Der „Festungsgürtel“ der Ukraine, den Donald Trump gegen Frieden eintauschen will

Ask the Czechs and Slovaks how well trading their fortress belt for peace worked out in 1938.

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Ukraine’s ‘fortress belt’ that Donald Trump wants to trade for peace

Known as the Donbas, the region has become the fulcrum of fraught US-led diplomacy to end Russia’s full-scale invasion

Vladimir Putin and Steve Witkoff © FT montage/AP/Reuters/Russian defence ministry
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Christopher Miller in Kyiv

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As US-led efforts to end Russia’s war against Ukraine lurch forward, there is one considerable obstacle that could derail an agreement: territorial concessions.

Russia and the US are demanding that Kyiv withdraw from roughly a quarter of Donetsk province and a sliver of neighbouring Luhansk province still under Ukrainian control — an area that is politically important to Kyiv, and its most heavily fortified bulwark against Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

Donetsk and Luhansk provinces together form what is known locally as the Donbas — a sprawling eastern steppe roughly half the size of England and similar to the US state of West Virginia.

The area, filled with metallurgical plants and coal mines, once served as the Soviet Union’s industrial powerhouse. Home to a complex mix of ideologies and languages — a blend of Russian and Ukrainian called surzhyk is common today — it has been notoriously difficult for outside powers to control.

In a 1921 letter to his Soviet comrades, Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky wearily described the Donbas as so toxic a “political gas mask” was required to deal with it.

The question of the Donbas remains just as vexed today, with the territories emerging as one of the most contentious elements of peace talks to end the largest war in Europe since 1945.

By seeking to claim the land through negotiations, the Kremlin has attempted to acquire what it failed to conquer at immense military cost since 2014. Controlling the Donbas would mean seizing a “fortress belt” of cities — Pokrovsk, Kostyantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk — that have remained a rampart against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine. 

But Russian troops have been advancing. They now claim much of Pokrovsk and are already at the southern entrance to Kostyantynivka, according to Ukrainian military officials and analysts. Ukraine’s top general Oleksandr Syrsky said on Tuesday he had ordered a partial withdrawal of forces around part of Pokrovsk after their positions became untenable.

A sizeable portion of the more than $1bn that Ukraine spent on defences last year went to the Donbas, the focus of Russia’s ground assaults. Some of the fortifications are visible from the highways that cut through the region: layered labyrinths of defensive lines composed of razor wire, trenches, minefields and other obstacles. 

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Ukrainian soldiers defend the town of Kostyantynivka as Russia advances © Reuters
The terrain there also makes for a strong barrier for Ukraine, with its natural cliffs and valleys, as well as the man-made quarries and slag heaps that dot the landscape.

West of the defensive line, however, the steppe flattens out, and Russia could have open fields and less densely populated areas to sweep through, analysts say.

It would be easier for Russia to move deeper into Ukraine should its forces take the fortress belt cities — or be given them, as the US has suggested, as part of a peace deal.  

Trump administration officials, notably the US president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, have pushed Ukrainian negotiators in recent weeks to accept a “land swap” that they see as an inevitable part of any peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow, according to several people familiar with the talks. 

This would entail ceding ground in Donetsk that Russia has lost tens of thousands of troops trying to capture through countless ground offensives supported by swarms of suicide drones and heavy bombardment.

Witkoff, who has met Russian President Vladimir Putin in person six times this year, was “obsessed” with the idea that if Kyiv just handed over the remaining 25 per cent of the eastern Donetsk province under its control to Moscow a fair peace could be achieved and a longer, more devastating war could be avoided, said two senior Ukrainian officials.

US President Donald Trump, for his part, has argued that Ukraine “doesn’t have the cards” and stands to lose much more in battle next year if it refuses what he considers reasonable territorial concessions now.

Mykola Bielieskov, a senior analyst at Come Back Alive, a group that procures military equipment for the Ukrainian army, said the US idea of a unilateral Ukrainian withdrawal “seems to be the Trump team’s best attempt to bridge Russian and Ukrainian positions” in peace talks.

But he warned the debate around the Donbas had no good outcomes for his country, as a weak agreement would create “fissures inside Ukraine while leaving open nearby regions for further Russian advances”. The alternative would be refusing to cede ground — and risk Washington withdrawing its support.

Mourners attend the funeral of a soldier in Kyiv © Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA/Shutterstock
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been adamant — and many European officials and military analysts agree with him — that Ukraine handing over territory without a fight would mean forcibly swallowing a poison pill.

Zelenskyy reiterated his position to reporters in a WhatsApp chat on Monday, saying he has no legal or moral right to cede territory to Russia. Most analysts in Ukraine expect the public backlash over territorial concessions to be fierce.