From: Kyiv Independent — Russian President Vladimir Putin is once again trying to seize through political backchanneling what he has failed to capture by force.
According to the Financial Times (FT), Putin once again is trying to entice U.S. President Donald Trump to pressure Ukraine into surrendering the eastern Donbas region — a territory Moscow has fought to occupy for more than a decade.
The newspaper reported that during their last meeting, Trump urged President Volodymyr Zelensky to give Putin the entire Donbas, an area comprising two Ukrainian regions — Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts — including areas still under Ukrainian control.
U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s main intermediary with the Kremlin, reportedly told the Ukrainian delegation that Donbas should be surrendered because it is “mostly Russian-speaking” — echoing one of the Kremlin’s oldest propaganda lines.
Voice of Ukraine 