Why Ukraine Cannot Surrender the Donbas: The Fortress Belt and the Ceasefire Trap

Imagine living under enemy occupation for eleven years straight. In that time, some of your neighbors have fled, some have been killed, and some have simply vanished. Those who remain have been coerced into sending their children to Russification programs, and avoid speaking Ukrainian for fear of arrest and torture. Access to food, education, employment, and even life-saving medical care has become contingent on accepting a Russian passport and, by extension, Russian citizenship.

This is the reality for some three million Ukrainian citizens now living behind enemy lines in the embattled Donbas region of eastern Ukraine—an area haunted by bombs, landmines, and extrajudicial killings since Russia’s annexation of Crimea. If negotiations continue on their current trajectory, it may become the reality for hundreds of thousands more.

While some degree of armed conflict has been present in the region since 2014, the situation has only escalated since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine—an invasion now centered on this industrial region. With the latest round of ceasefire talks reaching a dead end, it has become clear that the thing Vladimir Putin wants most is exactly the thing Ukraine can least do without: the Donbas.

The core of the dispute is simple to state and nearly impossible to resolve. Russia wants Ukraine to surrender the Donbas at the negotiating table. For Ukraine, doing so would mean handing over a fortified bulwark built over more than a decade, rewarding aggression that has already broken every treaty between the two states, and exposing millions of citizens to a government accused of mass atrocities—all with no credible guarantee the peace would last.

An Unacceptable Proposal

The peace talks, which began in Abu Dhabi in late January 2026 and reconvened the first week of February, were largely inconclusive. The specifics of the various proposals discussed have not been publicly released, but the broad outlines are known. The United States, whose representatives have served as mediators, is pressing Kyiv to accept terms and stop the fighting.

Washington’s commitment to Ukraine has run hot and cold over the past year: at times seizing ships Russia uses in its shadow fleet of oil tankers, and at others pausing aid entirely. The United States no longer directly supplies Ukraine with military aid, but Kyiv still relies on American intelligence—and there is anxiety in Kyiv that Washington could forbid Europe from buying and shipping US weapons should Ukraine refuse to cooperate.

American negotiators have floated an agreement built around a “demilitarized special economic zone” in the part of Donetsk still held by Ukrainian forces. This stretch of contested land, extending some forty kilometers, would in theory be governed jointly by the United States, Russia, and Ukraine, with both sides required to withdraw their troops and keep them out. Zelenskyy has been amenable to the idea. Russia is not satisfied with the prospect.

The Anchorage Formula

Russian officials, for their part, have presented a plan they call the “Anchorage Formula,” a proposal they claim was agreed upon by Putin and US President Donald Trump when the two convened in Alaska last year. The White House claims to have no knowledge of anything by that name. That denial, combined with the plan’s utter incompatibility with Ukraine’s interests, suggests the name is largely a piece of stagecraft—an attempt to make Russia appear ready and willing to negotiate while positioning Ukraine as the apparent obstacle to peace.

The substance of the Russian proposal is as follows: in exchange for an end to the fighting, Ukrainian forces would pull entirely out of the Donbas region, past the borders of Donetsk and Luhansk, the provinces that make up the vast majority of the Donbas. Russian forces already occupy close to the entirety of Luhansk Oblast, but they control only roughly 75 percent of Donetsk.

During a ceasefire, the frontlines would officially be frozen—perhaps. But it is not much of a stretch to imagine that, should Ukrainian forces withdraw, Russian forces would happily fill the gap, ceasefire or no ceasefire. In effect, the plan simply hands the remaining land, and all its fortifications, over to Russia.

For most Ukrainians, this is a deeply unpopular proposition. Opinion polls continue to show that a majority of the public opposes any deal that would surrender land to end the war, and as far as Kyiv and most of the rest of the world is concerned, Russia’s annexations remain illegal. Yielding would mean losing the bulwark provided by the well-fortified frontlines and rewarding Putin’s aggression, with no promise of the rest of the nation’s continued safety to make such losses even remotely worth it.

So the two sides are deadlocked. Zelenskyy has stated he is willing to discuss a mutual withdrawal of forces, but he will not surrender Donetsk and Luhansk without reliable security guarantees. The Kremlin continues to insist that the only resolution it will accept is the full incorporation of Donetsk and Luhansk into Russia. The result is an impasse—and a look at the history between Putin and Ukraine suggests Zelenskyy’s caution is not misplaced.

Reasons for Suspicion

Ukraine has essentially no reason to think that conceding to Russia’s claim to the Donbas would prevent future conflict. Nearly everything in the recent diplomatic record points to the opposite. The intricacies of post-Soviet diplomacy explain why.

By invading Crimea in 2014, Russia violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum—in essence, an agreement that prohibited Russia from threatening or using military force against Ukraine, Belarus, or Kazakhstan in exchange for those countries relinquishing their nuclear weapons. In an attempt to end the hostilities that followed the annexation of Crimea, Russia and Ukraine signed the first Minsk Agreement. The word first matters: barely four months later, Russia violated that ceasefire too, sending another wave of soldiers to continue fighting in January 2015. Following a significant defeat in February of that year, Ukraine was forced to sign Minsk II on unfavorable terms.

Russia then violated both the Budapest Memorandum and the Minsk agreements with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It is not a reassuring track record. Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people have been given no reason to believe the Kremlin would honor a ceasefire deal for any meaningful length of time.

Consider, too, the geometry of the proposed “demilitarized special economic zone”: Russian forces on Ukraine’s doorstep, Ukrainian troops kilometers away, and a wide swath of occupied land sitting right beside them. To Kyiv, that looks an awful lot like an invasion just waiting to happen. From Ukraine’s perspective, any agreement to withdraw from Donetsk and Luhansk would have to be accompanied by an iron-clad security agreement. Anything else would be madness—especially given the strategic importance of the strip of land in Donetsk that Russian forces have been unable to claim, an area so heavily fortified it has held off the concerted efforts of the Russian army for over a decade without breaking.

Ukraine’s Fortress Belt

By now, both sides have dug in deep along the frontlines, each committing thousands upon thousands of troops and extraordinary amounts of resources. Yet despite the sheer manpower devoted to the cause, Russia has not made significant advances since the first months of the war. Its forces have been gaining territory only on the order of dozens of square kilometers per month—and at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian lives.

The reason Russia’s advance has stalled lies in a stretch of land in Donetsk Oblast known as the fortress belt. A roughly fifty-kilometer series of fortifications running between the cities of Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, and down to Kostyantynivka, this heavily militarized strip of railways and roads features lines of razor wire, deep anti-tank ditches, defensive berms, and landmines galore, while ensuring that supplies continue to reach the frontline. Russia has so far proven unable to breach these defenses, meaning its ground troops’ progress further into Ukraine—and toward other important strategic targets, such as the Dnipro River—has been halted.

The fortress belt’s defenses are vital to maintaining Ukraine’s hold in the region, and losing it to the Russian military would pose a serious threat to the country. The belt is so effective that, for better or worse, very little in the way of further defensive lines has been constructed behind it.

Kirill Martynov, editor-in-chief of the exiled Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe, framed the stakes bluntly in a recent interview: “Putin has been trying to conquer the Donetsk region for 11 years. Handing over to him those fortified areas that remain under Ukrainian control is effectively a path to Kharkiv and Dnipro. And, by and large, a path to a new war in which it will be even easier for Putin to win.”

The Geography of Defense

A 2023 brief published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies explained the problem in terms of terrain. Flat, open spaces—like those beyond the fortress belt—favor the offense, because their excellent visibility and absence of natural obstacles make it easy for an invading force to flank a defending army. The fortress belt’s lines of defense use the hilly land to their advantage; the broad plains of the steppes beyond are nearly devoid of defensible features.

Allowing Russian forces to advance to the border of Donetsk as part of a ceasefire would require Ukrainian forces to rapidly build large-scale defenses on open fields. Even setting the geographical difficulties aside, Ukraine simply cannot rebuild an equivalent fortress belt further west. The belt is the product of nearly twelve years of labor and supplies, placed strategically to exploit the geography of the region.

To use a handy analogy, a Ukraine without the fortress belt is like a medieval castle without its moat, drawbridge, or fortifications of any kind. In any future war, the enemy could more or less just walk right on in.

Former Lithuanian Foreign Affairs Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis has compared surrendering the fortress belt to the 1938 Munich Agreement that forced Czechoslovakia to hand over the Sudetenland. A heavily fortified stretch of mountainous land key to holding back any German offensive, the Sudetenland was surrendered to the Nazis by Britain and France, which claimed that appeasing Hitler then would leave him no reason to attack Czechoslovakia further down the line. That calculation, history records, did not work out.

Landsbergis’s assessment is that the West is now wilfully recreating the mistakes of history: “What would happen if—by the time the ceasefire is agreed—Putin takes Donbas and demands Kharkiv? Would the Western position change somehow? Where is the line where we would say ‘not a step further’?”

To Landsbergis, surrendering this much in hopes of peace seems almost certain to set the stage for a far worse invasion in the near future. Ukrainian officials in the government and military believe they will ultimately fight three wars with Russia. The first was in 2014. The current war is the second. The third, they expect, will come after the eventual ceasefire, once Putin has had time to rebuild his shattered army—and Ukraine wants to start that next war with as many advantages as possible.

The Coalition of the Willing

Regardless of whether Ukraine withdraws its troops, some European nations have pledged to station soldiers in the country once a ceasefire is reached. The “Coalition of the Willing,” a group of more than thirty countries from Europe and around the world, published plans in January 2026 to support Ukrainian independence following a ceasefire.

The basic outline includes participation in a proposed US-led ceasefire monitoring and verification mechanism; long-term support for the Ukrainian military, including financial aid and arms; the deployment of a multinational corps to assist in rebuilding, training, and monitoring borders; and, most importantly, “binding commitments to support Ukraine in the case of a future armed attack by Russia, in order to restore peace.”

That final commitment was especially well-received by Zelenskyy, who has said he is ready and willing to sign a security agreement along these lines. The Kremlin, for its part, loudly insists this is unacceptable, claiming such guarantees would encourage Ukraine to stage a false-flag attack so NATO could invade Russia.

Rhetoric of this kind only deepens Ukrainian skepticism that Russia will abide by any ceasefire. Oleksandr Khara, head of the Centre for Defense Strategies in Kyiv, has said the Coalition’s proposal is merely an assurance, not a guarantee—mainly an attempt, in his words, to “sugar-coat the bitter pill” of territorial concessions.

A Partner Ukraine Can No Longer Count On

Ukraine’s search for reliable guarantees long predates the current talks. After receiving public silence and private opposition from US President Joe Biden’s administration over its ambitious attempt to join NATO early in the war, Ukraine was left to look elsewhere to safeguard its borders. That was under Biden—who still showed interest in passing sanctions on Russia and allocating military aid to Ukraine.

Now, under Donald Trump, the United States has reduced its involvement to measures like intelligence sharing and allowing Europe to buy US weapons for Kyiv. Trump’s frequent changes in attitude have raised eyebrows in Kyiv and Brussels alike, leaving European officials worried that Washington may not be a consistent partner in matters of continental defense—even outside of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the fact that Russia has violated every treaty it has signed with Ukraine, including those containing some measure of security guarantees, means there is no illusion among Ukrainians that any peace favoring Russia will hold. War, in this reading, will spark again as soon as the Kremlin decides conditions are right. For Ukraine, the situation boils down to a stark choice: continue this war, or let Russia pick the time and place that best suits it to try again.

The Future of the Donbas

Putin does not seem likely to ever give up on his plans of conquering Ukraine. In a February 2022 speech, shortly before the full-scale invasion, he claimed that Ukraine was “an inalienable part of [Russia’s] history, culture and spiritual space,” and repeatedly challenged Ukraine’s right to a separate existence. Over the years, he has insisted that the two nations’ shared heritage and language make existing separately unnecessary and illogical, that Ukrainians are being oppressed, lied to, and even subjected to genocide by their own government, and that Ukraine is overall a failed state.

One might have expected four years of war—four years in which Moscow’s forces “liberated” Russian-speaking cities like Mariupol by bombing them flat and killing tens of thousands of civilians—to lead Putin to drop the pretense. Instead, all signs are that he has doubled down. In June 2025, Putin drew enthusiastic applause at a keynote speech when he declared: “I have said many times that I consider the Russian and Ukrainian people to be one nation. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours.”

If the last twenty-odd years of his pronouncements on the subject are anything to go by, Ukraine is an obsession he will never drop. From Kyiv’s perspective, all this talk of brotherhood and shared history is simply a veil for an imperial war of conquest.

Ukrainian law prohibits ceding territory that is not occupied by military force. Beyond the legal barrier, acquiescing to these ceasefire demands would invalidate Ukraine’s sovereignty, harm the current and future war effort, and reinforce Putin’s unlawful claims of ownership over Ukrainian territory. It would also place Ukrainian citizens at the mercy of the Russian government.

The Human Stakes

Somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million Ukrainian citizens still live in the Donbas, doing their best to go about their lives against a backdrop of whirring drones and distant gunfire. International human rights organizations have documented numerous violations by Russian forces in Ukraine, including torture, unlawful arrests, deportations, and sexual violence. The Bucha massacre, which made headlines in 2022 after the town’s recapture following nearly a month of occupation, is far from the only place where civilians have been murdered en masse by Russian forces.

To give up on retaking the region and surrender the remainder of Donetsk to Russian control would, in Kyiv’s view, be to abandon those citizens to their fates. That fear—that surrender would guarantee another Bucha—is at the heart of Ukraine’s resistance to ceding this territory.

In a recent interview with France 2 News, asked about Russia’s demand for a Ukrainian retreat, Zelenskyy said: “Russia wants us to leave the entire Donbas. Why? Because to conquer eastern Ukraine, it will cost them another 800,000 corpses, corpses of their soldiers. It will take them at least two years, with very slow progress. In my opinion, they won’t last that long.”

Regardless of precisely how many more lives this war takes, the gist of Zelenskyy’s message is hard to argue with. Ukrainian soil has been very costly to Russia, and unless an agreement is reached, it will remain so until one side can no longer fight. But acknowledging Ukraine’s sovereignty and bowing out is not an option for Putin—a man not exactly known for admitting when he is wrong. As far as the Kremlin is concerned, it has already declared ownership of the region.

The proposed ceasefire deal would grant Putin a massive step forward that his armies have so far failed to accomplish, while asking Ukraine to trust a system of guarantees that has already failed it multiple times. It would be no surprise if Kyiv rejects the deal even under immense US pressure. Losing Washington’s support would leave Ukraine in a difficult position. Surrendering the Donbas at the negotiating table would doom it to disaster.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Russia demanding that Ukraine surrender?

Russia wants Ukrainian forces to pull entirely out of the Donbas region, past the borders of Donetsk and Luhansk. This would include the areas of Donetsk that Ukraine’s army still holds—not just territory already under Russian occupation—and would hand over the fortress belt that Russia has been unable to capture through years of fighting.

What is Ukraine’s fortress belt and why does it matter?

The fortress belt is a roughly fifty-kilometer series of fortifications running between Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, and Kostyantynivka in Donetsk Oblast. Built over nearly twelve years, it features razor wire, anti-tank ditches, defensive berms, and extensive minefields, and has stalled Russia’s advance toward the Dnipro River. The belt exploits hilly terrain; the open steppe beyond it offers almost no natural defensive features, making an equivalent structure impossible to rebuild further west.

Why doesn’t Ukraine trust Russian security guarantees?

Russia violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum by invading Crimea in 2014, violated the first Minsk Agreement within roughly four months, forced Ukraine into the unfavorable Minsk II, and then violated all of them again with its 2022 full-scale invasion. Kyiv has no basis to believe the Kremlin would honor a new agreement, especially one that left Russian forces on Ukraine’s doorstep while Ukrainian troops were pushed back kilometers away.

What did Landsbergis mean by comparing the Donbas to the Sudetenland?

Former Lithuanian Foreign Affairs Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis compared surrendering the fortress belt to the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which Britain and France handed Czechoslovakia’s fortified Sudetenland to Nazi Germany in hopes of avoiding further war. That appeasement failed catastrophically, and Landsbergis argues the West risks repeating the mistake by pressing Ukraine to give up its strongest defensive line in exchange for guarantees from a power that has already broken every agreement it has signed.

Why do Ukrainian officials say they will fight three wars with Russia?

Ukrainian officials count the 2014 conflict as the first war and the current full-scale invasion as the second. They believe a third will follow any ceasefire once Putin has rebuilt his shattered army. That expectation shapes Kyiv’s refusal to surrender the fortress belt: entering the next war from open, undefended steppe would give Russia far better conditions than it currently faces, making any future fight far easier for Moscow to win.

Sources

1. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147776
2. https://www.swp-berlin.org/10.18449/2024C38/
3. https://kyivindependent.com/why-does-russia-want-donbas-6-things-to-know-about-region-ukraine-is-being-pressured-to-give-up/
4. https://www.politico.eu/article/peace-deal-between-russia-ukraine-looks-close-except-territory-security-ceasefire-zelenskyy-putin/
5. https://abcnews.go.com/International/trumps-threats-abandon-ukraine-war-pose-battlefield-conundrums/story?id=122624970
6. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/02/11/us-warships-used-diego-garcia-to-capture-shadow-fleet-tanke/
7. https://www.csis.org/analysis/trump-sends-weapons-ukraine-numbers
8. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/25/ukraine-accepts-demilitarised-zone-to-end-russia-war-but-do-dmzs-work
9. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/27/world/russia-ukraine-talks-anchorage-formula-analysis-intl
10. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/4/russia-ukraine-war-second-round-of-peace-talks-set-to-begin-in-abu-dhabi
11. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/ukraine/russia-unleashes-new-attacks-freezing-ukraine-day-peace-talks-rcna257201
12. https://understandingwar.org/newsroom/new-york-post-nearly-four-years-into-war-russia-has-gained-little-and-ukraine-keeps-bouncing-back-despite-some-2-million-draft-dodgers/
13. https://english.nv.ua/nation/ukrainian-intelligence-officer-calls-pokrovsk-fortifications-sabotage-urges-investigation-50479086.html
14. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-donbas-donetsk-war-putin/33564948.html
15. https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/01/07/ukraine-now-has-the-fortress-belt-it-wishes-it-had-in-2022
16. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/23/world/ukraine-donbas-region-explained-intl
17. https://www.csis.org/analysis/ukraines-offensive-operations-shifting-offense-defense-balance
18. https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/the-critical-importance-of-ukraines-fortress-belt-in-donetsk-oblast/
19. https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/08/18/putins-land-swap-is-really-a-grab-for-ukraines-fortress-belt
20. https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/landsbergis-donbas-is-todays-sudetenland/
21. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/27/opinion/trump-russia-ukraine-putin-zelensky.html
22. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-donbas-region.html
23. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-agrees-multi-tier-plan-enforcing-any-ceasefire-with-russia-ft-reports-2026-02-03/
24. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/zelenskyy-says-u-s-security-agreement-for-ukraine-is-100-ready-to-be-signed
25. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/26/ukraines-security-guarantees-what-are-they-and-why-might-they-fall-short
26. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2026/01/06/robust-security-guarantees-for-a-solid-and-lasting-peace-in-ukraine-statement-of-the-coalition-of-the-willing-issued-by-france/
27. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/us/politics/nato-ukraine.html
28. https://www.npr.org/2024/02/23/1233410578/biden-russia-sanctions-ukraine-war-anniversary-navalny
29. https://www.forbes.com/sites/marktemnycky/2025/08/16/how-us-aid-to-ukraine-and-russia-changed-from-biden-to-trump/
30. https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-leaders-warn-europe-must-become-defense-giant-us-role-wanes-nato-andrius-kubilius/
31. https://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828
32. https://theconversation.com/putins-invasion-of-ukraine-attacks-its-distinct-history-and-reveals-his-imperial-instincts-177669
33. https://unn.ua/en/news/russians-will-need-at-least-2-years-and-800000-of-their-own-soldiers-corpses-to-seize-donbas-zelenskyy