Op-ed by Irwin Redlener in The Kyiv Independent
Even as the world is understandably distracted by war in the Middle East, talks to end the Ukraine-Russia war have just resumed in the United States, albeit without Russian representatives.
Since Ukraine has repeatedly signaled its resistance to even consider ceding territory, Putin’s negotiators have so far refused to join discussions.
That said, my concern is that, with or without Russian participation, U.S. President Donald Trump and his highly inexperienced negotiators will continue to press Ukraine to concede territory in exchange for some kind of security arrangement.
That is precisely the condition that Vladimir Putin keeps insisting is "non-negotiable." But territorial concessions to a brutal aggressor would be unconscionable for Ukraine and should be entirely unacceptable to Europe.
I write as an American physician and humanitarian who has worked closely with Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began.
As co-founder of the Ukraine Children's Action Project and a senior advisor to the Institute for Global Politics at Columbia University, I have spent years documenting the war's toll on Ukrainian children — thousands killed or injured, millions displaced, a generation subjected to the systematic erasure of their language, history, and identity in Russian-occupied territories.
