A string of Ukrainian politicians and public figures condemned the idea of handing over unoccupied land to Russia for peace on Sunday, arguing that their country had not been defeated and should not be forced into a surrender.
The hardening of the mood comes at the end of a weekend where there was first ridicule and disgust in Ukraine at the red carpet treatment of Vladimir Putin by Donald Trump at their summit in Alaska – followed by frustration as it appeared that Trump was siding with the Russian leader.
Trump reportedly told European leaders that he believed a peace deal could be negotiated if Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed to give up the areas of the Donbas region that the Russian invaders have not been able to seize in more than three years of fighting.
Halyna Yanchenko, an independent member of Ukraine’s parliament, said demands that Ukraine “simply surrender new territories without a fight – just because Putin wants it – is absurd from the very start”.
The MP, an anti-corruption activist previously part of Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party, said that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians would be affected by Putin’s proposal, initially favoured by Trump after Friday’s Alaska summit.
Official estimates are that 255,000 people still live in the 9,000 sq km (3,500 sq miles) of Donetsk province that Russia has been unable to seize in its three and a half year invasion, which includes the industrial cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. The Donbas also comprises Luhansk province, which is almost totally occupied by Russia.
Prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion the population of Donetsk was 1.9 million, so the number of people with property and other connections to the area wanted by Russia is higher. “So when someone brings up the idea of ‘trading territory’ we must understand that, in practice, it is trading people,” Yanchenko said.
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Serhii Kupavykh, who was born and raised in Kramatorsk, but now lives in Kharkiv, said he believed that allowing Russia to take his city and the rest of Donetsk would amount to “a defeat in the war, which will lead to a split in society”, though he recognised that gradual Russian advances had made the defence of them difficult.
Zelenskyy had “no right to resolve such issues unilaterally” and he said he believed that “renouncing the territory is political suicide for the entire government” – though he acknowledged that Ukraine was in a complex position.
Cartoons and memes circulated widely online over the weekend with a particular focus on the sight of US soldiers kneeling to straighten out the red carpet in Alaska for the Russian president. “Dishonored,” wrote Ukrainian drone fundraiser Serhii Sternenko on X, comparing the image to soldiers raising the US flag at Iwo Jima towards the end of the second world war.
Maksym Palenko, a cartoonist, drew a picture of a glum-looking Trump with his trademark red tie spooling out beneath him and turning into a carpet on which a laughing Putin was standing. It reflected shots of Putin smiling as he was sitting in Trump’s limousine while it was setting off.
“We do not deserve to surrender, and we are not in a position to surrender,” said Oleksiy Goncharenko, an MP with the opposition European Solidarity party. “This part of Donetsk is a fortress and Putin has tried and failed to take it for 11 years. Now he wants to take it through diplomatic tricks and manoeuvres.”
Russia’s military has struggled to capture urban centres during the war, and the Kramatorsk area is one of the most heavily defended in Ukraine. Last week Zelenskyy said it effectively protected the centre of the country and there was no guarantee handing it over would not prevent a new war.
Putin’s offer to freeze the conflict in the western Kherson and central Zaporizhzhia provinces if Ukraine hands over Donetsk was designed to provoke splits in Ukraine and abroad, the MP argued, but the situation needed to be handled with care.
The president’s response needed to be “well framed, to persuade Trump that Putin has set a trap, because we have seen in the past that the relationship between Trump and Zelenskyy can be quite explosive,” Goncharenko said.
Ukraine’s armed forces fire at Russian invading troops in the Donetsk region, Ukraine. Photograph: Pierre Crom/Getty Images
On his previous visit to see Trump at the White House, Zelenskyy was ambushed by Trump and vice-president JD Vance, and got into a bitter public argument with both – leading to a pause in intelligence sharing and arms deliveries at a crucial point in the battle.
Sevgil Musaieva, the editor of Ukrainian Pravda, said in a column published on Sunday that “we are being forced to behave as if we have to admit defeat. Not military, but political. Not a surrender of arms, but a surrender of thought.”
This was, she continued, “the most dangerous form of defeat. Because if we accept it internally, then external defeat will only be a matter of time.” In fact “for the first time in a century, Ukrainians put up a worthy resistance,” she said.
“We have no right to forget Bucha, Izium, Mariupol. We have no right to forget the torture, the mass graves, the children killed and abducted by Russia,” she said, arguing that “without memory we will lose ourselves”.
Oleksii Kovzhun, a popular Kyiv-based video blogger, said that “Putin’s demands are akin to capitulation” and said that “Zelenskyy could not legally hand over Donetsk even if he would want to (and he does not)” because it would have to be subject to a referendum. “Ukrainians will not allow it,” he said.