United States President Donald Trump has suggested freezing the war in Ukraine at its current front lines and using these lines as a starting point for future negotiations over territory.
Peace talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine have so far stalled despite Trump boasting during his presidential campaign last year that he could end the war in “24 hours” after his inauguration.
Russia insists that it must be allowed to keep all the land it has seized from Ukraine and be granted more if it is to consider a ceasefire. Ukraine has balked at this, and Trump has failed to move either side.
Here is what the current front lines look like and how Russia and Ukraine have reacted to this latest proposal:
What has Trump proposed?
Trump has proposed halting the war where the fighting is now occurring.
“They can negotiate something later on down the line. But I said cut and stop at the battle line,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday.
“The rest is very tough to negotiate if you’re going to say, ‘You take this. We take that.’”
When Trump was asked if he had advised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cede the whole of the eastern region of Donbas, which borders Russia and which it has laid claim to, he said no.
“Let it be cut the way it is. It’s cut up right now. I think 78 percent of the land is already taken by Russia,” Trump told a reporter from the Reuters news agency.
“You leave it the way it is right now. They can … negotiate something later on down the line.”
Where are the front lines right now?
Over the course of its nearly four-year war in Ukraine, Russia has seized territory primarily in four eastern and southern Ukrainian provinces: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia. It also controls a small pocket of Kharkiv province.
Donetsk and Luhansk are collectively called the Donbas, which has seen the most fighting.
Russia controls all of Luhansk and most of Donetsk, including the areas around the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
Russia also controls about 75 percent of Kherson and Zaporizhia.
Zaporizhia is a significant industrial region known for its steel, aluminium and aircraft manufacturing and is also home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.
How have Ukraine and its European allies responded to this proposal?
Ukraine and Europe have backed Trump’s plan to freeze the battle lines.
On Tuesday, European leaders and Zelenskyy signed a statement saying they “strongly” support Trump’s proposal.
“The current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations,” the statement said.
Previously, Ukraine has insisted on reclaiming all of its land. But Trump has flip-flopped over whether Ukraine should or should not be required to cede land to Russia in any peace deal.
In August before a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska to discuss the war, Trump stated that both Russia and Ukraine would have to cede territory to end the war.
“There’ll be some land swapping going on,” Trump told reporters at the time.
Then in September, Trump appeared to make a U-turn, saying Ukraine could win the war militarily and recapture the territories occupied by Russia, including the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized in 2014, and other areas in eastern Ukraine. “Ukraine would be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that!” Trump wrote in a social media post.
How has Russia responded?
Russia has rejected the plan.
On Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia is committed to “a long-term, sustainable peace – not an immediate ceasefire that would lead nowhere”.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov added that “the consistency of Russia’s position doesn’t change,” referring to its hardline demands to end its war, including a complete withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the eastern regions that Moscow has laid claim to.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Russia had sent a private communique to the US over the weekend, demanding control of all of the Donbas – not just the parts it has already seized.
A planned meeting between Trump and Putin in Budapest, Hungary, in the next two weeks was shelved this week as Trump said he did not want a “wasted meeting” with Putin.
“It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get, so I cancelled it. But we’ll do it in the future,” Trump told reporters in the White House on Wednesday.
