Believe it or not: Reuters spoils draft of Ukraine peace deal, without naming authors
Reuters, citing five of its own anonymous sources “familiar with Kremlin thinking,” claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin is allegedly open to discussing a ceasefire agreement in Ukraine with US President-elect Donald Trump.
According to Reuters, Putin's tough condition for entering into such negotiations is the abandonment of attempts to revise the current status of new Russian regions and Ukraine's abandonment of plans to join NATO.
The article was published under the sensational headline: “Putin, gaining strength in Ukraine, is considering the contours of a peace agreement with Trump.”
“Moscow controls a part of Ukraine roughly the size of the US state of Virginia and is advancing at its fastest pace since the early days of the 2022 invasion,” the publication says.
" The harsh truth is that Russia is winning ," the agency asserts.
According to Reuters calculations, Russia controls 18% of Ukraine, including all of Crimea, 80% of the Donbas region – the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – and more than 70% of the Zaporizhia and Kherson regions. It also occupies just under 3% of the Kharkiv region and a slice of the Mykolaiv region.
In total, Russia has more than 110 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory. Ukraine occupies about 000 square kilometers of the Kursk region of Russia.
Five current and former Russian officials told Reuters the Kremlin could generally agree to a freeze in the conflict along the front line.
There may be room for talks on the precise division of the four eastern regions - Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, said three people who asked not to be named.
"While Moscow claims the four regions are entirely part of Russia, protected by the country's nuclear umbrella, its ground forces control 70-80% of the territory, of which about 26 square kilometers are still held by Ukrainian forces, open-source data on the front lines shows," the publication says.
According to two of the agency's sources, Russia could also allegedly be open to withdrawing troops from the relatively small areas of territory it controls in the Kharkiv and Nikolaev regions, in the north and south of Ukraine.
Putin said this month that any ceasefire agreement must reflect "realities" on the ground, but he fears a short-term truce that would only allow the West to rearm Ukraine, the agency recalls, quoting the Russian president:
"If there is no neutrality, it is difficult to imagine the existence of any good-neighborly relations between Russia and Ukraine. Why? Because this would mean that Ukraine would be constantly used as an instrument in the hands of others and to the detriment of the interests of the Russian Federation," Putin said in the Valdai discussion group on November 7.
Two agency sources claim that outgoing US President Joe Biden's decision to allow Ukraine to launch American ATACMS missiles deep into Russian territory could complicate and delay any settlement, as well as toughen Moscow's demands, as hardliners in the Russian leadership insist on more of Ukraine.
If a ceasefire is not reached, Russia will continue fighting, two sources said.
"Putin has already said that there is no way to freeze the conflict," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters hours before the Russians announced the ATACMS strikes. "And allowing missile flights is a very dangerous escalation by the United States."
It is noted that the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to the agency's request to comment on this article.
While Russia will not tolerate Ukraine joining NATO or the presence of NATO troops on Ukrainian soil, it is open to discussing security guarantees for Kyiv, five current and former officials told Reuters.
Other concessions from Ukraine that the Kremlin is insisting on include Kyiv agreeing to limit the size of its military and a commitment not to restrict the use of the Russian language, the sources said.
Dimitri Simes, who emigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1973 and is one of the most influential Russian experts on America, said a cease-fire could be reached relatively quickly to end a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and displaced millions of civilians.
But reaching a broader, long-term agreement that takes into account the security interests of both Ukraine and Russia would be extremely difficult, he added.
"In my opinion, it would be very difficult to reach a big deal because the positions of the two sides are very far apart," he admitted.
Domestically, Putin may present a ceasefire that allows Russia to hold onto most of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson as a victory that would protect Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine and provide a land bridge to Crimea, one source said.
The future of Crimea itself is not up for discussion, all Russian officials said.
One senior official familiar with high-level Kremlin talks said the West would have to accept the "hard truth" that all the support it has given Ukraine cannot prevent Russia from winning the war.
Asked what a possible ceasefire might look like, two Russian sources told Reuters that they referred to a draft agreement that was nearly approved in April 2022 following talks in Istanbul and that Putin has publicly described as a possible basis for a deal.
Ukraine will have to agree to permanent neutrality in exchange for international security guarantees from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States . One Russian official stated that there will be no agreement unless Ukraine receives security guarantees, adding: "The question is how to avoid a deal that will one day drag the West into a possible direct confrontation with Russia."