The Kremlin flatly stated on Wednesday that Russia would never contemplate surrendering negotiations to exchange Ukrainian land it currently occupies for areas in the Kursk region controlled by Kyiv.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently informed the Guardian that he would like to propose a mutual land exchange with Russia as a potential step towards resolving the conflict. This would entail providing some of Kursk that Ukrainian troops seized in a surprise advance last August, which has kept Russian forces engaged in efforts to recapture the area.
We’ll trade one for the other,” Zelenskyy explained, accepting uncertainty regarding exactly which territories would be sought in a trade. “I don’t know, we will see. But all our territories are valuable; there is no priority,” he asserted, arguing that every piece of Ukrainian territory was crucial.
Instead, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov staunchly rejected any suggestions on the territory exchange. “This is impossible,” he told a daily briefing. “Russia never did and will not exchange its territory.”
In his December phone-in, President Vladimir Putin informed the Russian people that their soldiers would eventually push Ukrainian troops out of Kursk but refused to give a timescale for this to occur. Peskov repeated the same assertion, saying that “Ukrainian units will be driven out of this land. All who are not destroyed will be driven out.”
Currently, Russia controls nearly 20% of Ukraine, including over 112,000 square kilometers, and Ukraine controls approximately 450 square kilometers of the Kursk region, based on open-source battlefield maps. Russian troops have advanced deeper into Ukraine than ever before since 2022 in 2024, but these gains have come at a cost that is high, though not revealed, in men and machinery.
