Ukraine faces a difficult choice: end the war and risk conceding territory or fight on and absorb more material, manpower, and territorial losses.

Ukrainian president Zelensky brought a map of Ukraine to his meeting with President Trump last week. But he need not have bothered. When he entered the Oval Office, he found that Trump had already mounted a much larger map on an easel next to the Resolute Desk. The US Department of Defense map clearly shows Ukraine’s border with Russia, the 750-mile front line on the battlefield along which Ukrainian and Russian troops are currently fighting, and the areas of each Ukrainian province that Russia now controls. Altogether, Russia has now occupied most of five Ukrainian provinces, which amounts to roughly one-fifth of the country.

Map 1: Trump’s Map from the Oval Office Meeting

To assist in visualizing the options laid out in the various peace proposals, Harvard’s Russia Matters team has produced a second map that overlays the Ukrainian territory Russia currently holds on a map of New England. That 44,000 square miles of Ukraine amounts essentially to the combined area of the northern New England states of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. 

Map 2: Current Russian Territorial Control Overlaid on New England

In considering alternative Ukrainian futures, it is useful to begin by recognizing that, territorially, it is a big country. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine emerged along with 14 other newly independent states. Its borders encompassed 233,000 square miles—which is equivalent to all of New England (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut), plus New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. 

In 2014, Putin seized Crimea, along with parts of two other provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk—some 17,000 square miles of territory. In February 2022, Putin’s armies launched a full-scale invasion aimed at capturing the remainder of the country. Over the past three and a half years, its troops have succeeded in taking control of most of two adjacent provinces (Luhansk and Donetsk) and about two-thirds of two other provinces (Zaporizhzhia and Kherson), which provide a land bridge from Russia to Crimea and Russia’s major naval base at Sevastopol.

As someone who began his professional life in real estate in Queens and Manhattan, President Trump came to the meeting with Zelensky and European leaders prepared to talk about “land swaps” as part of a potential “peace deal.” His map prominently shows in red the percentage of each province currently controlled by Russian troops. Map 3 illustrates what it would mean for Zelensky to accept Putin’s demand that he give up the remaining one-fourth of Donetsk that Russian troops have not yet been able to seize. On a map of the United States, this would be equivalent to the state of Delaware. 

Map 3: Remainder of Donetsk Equivalent

While Putin continues to demand that Ukraine formally recognize Russia’s annexation of the territory it has occupied, Zelensky and his colleagues have insisted that even if forced to accept the fact that Russian troops control this territory for now, they will never give up their claim to recover every square inch of its internationally recognized lands. They remind the international community that at the end of World War II, Germany was divided, with East Germany remaining under Soviet occupation, and when the Korean War ended in an armistice in 1953, the Kim regime remained in control of North Korea. 

However, neither West Germany nor South Korea gave up their aspirations and claims to recover occupied lands. On the other hand, Russians remind us that at the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had acquired approximately 10 percent of Finland’s pre-war territory following the Russo-Finnish War. For a decade after the war, the Finns discussed reunification. However, it eventually relinquished these claims and focused instead on becoming the modern miracle it is today.

Whether the bloody war in Ukraine will come to an end in the foreseeable future remains to be seen. But if it does, two brute facts are almost certain. First, Russia will continue to occupy about 20 percent of the land that previously belonged to Ukraine; second, Ukraine will not relinquish its claim to recover its land. The issue this map exercise brings into sharper focus is: how much should Ukrainians care about the differences between the feasible options they face today? If we start with the fact that recovering the equivalent of northern New England now is not a realistic option, the operational question is how much they should care about the further loss of Delaware? 

If Russia were prepared to, in return, withdraw from the 400 square miles of territory it now holds in Sumy and Kharkiv—an area slightly larger than Cape Cod—that would by no means be an even trade. But if Ukraine’s alternative is to continue a war in which, at the end of every month, Russian forces have taken another hundred to two hundred square miles of Ukraine—as they have every month this year—then which of these unpalatable options offers the better road ahead?

Celebrating his nation’s Independence Day last Sunday, President Zelensky reiterated his nation’s objective. It is to build “a Ukraine strong and powerful enough to live in security and peace.” The question his government now faces is whether to accept an option that will end the war sooner, with all the liabilities that entails, or to continue fighting and risk losing more warriors, citizens, and territory. Having demonstrated such an extraordinary will to fight and defeat Putin’s attempt to erase their country from the map, the choice is deservedly Ukraine’s to make. 

At this point, Zelensky is focused like a laser beam on the much more critical issue of security guarantees from Europe and the United States to ensure that any “deal” to end the current hot war will not simply be an intermission in which Russia prepares for the next attack. However much I wish effective security arrangements were politically feasible in Europe and the United States, I remain skeptical. Nonetheless, my bet is that if a joint US-European initiative can give reasonable assurances of a sustainable armistice, the Ukrainian government will find a way to trade temporary control of land for peace.