The President of Ukraine is not the President of Russia. That’s more than just a truism — it cuts to the heart of what makes a young democracy different from a despotic regime.
It also explains why President Zelenskyy has far more limited options than the Kremlin when negotiating a peace settlement or an armistice. While he has already made it clear that, as head of state, he will not yield to Putin’s extravagant demands, the international pressure remains high. His rejection of the idea is not simply because he regards the Kremlin’s demands as tantamount to capitulation; Putin may be able to order his army to pull back, and is certainly able to suppress any popular dissident this might cause, but for Ukraine, it’s very different.
Popular consent is a central issue for Ukraine’s government. Three-quarters of Ukrainians reject Russia’s maximalist demand that they surrender currently unoccupied land for peace, polls show. Having suffered huge casualties — perhaps approaching half a million dead and seriously wounded — Ukraine’s government has to consider not just the approach of Russia, the US, and its European allies, but also its own people.
There is another consideration barely mentioned in the Western debate about Ukraine and its options, and that’s the view of the army. With as many as a million (mostly) men under arms, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are a critical and powerful constituency. It is their blood that has been shed and their friends who have been killed and maimed. It is UAF units that would have to withdraw from the fortress cities of the Donbas to less favorable ground.
So it was notable when Ukraine’s drone commander, the outspoken Colonel Vadym “Magyar” Brovdi, published a video statement warning of the consequences of such a move. He argued that the war will not end this year, and that Ukrainian forces are positioned to force Russia into negotiations on Kyiv’s terms later on. His words were ominous — any deal regarded as unfair by the military may trigger a backlash, he said. “No one in the world could bend an army of a million.”
The views of key elements of the military, like the intelligence services and elite formations like the Azov Corps, are unknown, and it’s important to say the UAF has been well-disciplined through the war — there has been no attempt at an insurrection as there was in Russia in 2023.
Whether Brovdi is representative of the wider officer corps is an open question, and he is something of a maverick, with a checkered history before he entered the army in 2022 and became a highly effective commander. Yet there are signs of wider unease among the military at some of the proposals now being aired.
Dmytro Filatov, commander of 1 Separate Assault Regiment, stated that the army would never agree to withdraw from territories for which it has paid in blood. “In our unit, not a single person even considers surrendering any territory without a fight,” he said.
A lieutenant colonel, who asked that his name be retracted, raised a critical question: “What are we trading territories for? Kramatorsk and Sloviansk are not just cities — they are a system of fortresses. We would have to retreat… and rebuild from scratch.
“Only if we received the full return of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Sumy, and Kharkiv regions — and, most importantly, security guarantees that are not just empty promises — would it make sense. Otherwise, it is capitulation, and that would strike a severe blow to Ukraine’s internal resilience.”
Trust in the Kremlin is non-existent among Ukrainian troops. All are well-versed in the long history of Russian perfidy, starting with its abandonment of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum by which it explicitly recognized Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders. Its trail of broken promises and aggression winds through the 2003 Tuzla conflict, the “green men” invading Crimea, to the use of Russian forces to invade Eastern Ukraine in 2014, and the 2022 denials that it was planning a full-scale war of territorial conquest. For many Ukrainians, the choice is to lose lives now or to risk losing many more later, when a stripped-back nation faces yet another assault.
Sergeant Yevhenii Malik, who defended Mariupol and spent two and a half years in Russian captivity, warns against illusions of compromise: “My friends are fighting in Donbas and I want them to come back alive. But I have no doubt that if Ukraine cedes Donbas to the Russians, the very next day they will advance further, breaking all agreements under some laughable pretext. We’ve seen it happen before — and it will definitely happen again.”
Lesia Ogryzko, Director of the Sahaidachny Security Center, told this author: “The entire debate about territorial concessions shows that we’ve been pulled into Russia’s narrative — framing this war as if it were about land. But looking at the map of the world’s largest country, it’s crystal clear that Russia does not need more territory. This war is about Ukraine’s very statehood and sovereignty. If Trump does not want to repeat the mistakes made by Obama — who accepted the annexation of Crimea, emboldening Putin to escalate his war against Ukraine — he must be smart enough not to fall into the same trap.”
President Zelenskyy has provided a critical counter-narrative to the claims regarding Russia winning the war: Russia seized about 7% of Ukraine’s territory between 2014 and 2021, an additional 13–20% in 2022 (peaking at 27% early that year), and only around 1% more from 2023–2025.
British military intelligence estimates that at the current pace, it would take Russian forces more than four years and another two million dead and wounded for Russia to fully occupy all four of the Ukrainian regions it claims.
Ukraine is not the only combatant facing difficult choices, as Putin and his Kremlin advisers well know.
Elena Davlikanova is a Democracy Fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). Her work is focused on Ukraine and Russia’s domestic issues and their effects on global peace. She is an experienced researcher who, in 2022, conducted the studies ‘The Work of the Ukrainian Parliament in Wartime’ and ‘The War of Narratives: The Image of Ukraine in Media.’
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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