Behind the contact line

How would the 20-point peace plan impact the millions of Ukrainians living under Russian occupation?

President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly called territorial control the “most difficult” of the 20 points in the new peace plan drafted by Ukraine and the United States. For the agreement to take effect, Russia would have to withdraw its troops from four of Ukraine’s regions, and the front line that snakes through the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions would be frozen in place, under a monitoring mechanism. This arrangement would leave the millions of Ukrainian citizens behind the contact line under indefinite Russian occupation. But the peace plan currently under discussion barely mentions them. For insight into how a ceasefire agreement would impact these civilians, Meduza deputy editor Eilish Hart spoke with Karolina Hird, a National Security Fellow at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) who focuses on the humanitarian consequences of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The 20-point plan

As 2025 drew to a close, Russian forces continued their offensive push in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, where they have been making creeping gains for months. Meanwhile, in the Kharkiv region, Ukrainian forces partially liberated Kupyansk — a town that President Vladimir Putin maintained was under Russian control.

At the same time, Ukrainian and U.S. officials were working out the details of a new peace proposal, refining a 28-point plan developed by the Trump administration with input from Russian officials. The updated draft, which President Volodymyr Zelensky unveiled on Christmas Eve, contains 20 points. On the most difficult issue in the negotiations, territory, it calls on Russia to withdraw its troops from the occupied areas of the Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv regions. Military positions in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions would be frozen on the date of signing, creating a de facto line of contact.

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According to Russia analyst Karolina Hird, who tracks developments in the occupied territories, many of Ukraine’s front-line settlements are sparsely populated after four years of all-out war. Russia’s slow, grinding advances often give civilians weeks, if not months, to evacuate. As a result, it’s typically the most vulnerable people who remain — those who are elderly, disabled, or believe they have nowhere else to go.

But the 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory that Russia currently occupies is far from deserted. According to Ukraine’s estimates, as many as six million of its citizens, including around 1.5 million children, live in Russian-occupied regions. “Any sort of ceasefire deal is just going to consign six million people to live under Russian occupation,” Hird warns. “This is the general issue that I’ve had with all of these iterations of the peace plan. No specifications or considerations are being made for these people.”

The current proposal’s humanitarian dimension is indeed scant. It contains just one point on establishing a committee to ensure an all-for-all prisoner exchange; the return of all detained civilians, including children and political prisoners; and support for victims of the conflict. “To my understanding, there’s no mechanism to support the people living under Russian occupation,” Hird says.

Whether the estimated 20,000 to 35,000 Ukrainian children forcibly deported to Russia are considered “detained civilians” is also unclear.

‘Compromise’

As the Trump administration’s push for a peace deal drags into its second year, Moscow appears unwilling to consider a truce seriously. Amid talks in November and December, Putin repeatedly made public comments about Russia’s readiness to continue seizing more land unless Kyiv acquiesces to its demands. And the more territory Russia captures, the greater the number of Ukrainians who would find themselves on the other side of the contact line in the event of a ceasefire.

Kremlin officials have insisted that Ukraine withdraw its forces from the part of the Donetsk region they still hold. Thus far, Kyiv has refused — and as a “compromise,” the U.S. has suggested turning the area into a “free economic zone.” Earlier, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov suggested that Russia control a “demilitarized” Donbas with the help of its National Guard (Rosgvardia) and police. “If not through negotiations, then this territory will come under the full control of the Russian Federation by military means,” Ushakov added, echoing Putin.

For his part, Zelensky is open to Washington’s “free economic zone” idea, provided the DMZ is under Ukrainian administration and police. Hird sees this as a signal to the White House rather than the Kremlin. “The Trump administration has been more willing to engage with Ukraine, and also with Russia, when it has business incentives,” she says.

As for Russia’s notion of a “demilitarized zone,” Hird points to the 2014–2015 Minsk accords. The agreements sought to end the preceding war in Donbas but only succeeded in reducing it to a low-level conflict — one that killed 14,000 people by 2022. Between January 2017 and September 2020 alone, OSCE monitors in eastern Ukraine recorded more than 1.14 million ceasefire violations.

The 20-point plan also envisions a monitoring mechanism along the contact line. On January 6, the U.K. and France signed a declaration of intent to deploy troops to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal, paving the way for a “multinational force” to put boots on the ground. “This [monitoring] force would have to take lessons from what worked and what didn’t during those eight years before the full-scale invasion, and implement those lessons,” Hird says.

That said, the prospect of Western peacekeepers in Ukraine remains anathema to the Kremlin. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reiterated this stance earlier this week, after Kyiv’s allies signed a declaration on security guarantees for Ukraine. “The Russians have made it very clear that they refuse to engage with any negotiations that mention the presence of European or Western troops in Ukraine — and that they will consider them ‘legitimate military targets,’” Hird recalls.

The question of control over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which Russia has occupied since March 2022, also remains unresolved. While the Trump administration has proposed operating the plant jointly with Ukraine and Russia, Kyiv has suggested a 50/50 management split with the United States. But the Kremlin is loath to relinquish control of Europe’s largest nuclear power station.

“The Russians are getting really close to disconnecting the ZNPP from the Ukrainian power grid and connecting it to the Russian one, which is going to make reintegration efforts not impossible, but very difficult,” Hird warns. “It really shows that they have no interest in actually engaging in good faith with this [peace] plan, because they want full control over the ZNPP, no matter the nuclear security consequences,” she adds.

190,000 war crimes and counting

If both Ukraine and Russia were to agree to the current peace plan, a full ceasefire would take immediate effect. The document also says that “Russia and Ukraine will pledge not to alter territorial agreements by force.” The monitoring mechanism along the contact line would presumably deter potential ceasefire violations, as would the “Article 5-like” security guarantees promised to Ukraine.

At the same time, Zelensky can’t just sign on the dotted line. In accordance with Ukraine’s constitution, any decision to cede territory must be approved by a nationwide referendum. Zelensky says such a vote could potentially take place if there were a real ceasefire for at least 60 days. As with discussions about Ukraine holding elections (another stipulation of the peace plan), the prospect of organizing a referendum raises a myriad of issues — including how hundreds of thousands of active-duty soldiers and millions of Ukrainian refugees would vote. And of course, there are the millions of Ukrainian citizens deprived of their voting rights in the occupied territories.

If Russia refuses to strike a deal, the 20-point plan may prove increasingly moot — but the humanitarian issues it fails to address are not. “The ultimate burden of helping, supporting, and saving people living under occupation is falling on grassroots organizations, ones that are already doing rescue missions and extradition efforts,” Hird explains. “So because the peace plan doesn’t cover that from a strategic state level, the burden will continue to fall on community-level actors.”

“All of the iterations of the peace plan that we’ve seen treat Ukraine, and specifically occupied Ukraine, as uninhabited; like chunks of land where no one lives,” Hird says. “If this peace plan were to move ahead, there have to be humanitarian considerations for people who want to evacuate.”

Ukrainian human rights activists also emphasize the need to introduce protection and reintegration mechanisms for residents of the occupied territories. However, as Hird points out, legal processes, such as prosecuting war crimes, take years to implement. Ukrainian authorities have documented more than 190,000 war crimes committed by Russia since the start of the full-scale invasion. Putin himself is under an International Criminal Court indictment for the war crime of forcibly deporting Ukrainian children into Russia. Meanwhile, Trump has recently dismissed international law outright.

In this context, a peace plan that addresses humanitarian concerns comprehensively would be a positive step towards justice for Ukrainians, especially for those who would inevitably end up under Russia’s de facto control as a result of a ceasefire arrangement. “The only solution is that Russia gets beaten back from all of Ukraine,” Hird says. “But that’s obviously not a conversation that we’re currently having.”

Written by Eilish Hart