Last Friday, President Donald Trump hosted Vladimir Putin for a bilateral summit in Alaska and then, on Monday, received Volodymyr Zelensky and a half-dozen European heads of state at the White House. It was the latest attempt by Trump to bring the war in Ukraine to a close through diplomatic intervention. “While difficult, peace is within reach,” he said, on Monday. “The war is going to end.” Zelensky and Putin, he went on, “are going to work something out.” Trump, famously, has made such promises before—on the campaign trail, he declared that he would end the war within twenty-four hours of taking office—but is there reason to think that it might be different this time?

To answer that, one has to return to the question of why Russia invaded Ukraine in the first place, and why the war has continued for three and a half years since then. Territory, an issue that Trump and his special envoy, Steven Witkoff, have returned to time and again, most recently when talking of unspecified “land swaps,” is actually not the primary concern for either side. “They’ve occupied some very prime territory,” Trump said, of Russia’s invasion force. “We’re going to try and get some of that territory back for Ukraine.”

For Putin, lopping off Ukrainian territory—and, in the process, levelling Ukrainian cities with artillery barrages and aerial bombs—is a way to achieve his ultimate goal: a loyal and neutered Ukraine that does not threaten Russia and is free of undue Western influence. This aim is connected to a wider set of concerns that Putin calls the “root causes” of the war, which touch on a range of issues: language, history, and identity in modern-day Ukraine, and also the treaties and deployment of Western military forces undergirding security in Europe.

As Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, has been noting since the beginning of the war, in Putin’s understanding, if Ukraine is “ours,” then it doesn’t so much matter who controls which city or where its de-facto borders are drawn; but if Ukraine remains “theirs,” then it must be steadily destroyed, until Kyiv and its Western backers realize the folly of their stubbornness and acquiesce to the former scenario. “Putin has considered war to be the least desirable option from the outset,” Stanovaya told me. “He’d rather make a deal, but only in line with his maximalist conditions, which, neither then nor now, is he ready to rethink. And so, according to his logic, he is forced to continue to wage war.”

On the land question, Putin’s position appears to be that Ukraine should withdraw from the parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, in the country’s east, that it still controls. But this is no small amount of territory: Ukrainian forces hold thirty per cent of the Donetsk region, including its most fortified strongholds, which Russia has not been able to seize despite years of constant assaults. It’s unclear exactly what territorial concessions Putin and Trump have discussed, but Trump told reporters in Alaska that “those are points that we have largely agreed on.” Afterward, a Ukrainian diplomatic source told me, “People were concerned Trump might express some willingness or even demands on the territorial issue.” But the fact that, in Washington, Trump didn’t pressure Zelensky on the point means that “Trump didn’t go for a ‘dirty deal’ with Putin.”

Putin wants the entirety of the Donbas, as the Donetsk and Luhansk regions together are known, for two reasons—neither of which relates to the intrinsic qualities or benefits of the land, per se. The first reason essentially pertains to image and propaganda. In February, 2022, when Putin announced the start of the so-called “special military operation,” the supposed need to protect the Russian-speaking populations of the Donbas was his most precise, clearly articulated war aim. Since then, the bulk of the Russian war effort—and where its Army has seen the majority of its estimated million casualties—has been focussed on the Donbas. If Russia emerges from the war, effectively, with control of the region, Putin will have an easier time selling the idea of victory and the virtue of the sacrifice required to achieve it. The dual propaganda and repression machines could probably keep things stable at home for Putin in nearly any scenario, but all segments of Russian society—veterans returning from the war zone, families who have lost husbands or fathers in the war, once globally connected economic élites—will be all the less likely to express even tentative displeasure or doubt if the Donbas ends up in Russian hands.

The second reason that Putin wants control over the Donbas is that Russian forces will be in constant striking distance of other Ukrainian population centers, in particular cities such as Dnipro and Kharkiv, so that both the threat and the means of a renewed Russian invasion will be ever present. A perpetually insecure Ukraine, Putin believes, is one more amenable to Russian interests and liable to be manipulated or suborned by Moscow.

Zelensky faces the same pressures, but in reverse. I reached Balazs Jarabik, a political analyst and a former longtime European diplomat, in Kyiv, who spoke of the combined impediments to Zelensky agreeing to such a scheme: namely, the political (“the Donbas is where Ukrainians see this war as having started, in 2014, and losing the entirety of it would be a big blow to morale”) and the military (“after Donbas, there is basically just open steppe without any natural defensive lines”). Zelensky himself has cited a clause in the Ukrainian constitution that prevents any leader from ceding or transferring any of the country’s territory.

Still, this would presumably not be the final barrier to a deal, were a realistic one to materialize. Ukraine could, for example, withdraw its troops from particular areas without making any formal territorial concessions, creating an unrecognized but indefinite line of separation, like the one that followed the Korean armistice, in 1953, or the division of Berlin, during the Cold War. However, such a thing could be considered only if Ukraine felt that its long-term security was assured. “If the choice was, say, NATO or Donbas, Ukraine would obviously choose NATO,” Jarabik said. (Not that this option is on the table: Trump reiterated again this week that there will be “no going into NATO by Ukraine.”)

The question of land, then, is a proxy for more essential issues for both Russia and Ukraine: Ukraine’s future orientation as a state, and its ability to protect and defend that sovereignty, or the possibility that it remains perpetually exposed and vulnerable. Putin’s list of “root causes” presupposes changes to Ukrainian politics and society, a process that Putin appears to expect Trump to force on Kyiv as part of a peace settlement. In Alaska, Putin achieved partial success on this point. On one hand, he convinced Trump that the war can end only by addressing Russia’s strategic concerns, hence Trump’s move away from calling for an immediate ceasefire to advocating for a long-term peace agreement. (The ceasefire, which Ukraine and its European backers favor, could be done quickly and without taking into account Russia’s wider set of demands; a more lasting treaty can be achieved only when exactly that has happened.) On the other hand, Trump seems disinclined to serve as Putin’s proxy in achieving Russia’s wish list in full. “Putin would like Trump to force its conditions on Ukraine,” Stanovaya said. “But Trump appears to be saying that, on matters of Ukraine’s future borders, laws, and constitution, Putin and Zelensky will have to come to some arrangement between themselves.” That is a more complicated, less desirable situation for Putin, who sees Zelensky as an illegitimate figure—Putin’s preferred interlocutor has always been in Washington, not Kyiv.