{"id":727187,"date":"2026-01-28T21:47:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T21:47:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/727187\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T21:47:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T21:47:11","slug":"donetsk-ownership-issue-preventing-russia-ukraine-peace-deal-rubio-says-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/727187\/","title":{"rendered":"Donetsk ownership issue preventing Russia-Ukraine peace deal, Rubio says \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

The territorial destiny of Donetsk is the key issue preventing the conclusion of a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe one remaining item \u2026 is the territorial claim on Donetsk. There is active work going to try to see if both sides\u2019 views on this can be reconciled,\u201d Rubio told a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s still a bridge we haven\u2019t crossed. It\u2019s still a gap, but at least we\u2019ve been able to narrow down the issue set to one central one, and it will probably be a very difficult one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ukraine\u2019s Donbas, which consists of the coal-rich Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east of the country, has since 2014 been the site of an armed conflict between the Ukrainian military and Russia-backed separatists. According to open-source maps of the conflict<\/a>, Russian forces now control about 80 percent of the Donbas region.<\/p>\n

Annexing the Donbas has been one of the maximalist war goals of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in December said Russia will seize it \u201cone way or another\u201d<\/a> if Ukraine doesn\u2019t give it up voluntarily.<\/p>\n

Ceding Donbas was\u00a0also one of the points<\/a> in a 28-point plan circulated by U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s team, which drew criticism from Ukrainian and European officials as heavily skewed in Russia\u2019s favor. An updated proposal watered down some of the more pro-Russian aspects of the initial plan.<\/p>\n

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly vowed that Ukraine will not give up Donbas as part of any ceasefire deal, as that would give Putin\u00a0a springboard for a future invasion<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The territorial destiny of Donetsk is the key issue preventing the conclusion of a peace deal between Ukraine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":727188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[6178,5293,32,2820,2597,332,1771,657,49,333,2601,771,335],"class_list":{"0":"post-727187","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-conflict","9":"tag-diplomacy","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-marco-rubio","12":"tag-military","13":"tag-russia","14":"tag-u-s-foreign-policy","15":"tag-ukraine","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-vladimir-putin","18":"tag-volodymyr-zelenskyy","19":"tag-war","20":"tag-war-in-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115974927098415287","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=727187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/727188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=727187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=727187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=727187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}