KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — As Ukraine's leader headed to the White House, civilians in the country’s east were streaming out of front-line towns under mounting threat from Russian forces.
At the main station in the stronghold city of Kramatorsk, sisters Valentina and Nadia, both in their 70s, wait for a train to escape Russian troops approaching their home in a surrounding area. Neither trusts President Donald Trump or Russia's Vladimir Putin to shape Ukraine’s future.
“We do not believe Trump,” Valentina told NBC News last week. “He says one thing and does another.”
Now the home they have had to flee may be at the heart of Trump's push to end the conflict.
For more than a decade, the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine — of which Kramatorsk is one of the largest cities still holding out — has been the focal point of intense battles and diplomatic disputes.
For Kyiv, the Donbas is a vital industrial hub and defensive buffer, a resource-rich region that Ukraine fiercely claims as its sovereign territory with deep cultural roots.
For the Kremlin, it is both a tactical target and a political lever, with Putin framing the region as historically linked to Russia while placing it at the heart of the territorial ambitions he has pursued with military force.
Its fate may now be decided in the Oval Office rather than on the battlefield.
What is the Donbas?
Made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the Donbas is an industrial powerhouse spanning roughly 20,000 square miles, making it roughly the size of West Virginia. It is rich in coal and metal deposits, and shaped by industrial towns and strategically important ports on the Sea of Azov.
After Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Moscow-backed separatists fought Ukrainian forces in the Donbas, a conflict that lasted eight years and killed an estimated 14,000 people, according to the United Nations.
In 2022, Putin recognized two breakaway territories — the self-declared “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic” — before launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Three years later, Russia controls roughly 88% of the Donbas region, including all of Luhansk and 75% of Donetsk, according to open source maps of the battlefield. Russia claims sovereignty over both, in addition to the southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, as well as Crimea.
Russia’s conditions to end the war include Ukraine ceding the territories Putin claims — roughly 20% of the country — and agreeing to permanent neutrality, including a ban on joining NATO.
Kyiv has vowed never to recognize the annexations, and its European allies have insisted Russia cannot veto Ukraine’s path to NATO.
Why is Ukraine determined to keep the Donbas?
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has vowed that Ukraine will not hand over the Donbas in exchange for peace. The region serves as a defensive buffer and a center of industry, and giving it up would weaken the country military and economically.
While Ukraine is deeply fatigued by the war, about 75% of Ukrainians also object to formally ceding any land to Russia, according to polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
A few hours north in Kharkiv, there is little appetite for suddenly ceding this territory in any deal.
"We could not accept any possibility of giving up our territories," said writer and activist Ivanna Skyba. "It’s not about territories. It’s about our people, our values, our way of life," she said.
"If we give up land, this war will continue. It will not stop," she said, citing past occasions when Ukraine felt it had made painful concessions only to face new Russian aggression.
That cycle is at the center of concerns here. Even if Zelenskyy is able to win security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe, many are certain Putin will not stop at the Donbas.
Kateryna Avramenko, a 22-year-old nongovernment organization worker living in Kyiv, thinks territorial concessions would only legitimize Russia's invasion and give it a "green light" for future attacks even beyond Ukraine.
"Trump’s support for the occupation of the Donbas would open the door for Russia to invade other countries," she said.
Zelenskyy reiterated Sunday that ceding territories is impossible under the Ukrainian constitution, which says the nation’s sovereignty “extends throughout its entire territory,” which “within its present border is indivisible and inviolable.”
Why does Putin have his sights on the Donbas?
Donbas is predominantly Russian speaking and Putin has long made the unfounded accusation that Ukraine has carried out genocide in the region against Russian speakers.
After Russia failed to capture Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, in the early months of the war in 2022, it switched attention to “achieving the main goal — the liberation of Donbas.”
Putin frames the region as historically tied to Russia and the legacy of the Soviet Union, presenting his war as part of a broader effort to expand the Kremlin’s influence over lands he considers inherently Russian.
Its industrial capacity, fortified positions and access to the Sea of Azov also offer both economic leverage and strategic territory that Zelenskyy has warned Russia could use as a springboard for future offensives.
But Putin’s apparent insistence that Ukraine give up the Donbas may have an added dimension, in the view of some analysts.
“It is possible that it was some kind of an offer from Moscow that was designed to be rejected,” given that “politically, it would be untenable for the leadership in Kyiv,” said Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russia’s nuclear forces.
“For the Kremlin, it’s not really about territory. This is not really what Moscow wants from this settlement,” said Podvig, a senior researcher at the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research.
The Kremlin may want to capture as much of Ukraine as it can, but Podvig said that it would be loathe to accept a peace deal unless it could also prevent Ukraine’s further integration into the West as an armed and independent state.
Where are the front lines now?
While Putin has been trying and failing to capture all of the Donbas for more than a decade, his troops did appear to make a sudden push this month that might imperil cities like Kramatorsk and the nearby hot spot Pokrovsk.
But Ukrainian troops managed in recent days to stabilize the battlefield in that area, according to local officials and Western observers of the conflict.
Russia has, however, been slowly grinding forward in eastern Ukraine, and in July it announced the capture of Chasiv Yar, a town in Donetsk, after 16 months of fighting.
Russia’s defense ministry said it had “liberated” the town, while Zelenskyy dismissed the claim as “disinformation.
Yet capturing all of the region "will very likely take Russian forces multiple years to complete after several difficult campaigns," the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War assessed Sunday.
Ukraine's military is undoubtedly on the back foot, short of manpower and equipment.
But "giving away regions that aren’t even occupied is absolutely unacceptable,” said Olena Halushka, a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist, echoing the views of many in the country.
Pointing to the heavy fortifications in the Donbas compared to areas that have not been on the front lines, Halushka worried that "giving Russia the region they failed to conquer since 2014 will pave the way to much faster occupation of other regions." No one in Ukraine trusts any written guarantees from Russia.
"Such actions would bring the land grabbing and ongoing destruction of the world order to the whole new level," she said.
Richard Engel and Marc Smith reported from Kramatorsk, Ostap Hunkevych from Kyiv and Freddie Clayton from London.
