As anyone who caught even a bit of the day’s news knows, US President Donald Trump, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and the leaders of NATO, the European Union, Britain and several European countries spent Monday at the White House negotiating a possible land swap and security guarantees that could end the Russian-Ukrainian war. But did they really?
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, from left, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Donald Trump, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the White House. Credit: AP
Let’s think about the word “negotiating”. All wars end with it, according to the popular saying, but rarely does the aggressor come to the table demanding territory that it doesn’t actually control. Usually, the belligerents discuss which military gains should be formalised and which should be reversed. Vladimir Putin, however, has consistently demanded more land than his military has been able to bring under its control in the three and a half years since Russia’s full-scale invasion began. During his summit with Trump in Alaska on Friday, Putin appears to have made a small concession: He is still demanding more land than he has occupied, but not as much as he used to demand. But less is still more.
So let’s talk about “land swap”. This phrase seems to refer to Putin’s offer to take a piece of Ukraine in exchange for not threatening an even bigger piece of Ukraine. This is not what we normally think of as a swap. It’s what we think of as extortion.
Let’s also talk about the word “land”, or “territory”, which the leaders gathered at the White House on Monday used a lot. Zelensky referred to a map Trump apparently provided to facilitate discussion of “territory”. Trump promised to get him a copy.
But “territory” is not an outline on a map. It’s cities and towns and villages where people still live – even near the front line, even now. Before the full-scale invasion, the populations of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the two Ukrainian cities on land Putin is demanding, were 200,000 and 100,000, respectively. We don’t know how many people live there now – some people surely fled, some came from occupied territories, some died – but the number is almost certainly tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people.
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To propose to cede the land to Russia is to propose either subjecting those residents to Russian occupation – which in other cities has involved summary executions, detentions and torture – or displacing them forcibly. Either would be a crime – a crime in which Trump is asking Zelensky to become an accomplice.
This kind of negotiation-through-extortion is not unprecedented. In February 1945, the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain met in Yalta – then a city in Soviet Russia, later a city in Ukraine, now a city in Russian-occupied Crimea – to negotiate the end of World War II. Among other things, Josef Stalin wanted the Kuril Islands, which stretched from Soviet Kamchatka to the coast of Japan.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill agreed to let the Soviets have the Kurils. The islands weren’t theirs to give – the Kurils belonged to Japan – but they were theirs to take. Six months later, Soviet troops, with significant support from the US military, took control of the islands and deported the Japanese residents.
