The Land-for-Guarantees Trap: Why Trump's Ukraine Peace Plan Cannot End the War
RAND scholars argue that swapping Donbas territory for Western security promises misunderstands what both Russia and Ukraine actually need, and propose a radically different framework.
The war in Ukraine has ground on for more than four years. Peace negotiations have stalled repeatedly, most recently as Washington turned its attention to Iran. But in an incisive Foreign Affairs analysis, RAND Corporation's Samuel Charap and Defense Priorities' Jennifer Kavanagh argue that the talks were already failing before the Iran war began, because they are built on a fundamentally flawed formula.
The Trump administration has structured negotiations around a straightforward bargain: Ukraine cedes the remaining portions of the Donbas it still controls in exchange for security commitments from the United States and Europe. Vice President JD Vance articulated the logic plainly: "The Russians want certain pieces of territory... So that is really where the meat of the negotiation is." But Charap and Kavanagh contend this treats a complex geopolitical conflict like a real estate transaction, and it fails on both sides of the ledger.
Why territory alone won't satisfy Russia
Russia's core security concerns extend far beyond controlling specific parcels of Ukrainian territory. Moscow fears that Ukraine will become a forward base for NATO, host Western military forces, acquire unlimited advanced weapons, or join Western security alliances. Occupying the entire Donbas would address none of these anxieties.
What is the Donbas?
The Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk) is an industrial region in eastern Ukraine that has been partially occupied by Russian-backed forces since 2014. Russia launched proxy wars in both provinces that year, following its annexation of Crimea. Before the 2022 full-scale invasion, a low-intensity conflict had already killed approximately 14,000 people. Russia currently occupies most of the region but not all, the remaining Ukrainian-held areas include heavily fortified positions that protect the open terrain behind them.
The battlefield map matters more than it might seem. The fortified positions Ukraine still holds in eastern Donbas are not merely symbolic. They provide defensive depth against future Russian advances into the open steppe beyond. As the authors write, "Sacrificing the rest of the Donbas will objectively make Ukraine less resilient."
Why Western guarantees won't satisfy Ukraine
On the other side, Ukraine has no reason to trust that security guarantees from the West will hold. The core problem is what political scientists call the credible commitment problem: if Western nations refuse to fight Russia now, when Ukraine is an active battlefield ally receiving billions in aid, why would they intervene in a future conflict after a peace deal has dulled the urgency?
President Zelensky himself acknowledged the dynamic in March 2026, saying the Americans were "prepared to finalize guarantees at a high level once Ukraine is ready to withdraw from Donbas." But a January 2026 Paris summit of 35 nations, where Britain and France pledged to deploy troops to post-ceasefire Ukraine, has yet to produce binding commitments.
The CSIS analysis of the evolving 20-point peace plan identified the Donbas and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as the two fundamental sticking points that have resisted months of negotiation.
A comprehensive alternative
Charap and Kavanagh propose replacing the land-for-guarantees approach with a comprehensive framework. Ukraine would formally pledge permanent nonalignment, not joining any military alliance, while maintaining forces sufficient for defense but limited in offensive capability. Russia would accept constraints on deployments of forces, missiles, and heavy weapons near Ukrainian territory. The West could offer Russia a legally binding commitment, potentially through a UN Security Council resolution, to veto further NATO enlargement eastward, conditioned on Russia not reinvading.
For Ukraine, the West would codify commitments to provide air defenses, artillery, and ammunition on set timelines, with pre-positioned stockpiles enabling rapid deployment if aggression recurs. The model draws on Ukraine's geography and recent innovations in drone warfare, fortification, and distributed defense.
The authors acknowledge their proposal would be "extremely hard and time-consuming" to negotiate. But as an Orthodox Easter ceasefire briefly paused fighting on April 11-12, 2026, with both sides expected to resume operations within hours, the alternative is a war that neither side can win and neither side will end. Zelensky has identified April through June as "key months" before US attention shifts to midterm elections, lending urgency to the search for a formula that might actually work.