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By Ellie Cook
Senior Defense Reporter
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The U.S. will only provide security guarantees for Ukraine if Kyiv gives up all of the country's eastern Donbas region to Russia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.
Talks over an agreement to end more than four years of war in Ukraine have slowly rumbled on, despite the U.S. focus on the Iran war and possible ground operations in the Middle East.
Ukraine, currying favor with the U.S., dispatched air defense experts to the Gulf to advise the U.S. and its allies on how to intercept Iranian drone attacks, while Kyiv watches expensive interceptor missiles it desperately needs to take out Russian aerial assaults being used up in the Middle East.
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Russia, meanwhile, unleashed close to 1,000 drones on Ukraine in one day on Tuesday, its war-strained economy boosted by a temporary lift of U.S. oil sanctions designed to calm fears of global shortages sparked by the Iran war. Ukraine has increased the number of its attacks on Russian oil and gas sites in an attempt to cut off revenues funneled into the Russian invasion effort.
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Kyiv, worried by President Donald Trump's softened stance toward Moscow, has repeatedly said it is being unfairly pressured to make concessions for a peace deal. Ukraine says the prospect of a future U.S. response if Russia attempted to restart its invasion would be enough to deter the Kremlin from breaking a peace agreement.
But there are still unresolved questions about what U.S. security guarantees would look like.
"The Americans are prepared to finalize these guarantees at a high level once Ukraine is ready to withdraw from Donbas," Zelensky told the Reuters news agency in an interview published on Wednesday. Newsweek has reached out to the White House for comment.
Ukraine has long said its constitution bans ceding land to Russia, a move that would also be deeply unpopular with a Ukrainian public scarred by years of brutal warfare.
While Russia has claimed to have annexed the Donbas—a term used to refer to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine — Kyiv still controls just under a quarter of Donetsk and a sliver of Luhansk.
Ukraine has outright rejected giving up land it still controls in the Donbas to Russia, especially as many of Kyiv's most important defenses in the east are in Donetsk. Ukrainian officials say giving up this unconquered territory would expose Kyiv to future attacks.
Analysts say it would take Russia several years and likely hundreds of thousands more casualties to take the rest of the Donbas by force.
"I would very much like the American side to understand that the eastern part of our country is part of our security guarantees," Zelensky said.
Security guarantees are vital for Ukraine because the country is haunted by the disintegration of the Budapest Memorandum, when Kyiv gave up Soviet nuclear weapons stationed on its soil in exchange for "assurances" of protection from the U.S., U.K. and Russia.
Moscow violated the Budapest Memorandum when it annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and when it launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Zelensky said it still wasn't clear who would fund Ukraine's military—ensuring Kyiv could fight back if Russia did restart attacks—and how exactly Ukraine's allies would respond to renewed Russian assaults.
The Ukrainian leader had said in January an agreement on security guarantees was "100 percent ready" to be signed, although Ukrainian officials emerged from fresh talks with the U.S. over the weekend with plans for more negotiations.
Zelensky said Ukrainian authorities had evidence that Russia is providing intelligence to Iran as part of a "blackmail" tactic designed to force the U.S. to cut off intelligence-sharing with Ukraine.
Russia is "presenting it as a bargaining chip in this game," Zelensky said. "Could it prompt the U.S. to pause data sharing? Probably. It depends on the conditions in the Middle East and how this operation unfolds."
The U.S. is considering rerouting weapons intended for use in Ukraine to the Middle East as nearly a month of strikes and deployments of specialized ground troops to the area pressure U.S. resources, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
The U.S. Central Command, which oversees Washington's military operations in the Middle East, said on Wednesday the U.S. had struck more than 10,000 targets inside Iran since the opening U.S.-Israeli attacks on February 28.
But Iran's retaliatory strikes across the region have forced the U.S. and its Gulf allies to burn through supplies of costly, relatively scarce Patriot interceptor missiles. The U.S.-made missiles are the only interceptors Ukraine has that can knock out Russia's ballistic missiles, often aimed at its major cities.
"Deliveries to us were not stopped. I'm very grateful to President Trump, and to his team," Zelensky said. "But this supply of Patriot missiles is not as large as we need."
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