Selling territorial concessions – POLITICO

For one thing, they said, Ukraine’s parliament would be unlikely to endorse any such proposal. “I don’t see the parliament ever passing anything like that,” opposition lawmaker Oleksandra Ustinova said. “It would be seen as a capitulation.” And after all they’ve suffered at the hands of the Russians, Ukrainians are in no mood to do so.

According to the KIIS poll, 63 percent are prepared to continue to resist Russia for as long as necessary. And while that’s a decrease from the 71 percent to 73 percent recorded from May 2022 to February 2024, it’s also a significant uptick from the 57 percent to 54 percent recorded from December 2024 to March of this year.

“Despite the war fatigue, despite all the troubles we have, I’m pretty sure there aren’t many people who are ready to pay any price to stop the war,” said Yehor Cherniev, deputy chairman of the Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence and a member of Zelenskyy’s party.

Building a political consensus around a deal involving territorial concessions and withdrawal will be difficult, agreed a former high-ranking Ukrainian official, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “[Zelenskyy] will have to talk to people he hates among the political and military elites and who don’t trust him. He will have to get them on board to make sure they all agree on the same message and argue collectively that the deal is the best we can get.”

And pulling that off would be a considerable challenge for the Ukrainian leader.

During the 2019 election campaign, Zelenskyy went after his predecessor Petro Poroshenko for signing the failed Minsk agreements, which were highly unpopular and which Russia failed to implement, the official recalled. And if Zelenskyy sought to argue territorial concessions were necessary, those who oppose the surrender of land would remind him of that at every turn.

The official also questioned whether Zelenskyy has the skill or temperament to build a large enough political consensus, especially in the absence of Andriy Yermak — his powerful former chief of staff who’s been embroiled in a widening corruption scandal and was forced to resign last month. For all his faults, Yermak was a political mechanic.