Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday that any negotiations involving potentially ceding his country’s Russian-occupied territories would only serve to prolong the Ukraine war.

“If we start talking about Crimea, about our sovereign territories, etc., we enter the format that Russia wants, which is prolonging the war,” Zelenskyy said during a briefing in Kiev in response to a question on reports of such a provision in a US peace deal, according to the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.

Zelenskyy argued that in order to not repeat the outcomes of the Minsk agreements, they must look into the settlement of the conflict by addressing it as a “big problem” that needs to be resolved in parts.

Key things to know about Minsk accords and why their future looks bleak

Russia's President Vladimir Putin himself has said the Western-brokered peace agreements seeking a peaceful resolution to the eastern Ukraine conflict "do not exist now".

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“If we do not want to play this Minsk 3, 4, 5 and a copy of the Normandy format, but with a different number of victims...then we must look at this war as a pie and divide this big problem into pieces if we really want to settle something,” he said.

The Minsk agreements were a series of agreements aimed at securing a ceasefire between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatists in southeastern Ukraine. They were signed in the Belarusian capital Minsk in 2014 and 2015.

However, their implementation was stalled, with both sides accusing each other of violations. Zelenskyy said that prolonging the war only benefits Russia, reiterating Kiev's call for further pressure on Moscow. Earlier, The Washington Post reported that the US has proposed formally recognising Russia’s annexation of Crimea as part of a broader peace agreement to end the Ukraine war.

US proposal

By Wednesday, the US expects response to a peace framework that includes unofficial recognition of Russian control of nearly all areas occupied since the 2022 start of the war in Ukraine, Axios reported on Tuesday, citing sources with direct knowledge of the proposal.

According to Axios, under the proposal, which was presented last week, the US would lift sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014 and would return a small part of Russian-occupied Kharkiv to Ukraine. It added that the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant would be considered as Ukrainian territory but operated by the US, with electricity supplied to both Ukraine and Russia.