Vladimir Putin will pay a high price if he succeeds in retaining any Ukrainian land in a future peace deal, a former senior Trump aide said.
But a Ukrainian politician argued that, if the peace deal included their country ceding any territory, it would likely be impossible for Kyiv to agree to it.
The Kremlin tyrant has already declared the regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia as part of Russia, following a sham referendum in the autumn of 2022.
At a ceremony in the Kremlin to mark the occasion, Putin declared the residents of the four Ukrainian regions would become Russian citizens “forever”.
Yet, after almost three years since the beginning of the brutal and unlawful invasion, Russia’s army has failed to take full control of any of the regions.
With Donald Trump once again in the White House, expectations are growing that a peace deal could be in the pipeline.
Various US conservative commentators have recently started to push the idea that land could be traded for peace in any future agreement.
The implication is that Putin will be allowed to annex the four regions and keep Crimea, which Russia took in a land grab in 2014.
As part of the deal, Ukraine would be given security assurances by the US and its allies, although these would likely exclude membership of NATO.
The latest former Trump aide to float this idea is Gordon Sondland, Trump’s former EU ambassador.
He told Bill O’Reilly, a long-time friend of the US president, that Trump was determined to make Putin pay for his war in Ukraine.
“I actually think that Putin is going to regret what he did for the simple reason that if he winds up at Donald Trump’s pleasure by retaining any amount of Ukraine that he was able to take since the invasion, and I don’t know whether it’s going to be the case or not but let’s assume that it is, the payment he’s going to make for that is a structure that guarantees Ukraine ironclad security.
“If that’s short of joining NATO, it’ll be some kind of NATO compact, umbrella.
“But the deal will be very simply, ok, you get XYZ. You never get another inch. And if you take one more inch in the future, all bets are off, and we go toe-to-toe with the United States and NATO all in with Ukraine.”
However, a Ukrainian MP told the Express that it would be “impossible” for his country to agree to any land concessions to the Russians.
They said that there were no legal and political mechanisms that would allow the government to agree to those concessions.
“Any changes to state borders are possible through a referendum, and a referendum on ceding territories is prohibited,” they explained.
“The only mechanism that exists now is to recognise certain territories occupied and out of control of Ukrainian government.
“So without deep, profound changes in the Ukrainian Constitution (a pretty cumbersome process, involving referendum and multiple voting in Parliament), it is hard to imagine how one can do it.”