The future of Ukraine’s industrial heartland in the east of the country is uncertain, after Vladimir Putin reportedly demanded it be handed to Russia during his meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday.
Those demands will set a tense backdrop to a potential meeting between Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. The latter said he was ready for a trilateral meeting with Trump and Putin, after he held a friendly meeting with the US president in the White House on Monday.
“We’re going to work with Ukraine. We’re going to work with everybody, and we’re going to make sure that if there’s peace, the peace is going to stay long term. This is very long term,” Trump said after Monday’s meeting.
But territorial disputes, such as Putin’s demands for the Donbas, will pose a major challenge for mediators.
The Russian leader demanded that Ukrainian forces withdraw from Donetsk as part of any ceasefire deal, and said he would be prepared to stop fighting on the rest of the frontline if Kyiv gave in to the demand and addressed the “root causes of the conflict”.
The Ukrainian president has said that Putin wants to take the remaining 30 per cent of the eastern region, which has been the location of some of the fiercest battles in the three-and-a-half-year war.
But losing Donetsk would give Russia control of almost all of the Donbas, the collective name for Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, which has been long coveted by Putin.
Last week, Zelensky vowed that Ukraine would “never leave” the Donbas and warned that Putin could use it as a springboard for a future invasion.
However, sources close to the meeting told The Independent that the dramatic move appears to have been endorsed by Mr Trump as a means to bring an end to the war.
As Kyiv fights to keep the Donbas from Trump’s so-called “land swap” deal, here’s all you need to know about the region.
Situated along Ukraine’s eastern border, the Donbas takes its portmanteau name from “Donets Basin”, a further abbreviation of “Donets Coal Basin”, in reference to the coal basin along the Donets Ridge and River.
The Donbas stretches across the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, two large regions of Ukraine that have been on the front line of the war that followed Russia’s invasion.
The Donbas has been partially occupied by Russia since 2014, around the same time that Putin annexed the Crimean peninsula. Russian-backed separatists broke away from the Ukrainian government to proclaim the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk independent “people’s republics” and, as a result, Moscow captured more than a third of Ukraine’s eastern territory.
Russia classes inhabitants of the Republic of Crimea, Sevastopol, the Luhansk People’s Republic, the Donetsk People’s Republic, and the regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson as subjects of the Russian Federation. Ukraine insists these territories are part of Ukraine.
