Three sources familiar with top Kremlin thinking told Reuters that Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine to give up all of eastern Donbas, forsake NATO goals, remain neutral, and keep Western forces out.
According to sources who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, the Russian president met Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday for the first Russia-U.S. summit in more than four years and spent almost all of their three-hour closed meeting discussing a Ukraine compromise.
Putin told Trump after the meeting that the discussion would hopefully lead to peace in Ukraine, but neither leader revealed details.
Reuters provided the most detailed Russian-based reporting on Putin’s summit offer, revealing the Kremlin’s desired peace settlement to end a war that has killed and damaged hundreds of thousands.
According to Russian sources, Putin has compromised on his June 2024 territorial demands, which required Kyiv to cede all four provinces Moscow claims as part of Russia: Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine (the Donbas) and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south.
Kyiv rejected those terms as surrender.
According to three sources, the Russian president’s new proposal requires Ukraine to withdraw entirely from the Donbas region it controls. They said Moscow would stop the front lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange.
The US and open-source figures estimate that Russia controls 88% of the Donbas and 73% of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
The sources added Moscow will also hand over tiny areas of Kharkiv, Sumy, and Dnipropetrovsk to Ukraine as part of an agreement.
The sources said Putin is also sticking to his previous demands that Ukraine give up its NATO ambitions, for a legally binding pledge from the U.S.-led military alliance that it will not expand eastward, for limits on the Ukrainian army, and for no Western peacekeeping troops in Ukraine.
The two sides remain far apart more than three years after Putin ordered thousands of Russian troops into Ukraine in a full-scale invasion that followed the 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula and prolonged fighting in the east between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry didn’t immediately react to the recommendations.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has consistently rejected the concept of withdrawing from internationally recognised Ukrainian land as part of a compromise, saying the industrial Donbas region is a bulwark preventing Russian incursions into Ukraine.
“If we’re talking about simply withdrawing from the east, we cannot do that,” Kyiv told reporters Thursday. “It is a matter of our country’s survival, involving the strongest defensive lines.”
Kyiv views joining NATO as its best security guarantee and a constitutional goal. Zelenskiy said Russia shouldn’t pick alliance membership.
Neither the White House nor NATO immediately addressed the Russian ideas.
According to RAND chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy Samuel Charap, Kyiv will not disengage from the Donbas politically or 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 said. “The only way to test that proposition is to begin a serious process at the working level to hash out those details.”
Trump: Putin wants it over.
According to US assessments and open-source maps, Russian forces control a fifth of Ukraine, around the size of Ohio.
The summit in Anchorage, Alaska, offered the finest possibility for peace since the war began, according to three Kremlin sources, since Putin was willing to negotiate conditions.
“Putin wants peace and compromise. One person said Trump received that communication.
Moscow was unsure if Ukraine would yield the Donbas, and if not, the war would continue, insiders said. They also questioned whether the US would recognise Russian-held Ukrainian territory.
A fourth source said Putin understood Russia’s economic fragility and the necessity to expand deeper into Ukraine, even though economic reasons were secondary.
Trump wants to end the “bloodbath” and be recognised as a “peacemaker president”. He said on Monday that he has begun preparing a Russian-Ukrainian summit, followed by a trilateral summit with the US president.
Trump stated, “I believe Vladimir Putin wants to see it ended,” beside Zelenskiy in the Oval. “I feel confident we are going to get it solved.”
On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Putin was ready to meet Zelenskiy but that all concerns had to be resolved first and that Zelenskiy’s authority to sign a peace pact was questioned.
Putin has constantly questioned Zelenskiy’s legitimacy as his tenure expired in May 2024, but the war prevented a fresh presidential election. The Ukrainian government claims Zelenskiy is the genuine president.
The leaders of Britain, France, and Germany doubt that Putin wants to stop the war.
Ukraine security guarantees
According to two Russian sources, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff helped arrange the summit and the latest peace campaign.
Witkoff and Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov visited Putin on August 6. According to two Russian sources, Putin told Witkoff he was willing to compromise and outline his peace terms at the meeting.
One source claimed a three-way Russia-Ukraine-U.S. accord recognised by the U.N. Security Council is possible if Russia and Ukraine can achieve an agreement.
The sources suggested returning to the failed 2022 Istanbul agreements, where Russia and Ukraine discussed Ukraine’s permanent neutrality in exchange for security guarantees from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council: Britain, China, France, Russia, and the US.
One person remarked, “There are two choices: war or peace, and if there is no peace, then there is more war.”
