Medinsky rules out territorial exchange between Russia and Ukraine

The head of the Russian delegation at the talks in Abu Dhabi, Vladimir Medinsky, said he sees no possibility of a territorial exchange between Russia and Ukraine.

He stated this on Russian television after the trilateral negotiations.

“The topic of possible territorial exchanges is periodically floated from various sides… I see no possibility of exchanging these territories. Because, again, as our leader vividly put it: where the foot of our Russian soldier has stepped, that is ours,” Medinsky said.

Recall that after a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump in Anchorage last year, information emerged that the US and Russia had agreed on ending the war on the condition that Ukrainian troops withdraw from the Donetsk region. It was assumed that this withdrawal would be carried out as a “territorial exchange”: in return, the Russians would give up the parts of the Sumy, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk regions they had captured. This did not apply to the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions — Russia would not withdraw troops from there.

After Kyiv refused to withdraw troops from Donbas, a number of media outlets reported that the Kremlin had decided to harden its position and refused to withdraw troops from the Sumy, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk regions, while keeping the demand for the withdrawal of the Ukrainian Armed Forces from the Donetsk region. Thus, Russia now does not agree to a “territorial exchange.” Medinsky’s statement indirectly confirms this.

Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected territorial concessions for the sake of peace. At the same time, after the talks in Abu Dhabi, Medinsky said that “Russia and Ukraine have moved closer to peace.”