‘It’s not real estate’: Ukraine fears Trump aims to sell Russian occupation as peace

Perhaps peace talks no longer involve the unfurling of paper maps, but that doesn’t stop Ukraine having the uneasy feeling that its borders are on the negotiating table.

Delegations from Ukraine, Russia and the United States met for the first time in nine months this week in Abu Dhabi; then White House envoys visited Russian president Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin before flying to Dublin for discussions with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on the sidelines of a European summit.

US president Donald Trump claims that a deal to end nearly five years of all-out war between Russia and Ukraine is near, and that it might “involve all of Europe” in new security arrangements and will leave Ukraine with “a little bit different shape”.

Putin wants Trump to give him something his army has failed to take – the one-fifth of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region that Kyiv still holds – and reintegrate Russia fully into the world economy with sanctions lifted and at least de facto, ideally de jure, recognition of Moscow’s rule over the 20 per cent of Ukraine that it has seized since 2014.

From Washington or Florida – and especially to self-described “real estate guys” such as Trump and his Ukraine envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – it might look like a neat way to end a devastating war: give up land in exchange for peace.

But what of the people who live on that land – the three million or so Ukrainians surviving under occupation, and about 60,000 still clinging on in the shattered cities of Kramatorsk and Donetsk, the main Kyiv-held strongholds of Donetsk region?

According to personal accounts and reports by Ukrainian and international rights monitors, the rule of the gun outweighs the rule of law in Russian-run regions, and anyone falling foul of the occupying powers risks arbitrary arrest, torture and imprisonment – particularly for any show of loyalty towards Ukraine.

“They tied my arms and legs to a table and put a bag on my head. Then they took my shoes and socks off, and poured water on my feet,” Ihor Kirianenko recalls of December 30th, 2018, when he was dragged from his car in Donetsk city by the local security forces and taken to an infamous jail and torture facility in a former cultural centre called Izolyatsia.

“I didn’t understand what they were doing,” he says. “That’s when I got to know the ‘tapik’.”

It is a Soviet-era military field telephone that has been repurposed as a torture device. The user clips wires to his victim’s body and turns the crank on the phone, generating a strong electric current.

“They started asking me questions, accusing me of working with the Ukrainian security services,” says Kirianenko (65), a dentist who also ran a medical equipment firm and an antique shop in Donetsk, which Russian-led militants seized 12 years ago.

“Then they took my trousers off, and kept going with the tapik. They attached it to my genitals and then to my ears. I passed out a few times, and they used ammonia to bring me round and then shocked me again. That’s how it started on day one, and that’s how it went on.”

The beatings and electrocution continued for weeks. Kirianenko’s captors broke his ribs and fingers, smashed his teeth and pulled out at least one with a pair of pliers. The torture brought on a heart attack, which was left untreated, and finally he agreed to confess to anything.

Two years later, in a sham trial, he was convicted of spying for a foreign state and given 12 years in jail.

“I told them I have a Ukrainian passport, so Ukraine is not a foreign a state,” says Kirianenko, who would later refuse repeated attempts to make him take a Russian passport.

In August this year, United Nations assistant secretary general for human rights Claudia Fuentes Julio said that more than 16,000 Ukrainian civilians were known to be in Russian captivity.

More than 95 pe rcent of Ukrainian prisoners of war and 85 per cent of civilian detainees interviewed by her office upon their release reported being tortured or mistreated.

Ukraine says the real figure for civilian detainees could be closer to 30,000, because many are held incommunicado in a vast network of jails that range from basements in occupied territory to Russian state prisons, and often their own relatives have no idea where they are.

“I saw how the degree of hatred towards Ukrainians grew and grew, as it was constantly broadcast by Russian media and spread through Russian society. It showed in how Ukrainian prisoners of war were treated when the full-scale invasion began,” says Kostiantyn Davydenko, who was seized by Russia’s security services in Crimea in 2018.

He was beaten and forced to confess to spying for Ukraine, and a court in Crimea gave him 10 ½ years in jail, which was reduced to seven on appeal. He served most of his term in Saratov region, some 700km east of Ukraine.

“I had a stroke, and the only medical help I received was a pack of aspirin,” says Davydenko (40). “Every Ukrainian prisoner had to be put in solitary confinement in a punishment cell at least twice a month. Not because you’d broken any rule but because you were Ukrainian.”

Kirianenko and Davydenko were released and brought to Ukrainian-held territory in separate prisoner exchanges in August 2025.

With the relief of freedom came the realisation that Ukraine is struggling to meet the needs of civilians returning from captivity.

Many arrive penniless and unwell in unfamiliar cities where provision of benefits, accommodation and medical treatment is patchy at best. People who are released from Russian detention and make their own way to Ukraine via third countries often cannot prove to a state commission that they were jailed because of their pro-Ukrainian position, and so cannot access compensation and other schemes.

“Many people come out and find themselves alone,” says Liudmyla Yankina, chairwoman of the Civis Fortis foundation that supports former detainees.

“We are acting in place of the state. We move quicker than the state, we solve questions better, and unfortunately we need to push the state to assume its responsibilities to these people.”

Ukraine says it will never recognise Russian occupation, or abandon people to a regime that uses terror to erase the Ukrainian language, culture and identity from areas it controls.

“It’s not real estate,” Zelenskiy said this week, as Trump’s property-guys-turned-peace-envoys relaunched his push for a deal. “You can’t just speak about two kilometres plus, two kilometres minus ... It’s about people’s lives, houses, homes. It’s not about Florida.”

Trump, as always, claims Putin is eager to make peace, but nothing in the Russian leader’s rhetoric suggests any softening of the position he stated in June last year, when he said he considered Russians and Ukrainians to be one people: “In that sense,” he added, “all of Ukraine is ours.”

This week, after the talks in Abu Dhabi, the head of the Russian delegation quoted from the same speech as he discussed prospects for the so-called peace talks.

“As our leader so vividly put it,” Vladimir Medinsky said, “wherever a Russian soldier has set foot – that is ours.”