Peace in exchange for land? For many Ukrainians, it’s too painful to contemplate

Reuters:

KYIV, May 2 – Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxer who is now mayor of Kyiv, ventured last month into hazardous political territory: he delicately suggested in an interview that Ukraine might need to cede land to end its battle against Russia.

After a flood of angry online comments, he walked back his comments, saying on Facebook that “territorial concessions contradict our national interests and we must fight against their implementation until the last”.

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U.S. President Donald Trump and his negotiators believe the only route to ending the Russian war in Ukraine is for Kyiv to acknowledge in some form that it is not getting back the Ukrainian land Moscow’s troops have taken since invading.

But the episode with Klitschko — along with opinion polling shared exclusively with Reuters — indicates that, more than three years into the war, most Ukrainians are not willing to cede territory to Russia in exchange for a ceasefire deal.

The state of public opinion helps explain why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is expected to run for re-election, has resisted Trump’s pressure to cede territory in ceasefire negotiations.

A poll from Gradus Research exclusively shared with Reuters showed that almost three-quarters of the population did not see territorial concessions as a way to end the war.

“Most respondents believe that Russia’s main goal in the war … is to establish full control over our country,” Gradus said in a research note. “Ukrainian territorial concessions are not perceived as a compromise or a guarantee of peace – on the contrary, they can only strengthen the aggressor.”

Russia has denied seeking control of Ukraine, but its forces headed directly to Kyiv in their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 before Ukrainian troops pushed them back from the capital to their current positions in the south and east.

The Ukrainian poll conducted this week indicated that 40% of respondents believed that even in the case of concessions, peace would be only temporary and unsustainable. Another 31% thought that concessions would not lead to peace at all, Gradus said.