Ukraine just agreed to discuss handing over its own front line
1 hour ago · 28 October 2026Share
Volodymyr Zelensky at his presidential inauguration on 20 May 2019. Mykola Lazarenko / The Presidential Administration of Ukraine · CC BY 4.0
Ukraine just confirmed something huge.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's President, says the United States has proposed demilitarized zones in two places. One in eastern Donbas. One on part of the Kinburn Spit, down south.
This isn't a rumour anymore. He said it himself, a day ago, at a meeting with journalists in Kyiv.
So where did this idea come from? Zelensky says it goes all the way back to the American twenty-eight-point peace plan. It's been reworked across several negotiating documents since.
Here's the Donbas version. A buffer zone, or a demilitarized zone, stretching out on both sides of the current front line. Not just Ukraine pulling back. Both sides.
And Ukraine's answer? It's open to it.
Zelensky says quote "As a compromise, we were ready to discuss this."
Think about what that actually means. Ukraine's own president, on the record, saying his government would at least talk about moving troops back from land it still controls.
Now the second zone. A smaller patch on the Kinburn Spit, a strip of land in Ukraine's southern Mykolaiv region. Under this proposal, it stays Ukrainian. It just gets demilitarized.
But getting there is not simple.
Zelensky says building a demilitarized economic zone in Donbas means working out exactly how far troops retreat, and where international forces would actually sit to watch over it. And he's clear this isn't something negotiating teams can sort out with paperwork. He says it has to go to the leaders themselves.
There's more on the table too. The future of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which Russia has held since 2022. And possible territorial swaps between the two sides.
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Map of the situation in Donbas as of 18 April 2022, prior to Russia's Donbas offensive. File photo. Rr016 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Interfax-Ukraine reports the demilitarized zone idea came up again in later talks, this time tied to a separate so-called diesel deal. But Zelensky says there's been no further progress on the territorial question since.
So has anything actually been agreed? No. Zelensky says it hasn't. He says Ukraine keeps discussing territory for one reason. Russia keeps putting it back on the table.
And this didn't come out of nowhere.
Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy, met Zelensky and European leaders in Oslo eight days ago. That meeting included Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway's Prime Minister, and Alexander Stubb, Finland's President. The very next day, Witkoff flew to St Petersburg and sat down with Vladimir Putin, Russia's president.
Kyiv Post reports the wider American framework links the Donbas zone to something bigger. An investment package. The possibility of European Union membership for Ukraine. All of it in exchange for Ukraine dropping its bid to join NATO.
And territory is still the hardest part of all of this.
Four days ago, Zelensky put Russia's current control of Ukraine at 19.3 per cent. He pushed back on a higher figure of 25 per cent that's been going around. He said reaching that number would mean giving up the rest of Donbas entirely. That is not what he's proposing now.
He's also asking for something to come with any deal. Five days ago, speaking to the Hudson Institute, he called for at least ten years of international military financing for Ukraine.
So what hasn't Russia said? Everything, basically. Russia has not publicly responded to this specific Donbas and Kinburn Spit proposal. It's still demanding recognition of its control over Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions, including land its own forces don't even hold.
And a few big questions are still wide open. Would international peacekeepers actually go into the zone, and under what mandate? Nobody knows yet. Does Zelensky's willingness to discuss a pullback actually commit Ukraine to anything, or is it just a negotiating position? That's not clear either.
Here's what is clear. The two sides aren't just arguing about the shape of a deal anymore.
They're arguing about where, on an actual map, troops would have to move.
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