Russian President Vladimir Putin is often compared to a mafia boss – the kind that makes you an offer you can’t refuse. But sometimes he also makes you an offer you can’t accept. This appears to be what happened in the Aug. 15 meetings in Alaska between Putin and President Donald Trump.
While the United States was rolling out the red carpet for a man wanted in 125 countries for war crimes, Putin was going through the motions of playing along with peace negotiations. To show his willingness to participate, he came bearing an offer of peace, but on terms that he knows Ukrainian leaders will find very difficult to accept.
At the heart of Putin’s offer appears to be a demand that Ukraine cede territory to Russia. And it’s not just the territory that Russia has already taken by force, but further sections of the Donbas region that Ukraine has so far successfully defended at enormous cost in terms of lives and treasure.
Putin’s offer won’t fly with most Ukrainians
Taking up Russia’s offer will be very difficult for Ukraine’s leaders – should they even want to. Ukrainians are very supportive of peace, but, as our research shows, few Ukrainians are willing to trade land for that peace. This is important. Ukraine, unlike Russia, is a democracy. While Putin might be able to instruct the Russian state to do whatever he wants, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has to persuade the Ukrainian people. Our research suggests that doing so will be difficult.
To understand better how Ukrainians feel about potential peace terms, we conducted a face-to-face survey on a nationally representative sample of 1,342 Ukrainians in June and July of this year using the Ukrainian survey firm Razumkov Centre. We asked Ukrainians about the acceptability of different territorial concessions in peace negotiations with Russia.
As the figure below illustrates, the idea of concessions was not popular. Even after more than three years of intense suffering and heavy human and economic losses, only about a third of Ukrainians are willing to endorse conceding the territories that Russia controlled prior to the February 2022 full-scale invasion. (Russia seized and annexed Crimea in 2014, and supported separatist campaigns in the Donbas region). For the territories Russian forces have occupied post-2022, support for concessions is considerably lower (15.5%). And roughly two-thirds of respondents were opposed to any concessions for the newly seized land (almost half of them were unconditionally opposed).
Is bias driving our results showing high opposition to Putin’s terms? (Spoiler: No.)
The results so far suggest very little appetite for Putin’s “peace” vision among ordinary Ukrainians. But how genuine is this opposition? After all, roughly one in six respondents were either unsure or unwilling to answer these questions.
One concern is that some of the nominal opposition to Putin’s terms could be driven by the “rally-around-the-flag” dynamics of war. In other words, Ukrainians who say they oppose Putin’s terms for peace might be influenced by social pressure to give that answer. That’s because in wartime, Ukrainians would find it hard to agree with anything that sounds sympathetic to Russia.
To address this concern, we estimated support for territorial concessions of post-2022 Russian-occupied territories indirectly through a list experiment. This type of approach is designed to elicit truthful answers to sensitive survey questions. The results of this list experiment suggest that only 18% of respondents agreed with the sensitive item (“As part of the peace talks, it is acceptable to cede Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia after February 24, 2022.”) In other words, the opposition to Putin’s land-for-peace offer appears to be both widespread and genuine among the Ukrainian public.
Could Zelenskyy change Ukrainians’ minds to make concessions?
What about the ability of political leaders to sway public opinion on foreign policy issues? After all, both Putin and Trump were able to change the attitudes of many of their supporters vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine. Could the Ukrainian president do the same for his constituents , and persuade the Ukrainian public to endorse territorial concessions as part of a broader peace plan?
To test this possibility, we ran a survey experiment in which we asked a random subset of our respondents to read an actual statement by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which prioritized saving lives over preserving territory, before answering the three questions about the acceptability of territorial concessions.
We found that reading Zelenskyy’s pro-compromise statement made virtually no difference in how respondents evaluated the acceptability of different territorial concessions. This means that even if the Ukrainian president decided – or was forced – to accept a land-for-peace deal along the lines of Putin’s proposal, he would be unable to persuade the Ukrainian people to go along with that plan.
These limited persuasion effects are not simply due to Zelenskyy’s lower popularity in recent months. In fact, we found very similar effects for the same experiment in an earlier online experiment from late summer/early fall of 2022, when Zelenskyy’s popularity was very high.
Can Ukraine continue resisting Russia?
Of course, some observers have noted that the high human and economic costs of the war may ultimately erode Ukraine’s ability to continue resisting the Russian onslaught. The continued willingness of the Ukrainian population to support this resistance becomes a key question. When comparing the overall attitudes to territorial concession between our recent survey and the online survey from mid-2022, we notice that the intensity of opposition to territorial concessions in exchange for peace has indeed declined noticeably over the past three years.
Other surveys in Ukraine show a similar decline starting in mid-2023, in conjunction with the disappointing counter-offensive of 2023. These surveys also reveal that opposition to territorial concessions has stabilized since late 2024, and that opponents still outnumber supporters of concessions by roughly 15%.
What our findings show
On balance, our analysis suggests that, barring any dramatic changes on the battlefield, a clear majority of Ukrainians will continue to oppose the very premise of the Russian offer of buying peace in exchange for legitimizing the Russian land grab. Combined with Zelenskyy’s severely limited ability to persuade Ukrainians to endorse territorial concessions, these patterns suggest that any “peace” settlement that allows Russia to keep significant swaths of the territories it has occupied in the past three years will lack the popular legitimacy required for a durable peace.
The recent anti-corruption protests in Ukraine, moreover, have highlighted the importance of public opinion in Ukraine’s imperfect but genuine democracy. That’s yet another indication that accepting a land-for-peace deal would in all likelihood amount to political suicide for President Zelenskyy.
Grigore Pop-Eleches is professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and director of the Princeton Workshop in Post-Communist Politics. He is co-author with Joshua Tucker of “Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes” (Princeton University Press, 2017).
Graeme Robertson is a professor of political science and director of the Authoritarian Politics Lab at the University of North Carolina. Robertson is co-author with Samuel Greene of “Putin vs The People: The Story of a Popular Dictator and the Struggle for the Future of Russia” (Yale University Press, 2022).
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