Amid Donald Trump’s repeated promises that a ceasefire deal in Ukraine is imminent, Moscow has again dismissed the idea that it would agree to end its invasion in exchange for freezing the conflict along its current front lines. “There have been ideas like ‘let’s keep the line of contact as it is — this part is Russian, and that part is Ukrainian.’ […] That won’t happen. We have a Constitution based on the will of the people,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on February 26.

Lavrov’s remark refers to the Kremlin’s formal annexation of four eastern regions of Ukraine in September 2022. Today, under the Russian Constitution, the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions are all “part of Russia,” technically preventing Moscow from accepting any deal in which Kyiv doesn’t surrender these territories. 

From a legal standpoint, Russian law incorporated all four regions in their entirety, as defined by their Ukrainian oblast’ administrative boundaries. However, Russian troops have never fully controlled these regions — not even when they were annexed. In fact, Russian forces withdrew from the city of Kherson a few weeks after the annexation, and they never controlled the city of Zaporizhzhia.

According to Meduza’s latest estimates, Russian forces currently control roughly 62.6 percent of the Donetsk region, 98.6 percent of the Luhansk region, 69.3 percent of the Kherson region, and 71.9 percent of the Zaporizhzhia region.

Meanwhile, Kyiv has indicated that it might consider freezing the war along the current front line, but the Zelensky administration has repeatedly emphasized that the Ukrainian Constitution forbids it from ceding any part of the country. In other words, if Moscow changed its position and agreed to a ceasefire, Kyiv would not legally recognize Russian claims on the territories it now occupies, including the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed more than a decade ago. Volodymyr Zelensky has called this issue a “red line” for his government.