Ken Akpan
The Russian President, Vladimir Putin is demanding that Ukraine give up all of the eastern Donbas region, renounce ambitions to join NATO, remain neutral and keep Western troops out of the country, as conditions to end the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Putin met United States President, Donald Trump in Alaska last Friday, being August 15, 2025, for the first Russia-US Summit in more than four years and spent almost all of their three-hour closed meeting discussing what a compromise on Ukraine might look like.
Speaking afterwards beside Trump, Putin said the meeting would hopefully open up the road to peace in Ukraine, but neither leader was specific about what they discussed.
In the most detailed Russian-based reporting to date on Putin’s offer at the summit, newsmen were able to outline the contours of what the Kremlin would like to see in a possible peace deal to end a war that has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people.
In essence, the Russian sources said, Putin has compromised on territorial demands he laid out in June 2024, which required Kyiv to cede the entirety of the four provinces Moscow claims as part of Russia: Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine – which make up the Donbas – plus Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south.
However, Kyiv rejected those 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 the three sources. In return, though, Moscow would halt the current front lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
Russia controls about 88% of the Donbas and 73% of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, according to U.S estimates and open-source data.
Moscow is also reportedly willing to hand over the small parts of the Kharkiv, Sumy, and Dnipropetrovsk regions of Ukraine it controls as part of a possible deal.
Putin is sticking, too, to his previous demands that Ukraine give up its NATO ambitions and for a legally binding pledge from the U.S-led military alliance that it would not expand further eastwards, as well as for limits on the Ukrainian army and an agreement that no Western troops would be deployed on the ground in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force.
Yet the two sides remain far apart, more than three years after Putin ordered thousands of Russian troops into Ukraine in a full-scale invasion that followed the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and prolonged fighting in the country’s east between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine has repeatedly dismissed the idea of withdrawing from internationally recognized Ukrainian land as part of a deal, and has said the industrial Donbas region serves as a fortress holding back Russian advances deeper into Ukraine.
“If we’re talking about simply withdrawing from the east, we cannot do that. It is a matter of our country’s survival, involving the strongest defensive lines,” he told reporters in comments released by Kyiv on Thursday, August 21, 2025.
Joining NATO, meanwhile, is a strategic objective enshrined in the country’s constitution and one which Ukraine sees as its most reliable security guarantee.
Zelenskiy therefore stated it was not up to Russia to decide on the alliance’s membership.
According to reports, the White House and NATO didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the Russian proposals.
