When Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, meet in Istanbul on May 15, place will be top of their list of priorities, and who controls it.
Putin made an offer to start strong negotiations between Russia and Ukraine at a media conference on May 11. Zelensky was pressured by Donald Trump to accept this offer in a social media post, saying “Ukraine may recognize this, IMMEDIATELY.”
Immediately after agreeing to a 30-day ceasefire request, the Ukrainian president was also encouraged by a agreed-sanction-russia-unless-ceasefire-agreed-2025-05-10/”>meeting with the English, French, German, and Finnish leaders.
Russia has stated that it wants to concentrate on the March 2022 Istanbul declaration and a draft agreement that the two parties negotiated but not agreed to in April 2022.
In these 2022 discussions, attention was drawn on which countries may offer security guarantees for any deal and on how Ukraine would become a permanent natural state. Additionally, they placed the Crimea conversations in separate conversations with a 10- to 15-year window.
Russia uses the phrase” the existing position on the ground” as flimsy gibeon for territorial disputes that have gotten more contentious in recent years. This is related to Russian victories on the field and the illegal invasion of four Russian provinces in September 2022 ( in addition to Crimea, which Russia improperly annexed in 2014 ).
Sergey Lavrov, the country’s foreign minister, recently stated that” the international recognition of Crimea, Sevastopol, the DPR, the LPR, the Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions as part of Russia is… imperative.”
This is undoubtedly a non-starter for Ukraine, as Zelensky has frequently stated.
Accepting that some areas of royal Russian country are temporarily under the control of Russia could have some freedom. This has been suggested by Vitali Klitschko, Kyiv’s governor, and Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy to Ukraine.
Strategic price of the Black Sea
The lands that Russia now occupies and claims in Ukraine have varying degrees of symbolic, financial, and strategic significance for Moscow and Kyiv.
Crimea and the lands on the coasts of the Azov Sea, which provide Russia with a property hall to Crimea, are the places with the greatest strategic value.
Russia’s claim to be a part of Russia, as it appears to have suggested in an arrangement hammered out by Putin and Trump’s minister Steve Witkoff, may enlarge the places of the Black Sea that Russia may claim to be legally able to claim power of, according to the terms of the agreement.
The Kremlin might then use this as a launchpad for additional strikes on Ukraine and to intimidate NATO’s northeast maritime side in Romania and Bulgaria. So, Ukraine and its Western partners find it inadmissible to acknowledge that Russia has control of these territories.
Comparing Crimea and the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia areas, Donetsk and Luhansk have less proper value. They do, however, have economic price because of the large sources that are present there. These include some of the minerals and other tools that the US and Ukraine separately agreed to on April 30.
Additionally, they have Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, and a sizable workforce of between 4.5 and 5. 5 million people, which will be essential to the post-war restoration of Ukraine.
Given how conflicting Moscow’s and Kyiv’s jobs are, the metaphor that both sides attach to their power is the most important obstacle to any deal, aside from the strategic and economic benefit of the illegally occupied territories. Control of these lands, or loss of, is what defines victory or defeat in the battle, for both factors.
Putin might be able to refute Putin’s claim that Russia has won some of its regional landslides since the country’s first full-fledged war in February 2022. However, for him, any agreement that would force Russia to relinquish the territory it has conquered, often at incredibly high prices, would be a dangerous gamble for his regime’s stability.
Anything less than the government’s full restoration of its territorial integrity in its 1991 edges would imply acknowledging its futile battle in the Ukraine war. The Zelensky government’s balance would be seriously harmed by this, whose social philosophy is based solely on the idea of a return to the borders of 1991.
Long-term effects
The Russian leadership has thus fallen under the control of its own information strategy, which prioritizes the “return of all territories” over the success of any country. According to a survey conducted by the Razumkov Center in March 2025, this is a target that is commonly shared by Ukrainians. However, it will be challenging.
There is another cause why the geographical problem has become so intractable, aside from the prospective home repercussions of any territorial compromises that Ukraine might be forced to make.
Beyond any proper, financial, and symbolic value, power over territory has always been a tool for Russia to use its wider political agenda to exert influence over its neighbors, from Moldova to Georgia, Armenia, and Ukraine, from the perspective of the Kremlin’s perspective.
It is also important to keep in mind that since 2014, Russia’s regional states in Ukraine have steadily grown. Russia had no state to Crimea up until September 2022, when it annexed the other four parts.
There is no assurance that any geographical agreement from Kyiv will put an end to Moscow’s regional expansionism permanently. Hence, it is concerning that Trump minister Witkoff reiterated the US position that the two parties must find balance over who has which territories in an interview with the Breitbart information website.
Russia’s anger against Ukraine was never a territorial conflict as such, but it was a part of Moscow’s plan to regain the effect it lost at the end of the Cold War. This schedule is not yet complete.
A ceasefire might result from Moscow and Washington’s approach to focusing on regional issues. However, it won’t address the fundamental problem of how to deal with a revision and malevolent autocracy that is sweeping Europe’s doorsteps.
The University of Birmingham’s Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko, both of whom are Jean Monnet and National University Odesa Law Academy’s professors of global surveillance, are professors of global security.
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