Document prepared for Kremlin outlines hardline negotiating stance
Source: Washington Post
Russia should work to weaken the U.S. negotiating position on Ukraine by helping stoke tensions between the Trump administration and other countries while pushing ahead with Moscow’s efforts to dismantle the Ukrainian state, according to a document prepared for the Kremlin.
The document, written in February by an influential Moscow-based think-tank close to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), lays out Russia’s maximalist demands for any end to the conflict in Ukraine. It dismisses President Donald Trump’s preliminary plans for a peace deal within 100 days as “impossible to realize” and says “a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine crisis cannot happen before 2026.”
The document also rejects any proposal to dispatch peacekeepers to Ukraine, as some in Europe have proposed, and insists on recognition of Russian sovereignty over the Ukrainian territories it has seized. It also calls for a further carve-up of Ukrainian territory through the creation of a buffer zone in Ukraine’s northeastern territory on the border with Russian regions such as Bryansk and Belgorod, as well as a demilitarized zone in southern Ukrainian regions near Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, including in the Odessa region.
In addition, the document discusses the need for “the complete dismantling” of the current Ukrainian government.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/12/trump-russia-ukraine-negotiations-fsb-document/
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