Zelensky Says US Raised Donbas-for-NATO Trade in Talks

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday that American negotiators have, for the first time, raised the idea of Ukraine withdrawing its remaining forces from the Donbas in exchange for membership of NATO.

The question was put to Kyiv during the latest round of US-brokered diplomacy aimed at ending the war with Russia, Zelensky said in remarks to reporters that his office released on Saturday. It links the alliance membership Ukraine has long sought to a territorial concession it has consistently refused to make.

“The Americans raised a question: ‘What if Ukraine joins NATO? Would Ukraine withdraw from Donbas?'” Zelensky said. “This was the first time this had been raised.”

A question never asked before

Zelensky said the idea had convinced him that NATO membership was back on the table after months in which Washington had treated it as out of reach. US officials had previously said Ukrainian membership of the alliance was off the table, the BBC reported.

“That is why I believe NATO is back on the agenda,” Zelensky said. “But you have also heard Putin’s signals, and this is an extremely difficult conversation.”

The disclosure followed a week of shuttle diplomacy by two of Washington’s senior envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who met President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday and then travelled to Dublin on Thursday to meet Zelensky on the sidelines of a European Union summit. The US-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators ran on 10 and 11 November and ended without a breakthrough.

Russia has long said Ukrainian membership of NATO is a red line, citing the issue as one reason for launching its full-scale invasion in 2022. Russia currently occupies roughly a fifth of Ukrainian territory, including most of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that make up the Donbas. The land at stake in any withdrawal is the smaller part of the region that Ukrainian forces still hold — ground Moscow has demanded but failed to take by force.

What Kyiv would demand in return

Zelensky did not reject the American idea outright, but he was careful not to treat it as a done deal. He said Kyiv’s position that it will not retreat from its own land stands, and that any deal would come “without any recognition of the occupied territories as Russian.”

He said he would put a confirmed offer to the Ukrainian people. “I have no right to make that decision on my own,” he said, adding that if the American side confirmed the proposal together with other NATO partners, he would ask society whether to accept it.

For any such question to reach a vote, Zelensky said Kyiv would first need a comprehensive security package: guarantees from NATO and the European Union, a strong army with no limits on its size, funding and weapons assured, and money to rebuild the country.

He said he had asked for guarantees modelled on Article 5 of the NATO treaty “as an absolute minimum.” Washington, he said, had sketched guarantees modelled on NATO’s Article 4 and Article 5 commitments, delivered bilaterally and more like those the United States gives Israel. When he asked whether American soldiers would be deployed on Ukrainian soil under such guarantees, he said the US side answered: “No.”

“We need specifics, and we don’t have them yet,” Zelensky said.

Why the trade is so difficult

The proposal’s central problem is that NATO membership is not America’s to give. Admission requires the unanimous agreement of all 32 allies, 30 of them European, and ratification by their parliaments. NATO leaders declared at Bucharest in 2008 that Ukraine “will become” a member, but set no date, and no invitation has followed.

Moscow, meanwhile, has shown no sign of softening. Putin told the US envoys in the Kremlin that the only line Russia accepts is the state border.

Zelensky also rejected any suggestion that Ukraine commit to neutrality, saying that would require changing the country’s constitution. “If Putin expects Ukraine’s neutrality to be enshrined, that’s not going to happen,” he said. “We’re not in NATO right now anyway.”

Where the talks stand

For now, the Donbas-for-NATO idea is only a question asked across a negotiating table, not an offer on paper. No American official had confirmed or denied it on the record by Saturday morning, and the White House and the US State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment, Reuters reported.

The talks continue against a backdrop of incremental progress elsewhere: Russia and Ukraine agreed the largest prisoner swap of the war after the Abu Dhabi round. Zelensky’s disclosure, however, has changed the terms of the debate — putting NATO membership, the very prize Moscow went to war to deny Kyiv, at the centre of the negotiation for the first time.