KYIV — U.S. negotiators have raised the idea of Ukraine withdrawing its remaining forces from the eastern Donbas region in exchange for membership of NATO, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday, in remarks released by his office and reported by the BBC and Reuters.
Zelensky said the question was put to him directly by American envoys. “The Americans raised a question: ‘What if Ukraine joins NATO? Would Ukraine withdraw from Donbas?’ This was the first time this had been raised,” he said, according to the BBC. The United States has not confirmed his account. A U.S. official told the BBC that many ideas continue to be discussed and that any final deal will have to be agreed by both parties.
The remarks followed a round of shuttle diplomacy aimed at ending the war between Russia and Ukraine. U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and then travelled to Dublin on Thursday to meet Zelensky on the sidelines of a European Union summit, according to the BBC. Separate U.S.-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi ended without a breakthrough, though they produced a prisoner exchange, and Zelensky said Russia rejected an energy ceasefire.
Zelensky did not accept the idea, and he did not reject it outright. He said that if he received a specific proposal containing security guarantees, no limits on the size of Ukraine’s military and funds to rebuild the country, he would put it to the Ukrainian people in a referendum. “I have no right to make that decision on my own,” he said, according to Politico. He also repeated his long-held position that Ukraine is not giving up its land, while saying the exchange made him believe that “NATO is back on the agenda.”
The Donbas, made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, borders Russia and is mostly occupied by Russian forces. Russia holds roughly a fifth of Ukraine’s territory in total, including about 80 percent of Donetsk and nearly all of Luhansk, according to estimates cited in reporting on the talks. Kyiv has long sought NATO membership as the strongest guarantee against a future Russian attack, while Moscow has said another NATO member on its border is unacceptable. U.S. officials had previously said Ukrainian membership of the alliance was off the table, which is why the reported question marks a notable shift, if Washington confirms it.
Why it matters: the idea links the alliance guarantee Kyiv wants most to the territorial concession it has refused for years. A referendum promise also moves any decision from the negotiating room to Ukrainian voters, which would take time and could fail. What happens next depends on whether the United States turns a question raised in talks into a written proposal, whether NATO allies would agree to membership on those terms, and how Russia responds. For now, Zelensky’s account is the only public version of the exchange, and the details remain, in his words, still under discussion.
Source: BBC News reporting via syndication, with additional reporting by Reuters, AFP and Politico.
