Why Ukraine Won’t Give Up Donetsk
It is the site of a reinforced defensive line, the ‘fortress belt.’ Putin’s demand for it is a sign of weakness.
By Jillian Kay Melchior
Kyiv, Ukraine
Vladimir Putin’s demand that Ukraine cede territory the Russians haven’t even managed to conquer may seem audacious, but it’s actually a sign of weakness.
Mr. Putin doesn’t have the power to take the land by force easily.
Russia wants the entire region of Donetsk, including the 25% that Ukraine still controls, an unoccupied swath larger than Delaware.
A heavily reinforced defensive line, known as the fortress belt, has stopped the Russians from rolling deeper westward, and Ukraine has no plans to surrender the area.
Ukraine began strengthening the 31-mile belt more than a decade ago, and the Russians have lost men and weapons whenever they bashed themselves against it.
Penetrating it by force would take years, according to the Institute for the Study of War—so Mr. Putin seeks to seize it through negotiations instead.
Ukraine knows the consequences of allowing itself to be stripped of its strength.
Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Kyiv surrendered its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees from the U.S., U.K. and Russia.
Those promises failed to deter Mr. Putin’s 2014 and 2022 invasions.
Mr. Putin has been ruthless in past dealings. In 2014, after he promised a “humanitarian corridor” to save surrounded Ukrainian soldiers in the eastern city of Ilovaisk, Ukrainian troops laid down their weapons—only to be ambushed and massacred.
The Kremlin justifies its aggression in part by claiming Moscow has an obligation to protect Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population.
But the prevalence of Russian language in Ukraine is itself a legacy of centuries of oppression, says Ostap Kryvdyk, chairman of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, a think tank.
In the Soviet era, Moscow banned Ukrainians’ mother tongue in schools, workplaces and government, instead imposing Russian.
An upshot is that Ukraine’s post-Soviet descendants can take Mr. Putin at his word when he talks about his objectives and intentions, and they’ve concluded that territorial concessions would whet his appetite, not satisfy it.
“No one actually believes the Russians will stop.
Why should they?” says Lt. Col. Viktor Tregubov, spokesman for the Dnipro Operational Strategic Group of Forces, a joint command of several dozen brigades that oversees the eastern front of the war.
“The only way to stop the Russians is physically.”
Ukrainians refuse to be pressured into a quick but unstable peace.
Seventy-eight percent of Ukrainians reject the idea of a deal that yields unoccupied territory to Russia, according to a poll published this summer by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
Another worry is that the U.S. might seek to coerce Ukraine into concessions.
American intelligence plays a crucial role in Ukraine’s defense, among other things by providing early warnings of incoming long-range drones and missiles.
American Patriots are the only way of countering Russian ballistic missiles.
Without them, Russia can better target civilians and Ukraine’s fighter jets, defense industrial base, energy infrastructure and other high-priority targets.
Would a loss of key U.S. operational support force Kyiv to accept a bad peace predicated on Russian conditions?
“Americans are really a huge help,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said in July.
Without U.S. support, “it would get tough, but this doesn’t mean that Ukraine will exit the war,” Mr. Podolyak says.
“If we were to stop, this would not mean a peace agreement—this would mean a capitulation that would be followed by a mass genocidal extermination.”
Other Ukrainians offered similar answers.
What if, in exchange for ceding unoccupied territory, the West commits to ensuring Russian aggression won’t resume in the future?
Europe is now considering a deterrent force, known as a “coalition of the willing,” that would include troops in Ukraine.
But Russia has repeatedly violated cease-fire agreements, and there’s no reason to believe it would honor the next one.
Some Ukrainians question whether under fire such a coalition would remain willing.
“If the West is going to go to war with Russia, why can the West not do it right now?” Col. Tregubov asks.
“If the West has no political will to do so, why do we think it will have the political will after Russia will break the next promise?”
If Kyiv were to cede Donetsk, Ukrainian and European forces would be responsible for securing more than 2,000 miles of frontier, including the line of contact and the borders with Russia and Belarus.
But a recent report from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies detailed several difficulties Europe would have deploying large forces to Ukraine.
Europe wants a U.S. backstop, but there is no “indication that the U.S. is willing to supply a force that is that big and that decisive,” says Ukraine’s former Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk.
“And if it’s anything short, this will end with Russia concluding they can attack again and have it be successful.”
Deterrence would be further weakened if Russia gained full control of Donetsk, given that the loss of a fortress belt would put Ukrainian and European forces in a less defensible position.
Russia would gain a prime outpost to threaten the neighboring regions of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia.
The Ukrainians and their Western partners would have to rush to erect new fortifications, including on terrain that’s more vulnerable.
The next comparably advantageous defensive line would be the Dnipro River, much further west.
Mr. Putin pitches the surrender of Donetsk as a condition to end the war.
Ukrainians know any such concession would enable Russian aggression, not end it.
Ms. Melchior is a London-based member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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