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Russian President Vladimir Putin is demanding that Ukraine give up all of the eastern Donbas region, renounce ambitions to join NATO, remain neutral and keep Western troops out of the country, three sources familiar with top-level Kremlin thinking told Reuters on Thursday.
Putin met U.S. President Donald Trump in Alaska for the first Russia-U.S. summit in more than four years and spent almost all of their three-hour closed meeting discussing what a compromise on Ukraine might look like, according to the sources who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
In the most detailed Russian-based reporting to date on Putin's offer at the summit, Reuters was able to outline the contours of what the Kremlin would like to see in a possible peace deal to end a war that has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people.
Putin has compromised on territorial demands he laid out in June 2024, which required Kyiv to cede the entirety of the four provinces Moscow claims as part of Russia: Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine—which make up the Donbas—plus Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south. Kyiv rejected those terms as tantamount to surrender.
In his new proposal, the Russian president has stuck to his demand that Ukraine completely withdraw from the parts of the Donbas it still controls, according to the three sources. In return, Moscow would halt the current front lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
Russia controls about 88% of the Donbas and 73% of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, according to U.S. estimates and open-source data. Russian forces currently control a fifth of Ukraine, an area about the size of the American state of Ohio.
Moscow is also willing to hand over the small parts of the Kharkiv, Sumy, and Dnipropetrovsk regions of Ukraine it controls as part of a possible deal, the sources said.
Putin is sticking to his previous demands that Ukraine give up its NATO ambitions and for a legally binding pledge from the U.S.-led military alliance that it will not expand further eastwards, as well as for limits on the Ukrainian army and an agreement that no Western troops will be deployed on the ground in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force, the sources said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly dismissed the idea of withdrawing from internationally recognized Ukrainian land as part of a deal, and has said the industrial Donbas region serves as a fortress holding back Russian advances deeper into Ukraine.
"If we're talking about simply withdrawing from the east, we cannot do that," he told reporters in comments released by Kyiv on Thursday. "It is a matter of our country's survival, involving the strongest defensive lines."
Joining NATO, meanwhile, is a strategic objective enshrined in the country's constitution and one which Kyiv sees as its most reliable security guarantee. Zelenskyy said it was not up to Russia to decide on the alliance's membership.
Political scientist Samuel Charap, chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy at RAND, a U.S.-based global policy think-tank, said any requirement for Ukraine to withdraw from the Donbas remained a non-starter for Kyiv, both politically and strategically.
"Openness to 'peace' on terms categorically unacceptable to the other side could be more of a performance for Trump than a sign of a true willingness to compromise," he added. "The only way to test that proposition is to begin a serious process at the working level to hash out those details."
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Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff was instrumental in paving the way for the summit, according to two of the Russian sources. Witkoff met Putin in the Kremlin on August 6 with Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov.
At the meeting, Putin conveyed clearly to Witkoff that he was ready to compromise and set out the contours of what he could accept for peace, according to two Russian sources.
Trump separately defended his stance on Ukraine in a Truth Social post, arguing that Ukraine had no chance of winning against Russia under former President Joe Biden's policies.
"It is impossible, though very difficult, to win a war without attacking the invading country. This is like a team in sports that has great defense but is not allowed to play offense. There is no chance of winning. This is the situation between Ukraine and Russia," Trump wrote.
Trump claimed that "fraudulent and incompetent Joe Biden did not allow Ukraine's counterattacks, only allowed its defense. What was the result?"
If Russia and Ukraine could reach an agreement, there are various options for a formal deal—including a possible three-way Russia-Ukraine-U.S. deal that is recognized by the U.N. Security Council, one of the sources said.
Another option is to go back to the 2022 Istanbul agreements, where Russia and Ukraine discussed Ukraine's permanent neutrality in return for security guarantees from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.
"There are two choices: war or peace, and if there is no peace, then there is more war," one of the people said.
Trump has said he wants to end the "bloodbath" of the war and be remembered as a "peacemaker president." He said on Monday he had begun arranging a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders, to be followed by a trilateral summit with the U.S. president.
"I believe Vladimir Putin wants to see it ended," Trump said beside Zelenskyy in the Oval office. "I feel confident we are going to get it solved."
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