Anton Troianovski and Andrew E. Kramer
When Poland sought a US military base in 2018, it pitched the idea as Fort Trump.
When Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a peace pledge at the White House last year, they called the transport link it created “the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity”.
But the most improbable instance of President Donald Trump’s name being lent to a geopolitical flashpoint may be one that has remained out of public view until now. In Ukraine peace talks in recent months, Ukrainian officials have suggested that the slice of the country’s Donbas region that Russia is still fighting for could be named “Donnyland.”
The moniker, a reference to “Donbas” and “Donald,” was described by four people familiar with the negotiations, who all spoke about it on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding them.
When a Ukrainian negotiator first mentioned the term, partly in jest, it was as part of an attempt to convince the Trump administration to push back more against Russia’s territorial demands, according to three of the people familiar with the talks. President Vladimir Putin has vowed to keep fighting until Russian forces reach a key administrative boundary on the edge of the Donbas, the industrial region in eastern Ukraine where the Kremlin first started waging war in 2014.
That a name evocative of Disneyland has been applied to a depopulated, decimated swath of Ukrainian coal-and-steel country could appear jarring as Europe’s deadliest fighting since World War II continues to rage. But it also reflects a global reality in which governments appeal to Trump’s vanity in order to get American might on their side.
For Ukraine, the effort has not yet paid off. The term has continued to be used in the talks, though it is not known to be written into any official documents. Negotiators have also floated the possibility of Trump’s Board of Peace playing a role in administering the area, though neither Russia nor Ukraine have joined it so far, according to four people familiar with the talks.
But Russia has not agreed to an arrangement acceptable to Ukraine. That has left the fate of the area the Ukrainians proposed calling Donnyland – about 80 kilometres long and 64 kilometres wide – as one of the main sticking points in the negotiations.
The Ukraine talks have ticked along behind the scenes in recent weeks, even as the lead US negotiators – Steve Witkoff, Trump’s close friend and special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law – have been focused on the war with Iran. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said this month that he was expecting Witkoff and Kushner to visit Ukraine soon. But a person familiar with the talks said that the Americans were still waiting for sufficient progress to warrant such a trip and that they also intended to make another visit to Russia.
“Ukraine is moving along. I wish they could get along,” Trump told reporters last week. “We’ll see what happens. There’s things happening there.”
Trump, of course, promised in his presidential campaign that he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. He and his top negotiators have now spent more than a year trying to forge a peace deal, spending hours in talks with Putin and frustrating Ukrainian officials with the appearance that they were acting like mediators rather than defending Ukraine.
“Donnyland” was one way Ukrainians tried to get Trump to be more on their side. Ever since Trump met Putin in Alaska last August, the Trump administration has signalled that it could support a peace deal in which Ukraine withdrew to the administrative border of the Donetsk region, one of the provinces in the Donbas – a move that critics saw as a major concession to the Kremlin.
Ukrainian officials say about 190,000 people live in this territory now. Others close to the talks say the real number may be about half that. It is so close to the front that the main highway into the area is draped in netting to protect against Russian exploding drones.
Little is left of the local economy other than one working coal mine and businesses serving the soldiers based in the area, including shops selling balloons and flowers for soldiers to buy for visiting wives or girlfriends.
Ukraine insists it can defend this area and that it will not give it up. But in December, Zelensky signalled openness to a compromise that would form a demilitarised zone or a free economic zone under neither warring party’s full control.
The Ukrainians considered but did not endorse proposals for a neutral administrator or a governing body with both Russian and Ukrainian representatives, so long as Russia could not claim the land after the war.
The Kremlin said Russia could be open to establishing a demilitarised zone if Russian police or National Guard soldiers were allowed to patrol it – a measure unacceptable to Kyiv.
Ukraine wanted the Trump administration to pressure Moscow to soften its position further. Ukrainian negotiators took to calling the proposed zone “Donnyland”, an area that would not be fully controlled by either side and branded as an accomplishment for Trump.
Another suggestion called the postwar arrangement the “Monaco model,” a reference to the city-state on the French Mediterranean. Like Donnyland, it referred to a possible, semiautonomous mini-state that would benefit from a status as an offshore economic zone. The phrase “Monaco model” appeared in treaty drafts, while “Donnyland” only came up in discussions, according to a person with direct knowledge of Ukraine’s negotiating strategies.
But the talks stalled in late February over the territorial issue, just as the war in Iran distracted the American negotiating team. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said Russia would accept only full legal control of the Donbas. And Zelensky downplayed the prospects of trading land for peace, saying doing so would be a “big mistake”.
Russia and Ukraine haven’t budged since on control of territory, even as talks continued on other issues, including US commitments to guaranteeing Ukraine’s postwar security, according to people familiar with the talks.
A Ukrainian official created a flag for Donnyland – coloured green and gold – and a national anthem, using ChatGPT, the person with knowledge of Ukraine’s negotiating strategies said. It’s not clear that the US side ever saw them.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
