Donbas-for-peace offer raises fears of more war, nuclear spread

KYIV, Ukraine — The price of U.S. security guarantees to end Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine became explicit this week: Kyiv must give up all of Donbas — about 10% of its territory, or about 15% of its prewar GDP.

The United States has asked Ukraine to withdraw from all of the eastern region — including areas it has held during more than 14 years of Russian attacks — before it will finalize the long-term protections it has been discussing with Kyiv for months, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, describing the negotiation in comments to Reuters .

The demand followed bilateral talks in Florida with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and senior adviser Jared Kushner last weekend that Zelenskyy said produced no real progress , a sharper assessment than his earlier claim that the guarantees were “100% ready.”

Just three weeks earlier, Zelenskyy tried to close the door on the central trade-off in the talks. Ukraine would “never leave Donbas and the 200,000 Ukrainians who live there,” he told Corriere della Sera .

But the battlefield did not slow down to match the diplomacy. Ukraine seized more ground in a February counteroffensive than at any point since 2023, according to the Institute for the Study of War .

Russia answered this week with its spring offensive — nearly 1,000 strikes in 24 hours, the largest attack of the war. Ukraine hit back the next day with about 400 drones, crippling at least 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity, according to Reuters .

Russian officials said this week the talks had been paused, though it was not clear when — or whether — they would resume.

“What Ukraine is being asked to do is politically and morally unacceptable,” retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of U.S. Army Europe, told Military Times.

In his view, the Donbas demand isn’t a bargaining chip — it is the point of the deal, and a test of whether Washington is willing to trade Ukrainian territory for a paper promise.

“You’re asking a country that’s been invaded to surrender its people and its land, and you’re calling that peace,” Hodges said.

As experts see it, the deal isn’t a path to peace so much as a demand Ukraine can’t accept: trading away Donbas for an undefined guarantee from a guarantor whose credibility is already fraying, as the Iran war drains the weapons Kyiv needs and boosts the Russian war machine.

Soldiers conduct a Patriot missile live-fire at MacGregor Range near Fort Bliss, Texas, Aug. 23, 2025. (Sgt. JaDarius Duncan/U.S. Army)

And if the message is that even a country that gave up its nuclear arsenal can be told to cede land for a “maybe,” the result won’t be peace, they argue, but more wars and more states concluding they need the bomb to survive.

Retired U.S. Ambassador Ian Kelly, who served as ambassador to Georgia when Russia occupied 20% of the country, said the pattern was not new.

“We gave them the Javelin but then said, ‘By the way, don’t use them,’” Kelly told Military Times.

Kelly said the outline is familiar: a concession Kyiv cannot make, paired with a promise that has not been spelled out — and offered by a sponsor whose follow-through is already doubted.

While any ceasefire signed under those conditions would be temporary, Kelly said, the precedent it sets would be permanent: it tells Moscow what kinds of demands work, and it tells U.S. partners what American protection is actually worth.

The uncertanties behind it come fast: what, exactly, Washington is offering; what enforcing it would actually require without the U.S.; and what happens if the guarantee fails its first credibility test.

Either way, the long shadow is the same. Deterrence doesn’t disappear — it migrates.

The guarantee mirage

The security guarantee at the center of the deal carries a basic problem: the people involved don’t appear to agree on what it means or whether it would hold up when tested.

In February, Zelenskyy tried to make one of Ukraine’s few real political concessions count: he said Kyiv would drop its bid to join NATO, a goal that had anchored Ukraine’s post-2019 foreign policy and one Moscow has long used to justify its war.

Washington, Zelenskyy said, offered what it described as “Article 5-like” security guarantees in return.

Hodges said the wording was the tell. Article 5 is a treaty commitment with a known trigger and an alliance behind it.

“Article 5-like” is neither. “That’s not a security guarantee,” he said. “It’s a phrase.”

He called it an “absolutely empty promise.” If the administration won’t even enforce existing sanctions — he pointed to India importing more Russian oil than before the war — “the administration’s not serious,” Hodges said.

“You can’t design security guarantees on the basis of ‘maybe,’” Hodges added.

He said he had zero confidence the current administration would treat a Russian drone attack on Ukraine the way it would treat one on New York or Washington.

“Does it have to be 50 drones or is it one drone?” he said. “I don’t have any confidence that they would really do that.”

But the deeper problem, he said, is that both sides know it.

“This is where we get into the Jedi mind tricks,” Hodges said. “I find it hard to believe that the Ukrainians trust ... the Americans. So, they’re also positing that simply as a negotiation tactic” to by time, he argued, for Europeans “to rediscover their strategic backbone and do what needs to be done to provide those capabilities.”

A Ukrainian officer shows a thermobaric charge of a downed Shahed drone launched by Russia, Nov. 14, 2024. (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)

Most NATO allies still fall short of the alliance’s defense spending targets. Trump has repeatedly threatened to pull the U.S. out if they do not pay up, leaving Ukraine reliant on a security umbrella its own guarantor is threatening to fold.

Hodges said the administration’s approach was failing not because the negotiations were insincere, but because Washington had refused to back Ukraine on the most fundamental issues from the start.

“They never cared about the origin of the war,” Hodges said. “They’ve never been willing to say that Russia was the aggressor. They’ve never said, ‘Russia, you’ve got to get out.’”

A deal no one believes in

When looking at the track record — the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which failed to prevent Russia’s invasion after Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal, and the Minsk ceasefire agreements that repeatedly collapsed — the new guarantee does not get any easier to take at face value, experts and insiders said.

Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow for European security at the Royal United Services Institute and a former British Army infantry officer, said the guarantee breaks down in three places: Washington is unlikely to commit to it, Kyiv is unsure it would hold and the Kremlin would sign only to keep fighting on better terms.

“Is the U.S. going to provide Ukraine something like mutual security assistance? I don’t think so,” Arnold told Military Times. “And even if they did, do the Ukrainians believe in it? And pretty critically, does Putin believe in it?”

Arnold pointed to the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords, both presidential directives that were reversed by successor administrations.

“[Those directives] are not legally binding,” he said. “The U.S. has fairly consistently let Ukraine down.”

Even if the guarantees were defined, the rules of enforcement make it practically impossible to sustain without the U.S., whose military spending exceeds that of every European NATO member combined.

“Europe simply does not have the capacity to provide the same level,” Arnold said. “Yet at the same time, they can’t trust the United States, given America’s most recent actions — let alone history.”

And what European governments do send, they lose permanently from their own defense posture.

Arnold calculated that any peacekeeping force of 15,000 to 25,000 soldiers requires triple that in a rotation committed indefinitely.

“Whatever you’re going to put into Ukraine, you’re permanently taking it away from what is available to you,” he said.

The diplomat said the deeper failure was not material but political. The failure of European leaders to convince their own populations that Russian aggression was a threat to them, not just to Ukraine.

“Europe has completely failed at deterrence,” he told Military Times.

Arnold traced the political logic to its root.

“Politically, you don’t win votes by spending more money on defense and less on welfare,” he said.

The result is a continent that has, in many ways, lost strategic control of its own defensives.

“We have handed escalation control to Russia,” he said. “They continuously escalate. And we keep absorbing it.”

A residential building is seen damaged after a Russian strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Jan. 9, 2026. (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)

For Zelenskyy, a deal that locks in a Ukrainian withdrawal from Donbas would force Kyiv to formalize a loss it has spent years saying it will not accept. It would also put Zelenskyy’s own pledge to “never leave Donbas” on the line, along with the roughly 200,000 Ukrainians he has said are still there.

“It would be toxic to sign up to something just to say that Russia gets off the hook for everything it’s done in not just the last four years, actually the last 12,” Arnold said.

That is why the deal, as described, does not reduce the risk of another war, Arnold added. It pushes it down the road.

“Russians certainly don’t want peace,” he said. “They do want their economy to improve, probably to move against Ukraine again in the future.”

Putin “is not in the mood to negotiate and is kind of making a fool of Trump,” he added.

The price and the precedent

Kelly said Washington was not eliminating the risk of escalation with Russia, but instead moving that risk down the chain, from the U.S. onto Ukraine and onto European allies that have less capacity to absorb it. In doing so, the risk of where increases everywhere.

“If we don’t impose the necessary costs on that, it’s obviously a lesson for other countries in the world,” Kelly told Military Times.

Kelly said that is the logic of what economists call a “moral hazard.” One party avoids the cost of a dangerous outcome by shifting it onto someone else.

“That’s what we’re doing here. We see a risk of a nuclear engagement with Russia, so we transfer that risk to the only country that’s paying the price.”

That shift, he argued, forces U.S. allies to rethink the core premise that has underpinned European security since World War II: that Washington would backstop them if Russia attacked.

“Europe has to basically operate on the assumption that they can’t count on the United States when it comes to Ukraine,” Kelly said.

For decades, many U.S. partners shaped their defense policies around that backstop, scaling down militaries, forgoing their own nuclear options and betting that American power would be there in a crisis. If that guarantee is no longer assumed, Kelly said, countries start recalculating what they need to deter Russia on their own.

“Their ultimate deterrent was always the U.S. nuclear umbrella,” he said. Without it, the logic that kept dozens of nations from pursuing their own weapons programs collapses.

“That could mean that these states are going to want to have their own nuclear deterrent.”

France has already started talking in those terms. In early March, President Emmanuel Macron used a speech at France’s nuclear submarine base in Brittany — home to the country’s nuclear submarine fleet — to argue Europe needs to think about deterrence in a more self-reliant way, and to signal Paris is prepared to play a bigger role.

“The global framework for nuclear arms control now resembles a field of ruins,” Macron said.

He ordered what could be the first expansion of France’s nuclear warheads since the Cold War and announced a doctrine of “forward deterrence” extended to European allies for the first time. This included the potential dispersal of strategic air forces across the continent, in what Le Monde called “a major step toward Europe.” Macron declined to disclose the size of the arsenal.

On the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov laid out the alternative conditions that could actually help ensure peace.

“The sky is secured, the Russian army loses its offensive potential and Russia’s economy can no longer sustain the burden of war,” he said.

But not one of those conditions has been met, and recent events seem to be taking Ukraine further from its goals.

Macron, standing among the submarines, answered a different question — the one the entire negotiation had been avoiding.

“Can we imagine the survival of our closest partners being threatened,” he said, “without that affecting our vital interests?”

“To be free, one needs to be feared — and to be feared, one must be powerful.”

乌克兰基辅——本周，美国为结束俄罗斯对乌克兰的全面入侵而提供的安全保障的代价变得明确起来：基辅必须放弃整个顿巴斯地区——约占其领土的 10%，或约占其战前 GDP 的 15%。

乌克兰总统泽连斯基在接受路透社采访时表示，美国要求乌克兰从东部所有地区撤军——包括在俄罗斯长达14年多的袭击中一直占领的地区——之后才会最终敲定几个月来一直在与基辅讨论的长期保护措施。

此前，泽连斯基上周末在佛罗里达州与美国特使史蒂夫·威特科夫和高级顾问贾里德·库什纳举行了双边会谈。泽连斯基表示，会谈没有取得任何实质性进展，这一评估比他之前声称的“100% 准备就绪”的说法更为尖锐。

就在三周前，泽连斯基还试图否决谈判中的核心交换条件。他告诉《晚邮报》：“乌克兰永远不会离开顿巴斯和居住在那里的20万乌克兰人。”

但战场上的局势并没有因为外交努力而放缓。据战争研究所称，乌克兰在2月份的反攻中夺取的土地比2023年以来的任何时候都多。

本周，俄罗斯以春季攻势予以回应——24小时内发动近1000次空袭，是战争以来规模最大的一次袭击。据路透社报道，乌克兰第二天出动约400架无人机进行反击，瘫痪了俄罗斯至少40%的石油出口能力。

俄罗斯官员本周表示，会谈已经暂停，但目前尚不清楚会谈何时恢复，甚至是否会恢复。

“乌克兰被要求做的事情在政治上和道德上都是不可接受的，”美国陆军欧洲司令部前司令、退役中将本·霍奇斯告诉《军事时报》。

在他看来，顿巴斯的要求不是讨价还价的筹码，而是交易的重点，也是对华盛顿是否愿意用乌克兰领土换取一纸空头支票的考验。

霍奇斯说：“你要求一个被入侵的国家交出它的人民和土地，而你却称之为和平。”

专家认为，与其说这是一条通往和平的道路，不如说这是乌克兰无法接受的要求：用顿巴斯换取担保人提供的未定义保证，而担保人的信誉已经岌岌可危，因为伊朗战争消耗了基辅所需的武器，并增强了俄罗斯的战争机器。

2025年8月23日，士兵在德克萨斯州布利斯堡附近的麦格雷戈靶场进行爱国者导弹实弹射击。（美国陆军中士贾达里厄斯·邓肯摄）

如果传递的信息是，即使是放弃核武库的国家也可以被要求为了“可能”而割让土地，那么结果不会是和平，而是更多的战争，以及更多的国家得出需要核武器才能生存的结论。

曾在俄罗斯占领格鲁吉亚 20% 领土期间担任美国驻格鲁吉亚大使的退休美国大使伊恩·凯利表示，这种模式并非新鲜事。

“我们把标枪导弹给了他们，但又说，‘顺便说一句，别用它们，’”凯利告诉《军事时报》。

凯利表示，这个方案似曾相识：基辅方面无法做出让步，同时又没有明确做出承诺——而且是由一个其后续行动已经受到质疑的赞助商提出的。

凯利表示，虽然在这些条件下签署的任何停火协议都是暂时的，但它所树立的先例却是永久性的：它告诉莫斯科哪些要求有效，也告诉美国的伙伴美国的保护究竟价值几何。

其背后的不确定性很快就出现了：华盛顿究竟提供了什么；如果没有美国的参与，执行这项保证实际上需要什么；以及如果这项保证未能通过第一次可信度考验会发生什么。

无论如何，威慑力始终如一。威慑力不会消失——它只会转移。

保证海市蜃楼

该交易的核心安全保障存在一个根本问题：相关各方似乎对其含义以及经受考验后是否有效没有达成一致意见。

今年2月，泽连斯基试图让乌克兰为数不多的真正政治让步发挥作用：他说基辅将放弃加入北约的计划。加入北约是乌克兰2019年后外交政策的基石，也是莫斯科长期以来用来为其战争辩护的目标。

泽连斯基说，华盛顿方面提供了所谓的“类似第五条”的安全保障作为回报。

霍奇斯说，措辞是关键。第五条是一项条约承诺，它有明确的触发条件，并且背后有联盟支持。

“类似第五条的规定”既不是安全保障，也不是其他任何东西。“那不是安全保障，”他说，“那只是一种说法。”

他称之为“彻头彻尾的空头支票”。霍奇斯说，如果政府连现有的制裁措施都不愿执行——他指出印度进口的俄罗斯石油比战前还要多——“政府就不是认真的”。

“你不能基于‘也许’来设计安全保障，”霍奇斯补充道。

他说，他完全不相信现任政府会像对待俄罗斯无人机袭击纽约或华盛顿那样对待俄罗斯无人机袭击乌克兰的行为。

“一定要50架无人机吗？还是一架就够了？”他问道，“我不相信他们真的会这么做。”

但他表示，更深层次的问题是双方都知道这一点。

“这就涉及到绝地武士的心理战术了，”霍奇斯说。“我很难相信乌克兰人会信任……美国人。所以，他们提出这一点也仅仅是一种谈判策略”，他认为，这是为了争取时间，让欧洲人“重新找回他们的战略支柱，并采取必要措施来提供这些能力”。

2024年11月14日，一名乌克兰军官展示了一架被击落的俄罗斯发射的“沙赫德”无人机上的温压弹。（Efrem Lukatsky/AP）

大多数北约盟国仍未达到联盟设定的国防开支目标。特朗普一再威胁，如果这些国家不支付相应款项，美国将退出北约，这使得乌克兰不得不依赖其担保国威胁要取消的安全保护伞。

霍奇斯表示，政府的做法失败并非因为谈判缺乏诚意，而是因为华盛顿从一开始就拒绝在最根本的问题上支持乌克兰。

霍奇斯说：“他们从来不在乎战争的起因。他们从来不愿意承认俄罗斯是侵略者。他们从来没有说过，‘俄罗斯，你必须撤军。’”

一项无人相信的交易

专家和内部人士表示，回顾过往记录——1994 年的《布达佩斯备忘录》未能阻止俄罗斯在乌克兰放弃核武库后入侵乌克兰，以及屡次破裂的明斯克停火协议——新的保证很难让人信服。

英国皇家联合军种研究所欧洲安全高级研究员、前英国陆军步兵军官埃德·阿诺德表示，该保证存在三个问题：华盛顿不太可能做出承诺，基辅不确定它能否维持，而克里姆林宫签署该保证只是为了以更好的条件继续作战。

阿诺德告诉《军事时报》：“美国会向乌克兰提供类似共同安全援助之类的东西吗？我不这么认为。即便他们真的提供了，乌克兰人会相信吗？更重要的是，普京会相信吗？”

阿诺德指出，伊朗核协议和巴黎气候协定都是总统的指示，但后来的政府都推翻了这些指示。

他说：“这些指令不具有法律约束力。美国一直以来都让乌克兰失望。”

即使保障措施已经明确，但由于执行规则的限制，如果没有美国的参与，这些保障措施实际上不可能维持下去，因为美国的军费开支超过了所有欧洲北约成员国军费开支的总和。

阿诺德说：“欧洲根本没有能力提供同等水平的服务。但与此同时，鉴于美国最近的所作所为——更不用说其历史行径了——他们也无法信任美国。”

欧洲各国政府派出的那些物资，会永久性地损害他们自身的防御体系。

阿诺德计算得出，任何一支由 15,000 至 25,000 名士兵组成的维和部队，如果无限期地轮换部署，则需要三倍于此的兵力。

他说：“无论你向乌克兰投入什么，你都会永久性地从你原本可以获得的东西中夺走一些东西。”

这位外交官表示，更深层次的失败并非物质上的，而是政治上的。欧洲领导人未能让本国人民相信，俄罗斯的侵略不仅威胁乌克兰，也威胁到他们自身。

“欧洲在威慑方面彻底失败了，”他告诉《军事时报》。

阿诺德追溯了这种政治逻辑的根源。

他说：“从政治角度来看，增加国防开支、减少福利支出并不能赢得选票。”

结果是，这片大陆在许多方面失去了对其自身防御体系的战略控制。

他说：“我们已经把局势升级的控制权拱手让给了俄罗斯。他们不断升级冲突，而我们只能默默承受。”

2026年1月9日，乌克兰基辅，一栋居民楼在俄罗斯空袭后受损。（Efrem Lukatsky/AP）

对泽连斯基而言，如果达成一项确保乌克兰从顿巴斯撤军的协议，将迫使基辅正式承认其多年来一直声称不会接受的失败。这也将使泽连斯基“永不离开顿巴斯”的承诺以及他所说的仍留在顿巴斯的约20万乌克兰人的处境面临考验。

阿诺德说：“如果签署一项协议，仅仅是为了让俄罗斯逃脱对其过去四年，实际上是过去十二年所作所为的责任，那将是极其有害的。”

阿诺德补充说，正因如此，这项协议并不能降低再次爆发战争的风险，它只是把战争推迟了而已。

他说：“俄罗斯人当然不想要和平。他们确实希望经济好转，将来可能还会对乌克兰采取行动。”

他还补充说，普京“没有谈判的心情，而且有点在戏弄特朗普”。

价格和先例

凯利表示，华盛顿并没有消除与俄罗斯冲突升级的风险，而是将风险从美国转移到乌克兰，再转移到承受能力较弱的欧洲盟友。这样做，风险实际上在各地都在增加。

“如果我们不为此施加必要的成本，这显然会给世界其他国家带来教训，”凯利告诉《军事时报》。

凯利表示，这就是经济学家所说的“道德风险”的逻辑。一方通过将危险后果的成本转嫁给他人来避免承担责任。

“这就是我们在这里所做的。我们看到了与俄罗斯发生核战争的风险，所以我们把这种风险转移给了唯一一个为此付出代价的国家。”

他认为，这种转变迫使美国的盟友重新思考自二战以来支撑欧洲安全的核心前提：如果俄罗斯发动攻击，华盛顿会支持他们。

凯利说：“欧洲基本上必须抱着这样的假设：在乌克兰问题上，他们不能指望美国。”

几十年来，许多美国的盟友都围绕着这一保障机制制定国防政策，缩减军备，放弃自身的核选项，并寄希望于美国的力量能在危机时刻挺身而出。凯利表示，如果这种保障不再被视为理所当然，各国就会开始重新评估自身需要采取哪些措施来威慑俄罗斯。

他说：“他们最终的威慑力量始终是美国的核保护伞。” 如果没有核保护伞，阻止数十个国家发展自身武器计划的逻辑就不复存在了。

“这可能意味着这些国家想要拥有自己的核威慑力量。”

法国已经开始以这种方式发声。3月初，法国总统埃马纽埃尔·马克龙在法国位于布列塔尼的核潜艇基地——法国核潜艇舰队的所在地——发表讲话，指出欧洲需要以更加自主的方式思考威慑问题，并表明巴黎准备发挥更大的作用。

马克龙说：“全球核军控框架现在就像一片废墟。”

他下令扩充法国自冷战以来的核弹头数量，并首次宣布将“前沿威慑”战略扩展至欧洲盟国。这其中包括可能在欧洲大陆部署战略空军，法国《世界报》称之为“迈向欧洲的重要一步”。马克龙拒绝透露核武库的具体规模。

在俄罗斯入侵乌克兰四周年之际，乌克兰国防部长米哈伊洛·费多罗夫提出了可能有助于确保和平的替代条件。

他说：“天空得到了保障，俄罗斯军队失去了进攻能力，俄罗斯经济再也无法承受战争的重担。”

但这些条件一个都没有得到满足，而且最近发生的事件似乎正使乌克兰离其目标越来越远。

站在潜艇之间的马克龙回答了一个不同的问题——也是整个谈判一直在回避的问题。

“我们能否想象，当我们最亲密的伙伴的生存受到威胁时，”他说，“我们自身的根本利益却不受影响？”

“要想获得自由，就必须令人畏惧；要想令人畏惧，就必须拥有强大的力量。”