plus Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south.

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NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte issued a stark appeal to young Russians not to fight in the war in Ukraine, saying they will be sent to the front with poor training, bad equipment and a high chance of being killed, wounded or abandoned. He backed his warning with NATO estimates that Russia is losing more than 30,000 soldiers a month – more in a single month than the Soviet Union lost during its entire 10-year war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

As of December 2024, according to the Institute for the Study of War, Russia controlled an estimated 76% of the Kherson region, 74% of Zaporizhzhia, 70% of Donetsk, 99% of Luhansk. Moscow also controls 100% of Crimea.

Kyiv rejected Russia’s terms as tantamount to surrender.

In his new proposal, the Russian president has stuck to his demand that Ukraine completely withdraw from the parts of the Donbas it still controls, according to Reuters’ three sources. In return, though, Moscow would freeze the current front lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

Moscow is also willing to hand over the small parts of the Kharkiv and Sumy regions of Ukraine it controls as part of a possible deal, the sources said.

Putin is also not budging on his previous demands that Ukraine give up its NATO ambitions, and insists on a legally binding pledge from the alliance that it will not expand further eastwards. He is also calling for limits on the Ukrainian army and an agreement that no Western troops will be deployed on the ground in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force, the sources said.