Territory ‘swap’ would be pause before new mass death, analyst warns

Journalist Vitaly Portnykov said this on Espreso TV.

"Trump can no longer avoid insisting that Ukraine change the Constitution. You simply pull your troops out of certain regions, you can still call them Ukrainian. No one forces you to change the law. And we just tell Putin we still see these territories as Ukrainian, and that we won’t demand Ukraine change its Constitution," he said.

In his view, this is what the compromise could look like.

"They pull out their troops from regions they see as Russian and don’t change their constitution. You pull out your troops from regions you see as Ukrainian and don’t change your constitution," Portnykov said.

The journalist explained Trump’s logic:

"When I stop being U.S. president in 2029, they can try to take back the territories they think are theirs, if they can. And you can try to take back the Ukrainian territories, if you can. You can prepare for war until 2029, and when I’m no longer president, you can start killing each other again as much as you like, so I can say that during my presidency I ended the war and it didn’t happen. But my successor took over and let the Russian-Ukrainian war start again," he stressed.

Portnykov believes that if such a fake swap of territories happens, "and if Ukraine, still seeing these territories as its own, leaves part of them, and Russia fails to get all the territories it wrote into its constitution, war between these two states is inevitable."

"It’s like the second Karabakh war, you know? If a country has certain territories written into its Constitution as its own, it will try to take them back by force if politics fails. That means the Russian and Ukrainian peoples are doomed to kill each other throughout the 21st century, and both countries’ lands will be zones of death, war, and crisis if the war ends this way. It will just be a pause before a new mass death. I can promise this clearly to every Ukrainian citizen and, by the way, to every Russian citizen. This is a diplomatic way of turning the land from Uzhhorod to Vladivostok into a massive cemetery," the journalist concluded.

• On August 8, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. and Russian officials were considering a deal that could end the war but leave Russia in control of occupied Ukrainian land. The reports said that under Putin’s terms, Ukraine would give Russia all of eastern Donbas and Crimea, pulling its troops from the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. In exchange, Russia would promise to stop its offensive in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
• Later, the German newspaper Bild reported that Putin still wanted to take all of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions.