‘Reality on the Ground’ – Waltz Insists Ukraine Needs to Cede Territory for Security Guarantees

US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said on Sunday that, as part of preliminary peace talks with Russia, the White House will propose that Ukraine would receive unspecified security guarantees in exchange for unspecified territorial concessions.

In an interview with ABC News, the top security adviser to President Donald Trump said that because of the “reality of the situation on the ground” there would need to be territory ceded to Russia in negotiations, using language that closely resembled Kremlin talking points about the balance of power on the battlefield.

Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and other members of Kremlin leadership have consistently demanded that Ukraine surrender the entirety of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, “including areas that Russian forces do not already occupy,” according to analysts from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and they have repeated these claims in recent weeks.

Putin insists that “Novorossiya” (“New Russia”) is an integral part of its boundaries: Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov defined the area as all of eastern and southern Ukraine including Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, and Mykolaiv regions, and the Crimean Peninsula.

According to the most recent ISW assessments, Russia currently occupies a small portion of the Kharkiv region and the Kinburn Spit in the Mykolaiv region, and “Russian forces are advancing towards the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast administrative border. Continued Kremlin statements demanding that Ukraine cede unoccupied Ukrainian territory indicate that the Kremlin and Putin remain committed to these territorial goals despite ongoing negotiations.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday said that the build-up of Russian troops along the eastern Sumy region suggests that the Kremlin has very little appetite for signing a lasting peace.

“This indicates an intention to attack,” Zelensky wrote on social media over the weekend. “We are aware of this, and will counter it. I would like all partners to understand exactly what Putin is planning, what he is preparing for, and what he will be ignoring.”

“The buildup of Russian forces indicates that Moscow intends to keep ignoring diplomacy,” he repeated. “It is clear that Russia is prolonging the war. We are ready to provide our partners with all the real information on the situation at the front, in the Kursk region and along our border.”

Over the weekend, Trump’s envoy for the conflict, Steve Witkoff, who met for several hours with Putin days ago, told CNN in a televised interview that he thinks “the two presidents are going to have a really good and positive discussion this week.”

Trump and Putin are expected to speak this week, officials said on Sunday, as Washington and Kyiv’s European allies press Moscow to accept a ceasefire in the three-year war.

Moscow said that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov and that the pair had discussed “concrete aspects of the implementation of understandings” at a US-Russia summit in Saudi Arabia last month.