According to the assessment of the US Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the territorial goals of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine extend well beyond the Donbas. In its report, the ISW analysed reports that the American side had proposed in the negotiations to change the administrative borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions so that Russia could announce the conquest of the entire Donbas and agree to an agreement to end the war, as Radio Svoboda reported on Wednesday, 11 November.
“However, such proposals do not take into account Moscow’s broader territorial goals in Ukraine,” Radio Svoboda quotes from the ISW analysis. Putin has repeatedly shown that his territorial claims go far beyond the Donbas. In September 2022, Russia announced the annexation of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions; the Kremlin had long prepared Russian society to regard this annexation as final. In addition, Russian officials regularly described the invented, vague region of “Novorossiya” in the south and east of Ukraine as an inseparable part of Russia – this included, alongside the occupied Crimea and the four annexed regions, also the Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions.
A proposal that fails on the reality of the front
According to the ISW’s assessment, any attempt to change the administrative borders of Donetsk and Luhansk would additionally be complicated by the “significant gap between the actual situation at the front and official Russian statements about the front line”. This gap carries the risk that Moscow would claim control over more territory than it actually holds. “Putin and the Russian military command have created a distorted reality based on exaggerated claims about large-scale advances along the front. This creates the risk that the Kremlin will try to use any discussion about changing the administrative borders (on the basis of the actual front line) in its own interest,” the report says.
The background is a report by The Economist magazine of 9 November. According to it, American negotiators had recently proposed to Ukraine that the administrative borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions be changed as part of a possible territorial agreement between Russia and Ukraine. Russia could thereby announce a claim to full control over both regions, while Ukraine would retain control over the remaining part of the Donbas that it currently holds. The new regional borders should coincide with the areas conquered by Russian troops; according to the report, it remains unclear what legal status the part of Donetsk and Luhansk remaining under Ukrainian control would have.
Zelensky: “Putin lives in a different reality”
In Abu Dhabi, the second round of negotiations on ending the war between Russia and Ukraine, with US participation, is underway on Wednesday, 11 November. According to Radio Svoboda, the talks lasted about four hours. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described details of the first day the evening before and named differences: the Russian side spoke of its control over areas in the Donetsk region that are actually held by the Ukrainian armed forces. “Putin lives in a different reality. He will tell the Americans that he needs one to two months to fully occupy the east of Ukraine. I can also paint him a picture in which I have fully occupied Russia. But that is not true. The positive thing was that the American side confirmed the Ukrainian assessment of the situation on the battlefield,” Zelensky said.
A Radio Svoboda source close to the Ukrainian delegation reported that a “large-scale prisoner exchange in the near future” had been agreed in the United Arab Emirates; the sides had also discussed security guarantees. A ceasefire is not expected in Abu Dhabi. Radio Svoboda’s Washington correspondent, Alex Raufoglu, quotes officials as saying that the USA wants to move Russia towards an agreement that offers Ukraine protection analogous to Articles 4 and 5 of NATO. “According to one of the officials, any US commitments ultimately depend on Trump; he stressed that Europe must bear the financial burden,” Raufoglu said. The territorial question remains unresolved: Russia continues to demand the entire Donetsk region, while Ukraine advocates a cessation of fighting along the current line of contact. American officials had stated that both sides had shown some flexibility, but stressed that territorial questions and post-war security arrangements must be discussed in parallel and ultimately decided together.
Editor’s note: The assessment that the ISW report evaluates the American proposal as insufficient for Moscow’s goals reflects the think tank’s argumentation, not an assessment by this editorial team.
