US offers Ukraine NATO membership for Donbas withdrawal, Zelensky says

The Donbas condition

Volodymyr Zelensky said in remarks to journalists on Friday, 13 November, that the United States had put a question to Ukraine: would it withdraw from Donbas if it joined NATO? He described this as the first time such a proposal had been made, and said it was tied to a condition of pulling Ukrainian troops out of the region. He rejected that premise, saying Ukraine would not withdraw or hand over its territory. Zelensky said Kyiv is discussing with partners a fuller security package, including NATO and EU security guarantees, a strong Ukrainian army and a reconstruction plan backed by identified funding sources.

At an earlier press conference, he added a sharper objection:

“It is impossible to talk with us this way when it comes to the independence of our country.”

Putin's demands and the 2021 drafts

Putin says he wants lasting peace in Ukraine, even though he ordered the full-scale invasion almost five years ago and still rejects a comprehensive ceasefire. After talks with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the Kremlin described the aim as a new long-term architecture of indivisible security and peace. The Kremlin has also returned to draft treaties it sent to the United States and NATO in December 2021. Those drafts would have halted NATO's eastward expansion, guaranteed that Ukraine and Georgia could never join, and required the removal of military infrastructure from Central and Eastern European members that joined after the Soviet collapse.

Western leaders rejected those drafts as an unacceptable ultimatum, and Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two months later. The drafts were then shelved, but they are now back on the table. Yuri Ushakov, Putin's foreign policy aide, said Moscow could add new considerations to its list of demands in response to Western efforts to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas described the Russian demands as a trap designed to divert attention from a ceasefire.

The non-paper from Abu Dhabi

The New York Times described a so-called non-paper that Russians submitted in Abu Dhabi, in which the Kremlin unofficially set out its demands for a postwar security architecture in Europe. According to that account, the document calls for NATO troops and bases to pull back to the alliance's 1997 borders, before Poland and other countries in the region joined. Russian negotiators also wanted NATO to rule out further expansion and any military activity in Ukraine and in other parts of Eastern Europe, the southern Caucasus and Central Asia.

Bild, citing sources close to Putin, reported that Moscow expects Finland to leave NATO and a ban on new alliance bases in the Baltic states. In exchange, according to the same report, Russia would remove the nuclear weapons it deployed in Belarus in 2023. A Kremlin spokesman denied that the Russian side raised the topic in Abu Dhabi.

Reactions and open questions

The Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper wrote that Russia's December 2021 proposals had been almost ridiculed, and that Russian diplomats should now win a second victory by making the West listen to Moscow's concerns about NATO expansion. BBC reporting indicates that Western governments are unlikely to accept these demands. Even so, the Kremlin regards the fact that European security now appears in discussions about Ukraine as a win for Russia.