Washington has signalled that any US security guarantees for Ukraine may depend on Kyiv accepting a peace deal that would involve relinquishing control of the Donbas, according to a Financial Times report.

The report said US officials had also raised the prospect of increased weapons support for Ukraine’s peacetime armed forces if Ukrainian units withdraw from the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions still held by the Ukrainian government.

The reported linkage goes to the heart of the current negotiating impasse: territory versus security. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said a US document on security guarantees is “100% ready” and that Kyiv is waiting for a time and place to sign it, after which it would go to the US Congress and Ukraine’s parliament for ratification. In the same remarks, Zelenskyy reiterated that Ukraine’s territorial integrity must be upheld, while acknowledging that the United States is seeking a compromise between two “fundamentally different positions”.

The White House has rejected the characterisation of US pressure. Reuters quoted Anna Kelly, the deputy White House press secretary, telling the Financial Times: “This is totally false — the US’s only role in the peacemaking process is to bring both sides together to make a deal.” A person familiar with the US position also told the newspaper Washington was not trying to force territorial concessions, while maintaining that security guarantees would depend on an agreed peace deal.

Moscow’s position is well established: it insists Ukraine must withdraw from the whole of the Donbas as a precondition for ending the war. Reuters reported the Kremlin saying on Monday that the territory question remained fundamental to any settlement, following weekend talks in Abu Dhabi involving Ukrainian and Russian negotiators alongside US mediators.

Abu Dhabi talks end without deal as Ukraine and Russia set out rival terms

The focus on Donetsk and Luhansk raises an additional question that is now being openly discussed by Ukrainian commentators: why is withdrawal from the still-held parts of Donbas presented as the decisive condition, when Russia’s declared territorial claims extend beyond it? Moscow announced the annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in 2022, following votes widely dismissed in the West as illegitimate. Yet the current reported US “ask” is concentrated on the sections of Donetsk and Luhansk that Russia has not taken militarily.

One explanation is practical and military. Donetsk contains some of the best-defended urban areas on the eastern front. For Russia, taking them by assault would be costly and slow, with fighting likely to centre on fortified towns and the logistics corridors that sustain them. If a diplomatic process could deliver territory without prolonged battles, it would change the balance on the ground while reducing Russia’s immediate operational risks. That logic has been used by analysts to explain why the Kremlin has periodically elevated Donbas withdrawal above other issues during negotiations.

A second explanation is political: the demand may be designed to trigger instability inside Ukraine. Any decision to pull back from territory still under Ukrainian control would cut across a central wartime pledge made by Kyiv: not to trade land for a ceasefire without credible security guarantees. The domestic consequences of such a move could be unpredictable, particularly in a country that has mobilised on the premise of defending the areas still held by the state. In that reading, the territorial demand is not an end point but a lever, aimed at weakening Ukraine’s unity and decision-making during a fragile negotiating phase.

There is a recent precedent in the region for a peace document producing a political shock. In November 2020, Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, signed a Russia-brokered statement with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev that ended fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh and returned territory to Azerbaijani control. The agreement triggered protests in Yerevan; demonstrators stormed government buildings and parliament, and the parliament speaker, Ararat Mirzoyan, was assaulted amid the unrest, according to Reuters reporting at the time.

A third explanation concerns external messaging, particularly towards Washington. If the central territorial condition is framed as a narrow, “reasonable” demand, Moscow can argue that the obstacle to peace is Ukrainian refusal rather than Russian maximalism. That approach would be consistent with repeated Kremlin efforts to depict Kyiv as the party unwilling to compromise, while pressing the United States to act as a persuader rather than an enforcer. Reuters reported that, in the Financial Times account, the US believes Ukraine must give up Donbas for the war to end and is not pressing President Vladimir Putin to drop the demand.

For the Trump administration, the reported position would align US guarantees with a negotiated outcome rather than an open-ended commitment. For Kyiv, the dilemma is structural: security commitments that are conditional on territorial withdrawal may be viewed as insufficiently firm, while any withdrawal absent guarantees would be seen by many Ukrainians as irreversible.

Talks are continuing, but the reported US linkage, if accurate, suggests the negotiations are moving from broad principles to concrete territorial lines — the stage at which the political costs become hardest to manage for all sides.

First published on eutoday.net.