With little known about how President-elect Donald Trump plans to end the war in Ukraine, one option thought to be on the table—effectively freezing the conflict and carving out a demilitarized zone—comes with many questions.
Trump has insisted he would end the more than two and a half years of war in Ukraine, thought to have caused upwards of a million combined casualties, within a day. He has not clarified how he plans to do this, not least with Moscow and Kyiv having seemingly irreconcilable conditions for peace talks.
One idea floated among officials in Trump’s camp could see Ukraine pledging not to join NATO for at least 20 years, while Washington continues sending weapons to deter a fresh Russian attack, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, citing three people close to the president-elect.
The conflict would also become frozen, with Russia keeping control of roughly a fifth of Ukraine and an 800-mile demilitarized zone (DMZ) marking Kyiv’s and Moscow’s control. It would likely be policed by European forces, according to the report, rather than any U.S. forces or U.S.-backed organizations like the United Nations.
Czech President Petr Pavel on Friday echoed these reports, saying that a future deal could include a two-decade-long delay to Ukraine’s NATO accession, giving Moscow control over Ukrainian territory it currently holds, and handing Europe the long-term responsibility for protecting the eastern flank of the continent and hundreds of miles of demilitarized territory.
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It is not clear where a demilitarized zone would fall, although vice-president-elect JD Vance has said a “peaceful settlement” would likely mean that “the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine, that becomes like a demilitarized zone.”
Moscow currently has a grip on around 20 percent of Ukraine, including swathes of the four regions of the mainland—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia—it said it has annexed.
The Kremlin has controlled Crimea, the peninsula to the south of Ukraine, since 2014. Kyiv has vowed to regain all territory taken by Moscow, and President Volodymyr Zelensky ruled out ceding land to Russia in his “victory plan” presented to Ukrainian lawmakers and global leaders in recent months. He also said he opposed a frozen conflict, insisting Kyiv needs an “invitation to join NATO now.”
Dan Rice, a former aide to Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, told Newsweek that Kyiv was very unlikely to accept a short-term ceasefire, but that significant European forces along the Russian border with Ukraine were needed to stop Russia attempting to seize territory.
Bryan Lanza, who has worked on Trump’s election campaign trail, told the BBC over the weekend that the new administration taking office in January would ask for a “realistic vision for peace” from the Ukrainian leader.
“And if President Zelensky comes to the table and says, ‘Well we can only have peace if we have Crimea,’ he shows to us that he’s not serious,” he said. “Crimea is gone.” A Trump spokesperson later said Lanza “did not speak” for the president-elect.
Also undecided is whether a DMZ would include the internationally-recognized border between Russia and Ukraine. Kyiv’s presence in the southern Kursk region in recent months complicates this further.
Also up for debate is how wide the zone would be, whether European militaries would consent to making sure it stays free of Russian or Ukrainian military operations and whether it would last.
We have seen DMZs in the past, possibly most famously in the strip of land that divides North and South Korea. The area slicing across the peninsula has been in place since the end of the Korean War in 1953, and the conflict has never technically ended.
“Demilitarized zones sound better than they function in real life,” said Mark Cancian, a retired U.S. Marine Corps Reserve colonel and a senior adviser with the U.S. think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The problem is enforcement,” and making sure the area stays clear, he told Newsweek. Otherwise, he said, it is “meaningless.”
The Korean DMZ has been “quite successful” because Pyongyang and Seoul can communicate with one another, but also because if one military moved into the DMZ, the other would have the military might to bite back, he said.
A Ukrainian DMZ is not “necessarily a bad idea, but it’s just difficult to implement in a way that’s successful,” Cancian said.
An anonymous member of Trump’s team told the WSJ that “the barrel of the gun is going to be European,” adding: “We are not sending American men and women to uphold peace in Ukraine. And we are not paying for it. Get the Poles, Germans, British and French to do it.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine any European military forces participating in demilitarized zones,” Cancian said. Committing ground troops to the war effort has largely been anathema to NATO states, and Kyiv has not requested it.
At the DMZ that ultimately collapsed in Vietnam, a mission of neutral countries, although “ineffective,” monitored the zone, Cancian noted. Diplomacy could craft some kind of neutral force that could be up to the task, but it would be “very difficult,” he added.
If a deal creates a DMZ, it would be on Putin’s terms, and he will “simply use that as the front line for the next invasion of Ukraine in five, 10, 15 years, after his army has rested and reconstituted and institutionalized the lessons it is learning in Ukraine,” said Karolina Hird, Russia deputy team lead with the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War think tank, which tracks daily changes to the front line in Ukraine.
“Creating a DMZ, no matter what it looks like, will give Russian forces an excuse to rest and reset and plan their next invasion,” Hird told Newsweek. Putin has not signaled his goals of seizing all of Ukraine have withered away, Hird said, adding that a DMZ would “almost legitimize the occupation” of parts of Ukraine and solidify the Kremlin’s control over the Ukrainians living in these territories.
“A DMZ would not end the war on anyone’s terms other than Russia’s,” Hird said.
