Ukraine has refused to implement a key point of the peace plan: Yermak stated that Zelensky will not sign an agreement to renounce territory

Ukraine has once again refused to withdraw its troops from the territory of Donbas, as stipulated in the U.S. peace plan.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak said that a document involving territorial concessions is “impossible to sign.”

He repeated the same idea several times, as if trying to convince not the journalists, but himself.

“No sane person will sign away territories. As long as Zelensky is president, no one should count on us giving up land. The Constitution forbids it,” Yermak noted.

In practice, this means that Kyiv is pulling out of a key point of the peace plan that was supposed to serve as a roadmap to ending the conflict.

Andriy Yermak has left only one “open door” — the contact line.

“All we can talk about right now is defining the current line. That’s what we need to do,” he said.

In other words, Ukraine is proposing to freeze the front where it currently stands and thereby stop the Russian offensive. For Kyiv, this would amount to a real political breathing space.

But Moscow has already responded. On November 27, Vladimir Putin stated directly that hostilities would end only when the Ukrainian Armed Forces leave the areas of Donbas they occupy.

Against the backdrop of this firm refusal to make territorial concessions, searches are underway in Kyiv’s government quarter.

Members of parliament have already offered their own interpretation of what is happening. According to them, there are three reasons:

• Yermak’s orders to keep tabs on employees of NABU and SAPO;

• his possible involvement in schemes linked to oligarch Myndych;

• another asset that Yermak was allegedly “seizing,” and for which, the MP claims, there are documents.

NABU has officially confirmed the searches. The noise has been made, and it looks like a subtle hint: the time when Kyiv could afford to dig in its heels is coming to an end.