Russia's Demands Pose Major Obstacle to Ukraine Peace Deal: Here Is What Moscow Wants

US special envoy Jared Kushner said that three days of diplomacy with Ukrainian and Russian negotiators and the presidents of both countries produced "meaningful progress" toward an agreement to end Moscow's war against Ukraine. But there was no public sign that Russia is prepared to offer concessions that might bring a settlement within reach. Both President Vladimir Putin and his chief negotiator have at times sent extremely uncompromising signals on central questions, among them territorial claims in Ukraine and sought-after changes to the long-established European security order.

The Russian positions outlined below come after two days of trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi and separate US meetings with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on November 12.

For many months, Putin and other officials have stressed that complete Russian control over the Donbas, made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, is a precondition for any peace agreement. Russia fomented war there in 2014 after seizing Crimea, held parts of both regions well before the full-scale invasion of February 2022, and now occupies virtually all of Luhansk and roughly 80 percent of Donetsk. Its forces have nonetheless failed in years of deadly fighting to take the rest of Donetsk, including a "fortress belt" that includes Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. Putin has repeatedly said Russia will seize the remainder by force if diplomacy fails, while Zelenskyy says Kyiv will not, formally or de facto, give up land its soldiers fought hard to defend.

The Kremlin's ambitions extend beyond Crimea and the Donbas. In September 2022, Moscow baselessly declared the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson regions to be part of Russia. It holds a majority of Kherson and Zaporizhzhya but not their capital cities; its troops took Kherson early in the full-scale war before being driven back across the Dnieper River in November 2022. Russia has at times sent mixed signals about whether it might accept partial control of those regions or even withdraw, but there was no such ambiguity this week. Meeting Kushner and fellow US envoy Steve Witkoff in the Kremlin on November 12, Putin claimed Kyiv had been "raising questions about gray zones" and added: "For us, there is only one line of demarcation: the line of the state border." He was not referring to the actual border in place since the Soviet collapse in 1991, which places all five claimed regions inside Ukraine, but to the border as Moscow has regarded it since 2022, meaning a peace that would make those regions entirely Russian, including areas now held by Kyiv.

On Russian state television, chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky struck a belligerent note, saying that "wherever the Russian flag has been raised, it must not be lowered" and repeating a past Putin comment that "wherever the foot of [a] Russian soldier has stepped, that is ours." He also suggested Moscow intends to keep territory it holds along the border in Ukraine's Kharkiv and Sumy regions, north of the Donbas, land observers had viewed, along with occupied ground in the Dnipropetrovsk region, as something Russia might trade away in a compromise. Medinsky noted that Putin had ordered a "security zone" along the border inside Ukraine, saying: "This zone is now quite substantial. It is expanding, and it will continue to expand. I don't see any possibility of exchanging these territories."

Rhetoric is rhetoric, and after the Abu Dhabi talks on November 11, a US negotiator speaking on condition of anonymity reported detecting "a little bit of flexibility" from both sides. Still, the remarks set an uncompromising tone. Samuel Charap, senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation, wrote on X that Putin's statement was "a clear reiteration of the hardline position on territory that has emerged over the last year" and that it "doesn't leave a lot of negotiating space" on this issue at least.

Russian officials have been less specific about another subject now central to the US-led process: a possible new European security architecture. On November 5, US President Donald Trump spoke of prospects for a "big, beautiful agreement" that is "going to involve more than Ukraine," and Kushner wrote of "the need for a broader European security architecture that can help establish conditions for lasting peace." The idea is hardly new for Moscow, dating at least to Putin's rise to power more than a quarter-century ago, rooted in a bid to reverse Cold War geopolitical losses and restore Russian clout in Europe. Without giving details, Medinsky told Russian TV that Moscow's aim is a "new, modern Yalta and Potsdam," a reference to the 1945 meetings where the United States, the USSR, and Britain settled the fate of parts of postwar Europe. He said such a system could "preserve peace for decades, perhaps centuries." The talk comes amid Russian hopes for a Putin-Trump-Xi Jinping summit at the November 18-19 APEC gathering in China, which Zelenskyy warned could amount to a "redistribution of spheres of influence," and it has stirred fears in Europe and Ukraine that larger powers might decide their fate while Russia is rewarded rather than punished for its aggression.

Hints of Russia's specific goals may lie in draft treaties it sent to Washington and NATO in December 2021, widely seen as ultimatums delivered as Russian troops massed on Ukraine's borders two months before the full-scale invasion. Those demands amounted to a reversal of some Cold War outcomes: no further NATO enlargement, a bar on member military activity in Ukraine and other regional countries, and a pullback of deployments behind the borders of countries that belonged to the alliance in 1997, before any former Soviet satellites joined. How closely Moscow's current positions track those demands, or wartime proposals such as strictly limiting the size of Ukraine's military, is in some cases unclear.

At a Moscow conference on November 11, a Russian Foreign Ministry official described several agreement types that could form part of a new security system, Reuters reported, including a collective defense alliance and bilateral nonaggression or mutual assistance pacts between Moscow and individual NATO members. Analysts say the Kremlin favors bilateral dealings with European nations over NATO or the EU partly because that lets Moscow sow divisions. Russia also continues to demand that Ukraine be permanently barred from NATO and has bristled at security guarantees for Kyiv resembling the alliance treaty's Article 5, under which an armed attack on one member counts as an attack on all. And in his meeting with Kushner and Witkoff, Putin indicated that any Western troop deployment in Ukraine after a peace deal would be unacceptable, saying: "We have already talked about this: For us, they are a legitimate target, meaning the war [would] resume immediately."