Russia Ukraine peace talks: Major hurdle looms ahead of meeting 

The thorny, unresolved issue of territory will take center stage at a fresh round of U.S.-brokered peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Geneva from Tuesday.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Monday territorial control will be discussed by a high-level, expanded Russian delegation led by Vladimir Medinsky, Moscow’s chief negotiator.

Kyrylo Budanov, the newly-installed head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s office, posted an image of himself alongside other Ukrainian officials boarding a train to the Swiss city overnight into Monday.

“Ukraine’s interests must be protected,” Budanov said.

Territory has been one of the most difficult topics for negotiators because neither Russia nor Ukraine are willing to move from their positions.

“It remains the only major issue which cannot be solved,” Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of Ukraine’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee and a member of Zelensky’s party, told Newsweek.

Russia has not stepped down from its demands to keep control of vast swathes of southern and eastern Ukraine, while Kyiv says it is barred from ceding territory by its constitution and that it cannot reward Russia for launching its invasion nearly four years ago. Territorial concessions would also be deeply unpopular among Ukrainians.

Moscow claims to have annexed the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine, collectively known as the Donbas, as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the southeast of the country.

In 2014, Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula to the south of mainland Ukraine. Altogether, the Kremlin now controls roughly a fifth of territory internationally recognized as Ukrainian soil.

Russia holds most—but not all—of the Donbas, which was formerly Ukraine’s industrial heartland. The remaining territory in Donetsk still under Ukrainian control is heavily fortified and key to the country’s defenses.

Western analysts say it would take the Kremlin years to take the rest of Donetsk by force, but Russian officials are thought to be demanding parts of the Donbas currently still held by Kyiv.

The discussions in Switzerland this week will be the third round of American-brokered peace negotiations this year. U.S., Ukrainian and Russian officials have broadly described the talks as constructive although Russia’s longtime foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said earlier in February there was “still a long way to go.”

“The good news is that the issues that need to be confronted to end this war have been narrowed,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio remarked during his appearance at the closely-watched Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday.

“The bad news is they’ve been narrowed to the hardest questions to answer, and work remains to be done in that front,” Rubio added.

Rubio said the U.S. wasn’t sure whether Russia was prepared to stop the fighting, contrasting with President Donald Trump‘s insistence on Friday Moscow “wants to make a deal.” Ukraine and its European supporters say Russia is dragging out talks to avoid inking an agreement.

Trump has struggled to fulfill his pledge to end the war in Ukraine in just 24 hours, and his apparent reluctance to put serious pressure on Moscow has worried Kyiv. Trump’s remarks on Friday included telling Zelensky to “get moving” on the terms of a deal.

Zelensky told reporters and world leaders on Saturday that American officials “often return to the topic of concessions” before adding: “Too often those concessions are discussed in the context only of Ukraine, not Russia.”

“We truly hope that the trilateral meetings next week will be serious, substantive, helpful for all of us, but honestly, sometimes it feels like the sides are talking about completing different things,” Zelensky said.

The Ukrainian leader has said the U.S. has proposed Ukraine withdraws from the chunks of the Donbas it still controls, which would become a “free economic zone.” Zelensky has said the idea was greeted coolly by Russian and Ukrainian officials.

Zelensky said at the weekend U.S. officials had told him that if Kyiv leaves the Donbas, peace would quickly follow. But the Ukrainian president told The Associated Press it was “a little bit crazy” to suggest Ukraine would pull back from its own territory.

Ukrainian officials have estimated roughly 200,000 Ukrainians still live in the Donbas.

“We will never to agree to withdraw all of our troops—for us, it’s an absolute red line,” Merezhko said.

There’s little clarity on how an agreement would bake in security guarantees, which Ukraine describes as a fundamental part of any deal. Without ironclad U.S. assurances it will act if Russia invades again, Kyiv says it cannot trust Moscow will honor the terms.

Zelensky has said the U.S. has offered a 15-year security guarantee but Kyiv has pushed for a much longer period of protection.

Also still up in the air is whether Europe’s largest nuclear power plant will end up in Russian or Ukrainian hands, or whether the U.S. will be heavily involved. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine is currently run by Russia after it captured the plant in March 2022 and international experts have repeatedly warned the fighting close to the site risks a nuclear disaster.

On Sunday, Ukrainian authorities said Russia had attacked Ukrainian energy infrastructure and residential areas in several regions of the country.