RESPONSIBLE STATESCRAFT | Published March 18, 2025
Zelensky had gambled on being able to trade land in Russia for the return of land in Ukraine. That failed.
President Zelensky should have pressed ahead with peace talks in August 2024, rather than invading Kursk. Ahead of talks between Presidents Trump and Putin this week, he has no cards left to play.
According to the New York Times on Sunday, Ukrainian troops are all but gone from the Russian Kursk region. At the peak of last August’s offensive, Ukraine held 500 square miles of the Russian territory. After fierce fighting it holds just a sliver of that today.
It is perhaps ironic that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s audacious offensive took place in the midst of secret talks in Qatar towards a partial ceasefire. It is no coincidence that Russia’s offensive in Kursk over the past week took place while Ukraine was agreeing with the U.S. on the notion of a possible ceasefire during talks in Saudi Arabia.
The inauguration of President Trump in January made U.S.-led pressure to end the fighting both inevitable but also, more importantly, predictable. It is absolutely clear to me that for President Putin, retaking Kursk was essential to putting him in the best possible place to negotiate.
Zelensky had gambled on improving his hand of cards in future ceasefire talks by being able to trade land in Russia for the return of land in Ukraine. That gamble has failed. Prior to the past week, based on the Institute for the Study of War battle map, Russia had already occupied three-to-four times more land in Ukraine than was seized in Kursk.
Over the past 11 years, I have witnessed Russia’s preference for upping the military ante to put themselves in the strongest possible position before striking a deal. What has happened over the past week has been, in many respects, a carbon copy of the tactics Russia used immediately before the agreement of the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 peace deals.
After the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk seized power following the February 2014 ouster of President Yanukovych, the Ukrainian army launched an Anti-Terror Operation to regain control of the Donbas. This led to considerable success on the Ukrainian side and the recapture of several large towns. With Ukrainian forces reaching the outskirts of Luhansk and Donetsk cities, the Russian military stepped into the conflict. On August 29, 2014, Russian formations encircled the town of Ilovaisk, inflicting a bloody defeat on the Ukrainian formations who are thought to have lost up to four hundred personnel. Just days later, the First Minsk agreement was signed, offering concessions to the separatists in the form of progress towards devolution.
The Ukrainian side didn’t push forward with devolution or a promised ‘national dialogue’. While the line of contact largely held, there were repeated violations of the ceasefire and casualties on both sides, including civilian casualties in the separatist areas which were verified by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission. In late January 2015, Russian backed Wagner troops mounted a brutal and, ultimately, successful encirclement of the town of Debaltseve, causing a withdrawal of Ukrainian troops.
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SOURCE: www.responsiblestatescraft.org
RELATED: Trump weighs recognizing Crimea as Russian territory in bid to end war
SEMAFOR | Published March 18, 2025
The Trump administration is considering recognizing Ukraine’s Crimea region as Russian territory as part of any future agreement to end Moscow’s war on Kyiv, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Administration officials have also discussed the possibility of having the US urge the United Nations to do the same, according to both people. Such a request would align the Trump administration with the position of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long seen Crimea as his nation’s territory.
The administration’s previously unreported openness to those options comes as Trump prepares for a Tuesday call with Putin, with a potential 30-day ceasefire deal on the table. Trump told reporters Sunday evening aboard Air Force One that negotiators had already discussed “dividing up certain assets.”
Trump has not formally made any decisions, and the possible Crimea moves are two of a multitude of options being floated as his administration pushes for an end to the war.
The White House declined to comment. In a statement to Semafor after publication of this story, National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes said that the administration has “made no such commitments and we will not negotiate this deal through the media.”
“Just two weeks ago, both Ukraine and Russia were miles apart on a ceasefire agreement, and we are now closer to a deal thanks to the leadership of President Trump. The goal remains the same: stop the killing and find a peaceful resolution to this conflict,” Hughes added.
Trump administration officials have talked openly about the need for Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia in order to bring the three-year war to an end, and the president himself has said in the past that he’s willing to consider Crimea to be part of Russia. But since Trump took office, his advisers haven’t publicly divulged many specifics about what they might offer to Putin.
Ukrainians have “suffered greatly and their people have suffered greatly, and it’s hard in the aftermath of something like that to even talk about concessions,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters last week. “But that’s the only way this is going to end to prevent more suffering.”
A push by the US to formally recognize Crimea — which Russia invaded and illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014 — as Russian land would likely draw tremendous pushback from Europe as well as from Kyiv, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has firmly resisted territorial concessions. The US, Ukraine, and much of the international community have recognized Crimea as Ukrainian, despite Russia’s occupation of the peninsula.
At the same time, security experts have serious doubts about Ukrainian forces’ ability to retake Crimea through military means. Even Zelenskyy acknowledged last year that the territory could only be restored to Ukraine through diplomacy, something Russia is unlikely to agree to.
Trump first floated the prospect of recognizing Crimea as Russian territory years before Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While running for president in 2016 — and subsequently, during his first term — the president repeatedly said he’d “look at” whether the US would move to recognize it.
“The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were,” Trump said during a 2018 interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “And you have to look at that, also.”
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SOURCE: www.semafor.com
