Former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said Wednesday he’s doubtful Ukraine will recover all of its territory occupied by Russia amid ongoing peace talks brokered by President Trump.
“Part of what the Ukrainians don’t have is a kind of sense of hope, a sense that they have enduring support from the United States, that they have a plan from their allies to support them in the long run,” Rhodes, who was an adviser to former President Obama, said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Chris Jansing Reports.”
“And look, the reality is, I would acknowledge that it is incredibly unlikely that Ukraine would recover certainly all the territory that Russia occupies — certainly Crimea, for instance,” he added.
Trump, who’s slated to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, has already signaled that a “land swap” may be necessary to end the war.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, its military has captured swaths of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the eastern Donbas. Early in the war, Russia illegally moved to officially annex the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said this week that any effort to cede Ukrainian territory would violate Ukraine’s constitution, and that Kyiv would not remove its forces from the Donbas in exchange for peace.
“If today we leave Donbas, from our fortifications, from our reliefs, from the heights that we control, we will clearly open a bridgehead for preparing an offensive by the Russians. In a few years, Putin will have an open path to both the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro regions. And not only that. Also to Kharkiv,” Zelensky told reporters Tuesday, according to PoliticoEU.
Rhodes said ending the war will not only pose questions about land ownership, but also the people living on either side of the dividing line.
“What happens to the Ukrainian children that have been taken into Russia, essentially kidnapped? What happens to the Ukrainians are living on the other side of that front line? Do they choose whether they want to live in Ukraine?” Rhodes said.
“Really importantly, what happens to the future of Ukraine if they are going to lose territory as a part of some kind of quote, unquote deal here. Do they get security guarantees? Can they join NATO? Can they join the European Union? If they can’t join NATO itself?”
Rhodes said Trump doesn’t seem to be considering these broader questions ahead of his discussion with Putin.
“These are all the kind of complex questions that Trump is not engaging with here, and I think that is why this feels somewhat haphazard here, because there’s a whole set of issues here beyond just a real estate deal, which is how Trump has literally talked about this, that get at the survival of Ukraine,” he told MSNBC.
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