The Kremlin has rejected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy’s proposal to exchange the part of the western Russian region of Kursk captured by Kiev for territory held by Russia in Ukraine.
“This is impossible,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in Moscow on Wednesday. Russia has never discussed the subject of an exchange of territory and never will, he said, and insisted that the Ukrainian units that invaded Kursk would be destroyed or driven out.
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 and launched a large-scale invasion of its neighbour three years ago. A fifth of Ukraine is currently occupied, which corresponds to a little more than 110,000 square kilometres.
The conquests made in the Kursk area during a Ukrainian counterattack have now shrunk to around 400 square kilometres.
Nevertheless, Kiev sees it as a bargaining chip for negotiations to get at least a small part of its own territories back.
In an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Zelensky said that if US President Donald Trump managed to bring Moscow and Kiev to the table, he would propose an exchange of territory. “We will swap one territory for another,” he said.
He did not specify which Ukrainian regions he wants back. Experts consider an exchange of land in the north-eastern Ukrainian region of Kharkiv to be most likely, because Moscow has not officially claimed these parts of the country – in contrast to the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya.
Earlier, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova had also sharply rejected the proposal. The Ukrainian soldiers in Kursk are entitled to an area of two square metres and one and a half metres in depth without any exchange, she said – implying that the Ukrainians would be buried there.