Where Concessions Meet Resolve: How Ukrainian Society Sees U.S. Efforts to End Russia’s War

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With President Donald Trump and his administration’s push to end the Russia-Ukraine war through negotiations, one fundamental question is whether and what kind of territorial concessions Ukrainian society may accept in exchange for Russia’s stopping its brutal, unrelenting invasion. Our opinion surveys conducted in August 2025 indicate that U.S. summits with Russia, and those of Ukraine and the European Union held that month, significantly increased support among Ukrainians for a negotiated settlement and for partial territorial concessions, especially when packaged with NATO-style security guarantees. A validation of Trump’s peace efforts at that time, and in anticipation of Washington putting more pressure on Moscow to agree to Trump’s unconditional ceasefire proposal, these findings suggest that persisting with high-level diplomacy, combined with working out such security guarantees for Ukraine, is a viable strategy to keep Ukrainian society on board with the peace process and a negotiated settlement, which in the end hinges on whether Washington and its allies can get Russia to agree to compatible terms.

We also find that Russia’s tactic of bombing Ukraine into surrender and U.S. threats to halt its support to Kyiv have not diminished Ukrainians’ commitment to defending their freedom and sovereignty over the past nine months. Moscow’s uncompromising demand for Ukraine to cede territory—including lands currently under Ukrainian control—without a ceasefire in place or credible security guarantees for Kyiv is a poisoned chalice for Trump and his peace efforts. Accepting this demand would not only strip Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of public support, but also very likely derail diplomacy, prolong the war, and make the United States look weak.

Trump Summits Move the Needle Toward Negotiated Solution and Compromise

Our data comes from the latest round, Wave 7, of the War and Democracy Longitudinal Study (WDLS), carried out in Ukraine in July–August 2025. The project tracks respondents recruited in November 2021, June 2023, and June 2024 based on probability sampling of the adult population in territories under Ukrainian government control. In Wave 7, the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology interviewed 536 respondents from July 17 to August 14, 2025, and followed up with a three-question express poll reaching 485 of the same respondents on August 21–25, 2025—bookending the U.S. summit with Russia on August 15 and that with Ukraine and Europe on August 18.

We statistically assessed the significance of differences between responses of the same individuals in the two polls, which gives us a measure of the effects of the summits on Ukrainian public opinion. On the first two questions that we repeated verbatim before and after the summits, the key findings were as follows:

• Support for Ukraine “directing its principal effort toward stopping the war by means of negotiations” increased by 9.2 percent (from an average of 3.45 to 3.77 points on a 5-point scale among the 437 respondents reached both before and after the summits and who agreed to answer the question). This substantive change is also statistically significant, with less than 0.1 percent probability that it was due to chance. It means that on balance, after the two summits, Ukrainians saw Trump’s efforts as positive and promising. With 63 percent of respondents supporting a negotiated settlement after the summits, Trump showed the potential to get most Ukrainians aligned with his efforts.
• The popular attitude toward the U.S. showed no significant change, averaging about 5.4 points on a 1-to-10 sentiment thermometer before and after the summit among the 439 respondents who agreed to answer the question.

We also repeated the question on Ukrainians’ preferences on territorial settlements in the case that all hostilities come to an end (essentially, Russia agrees to stop its military aggression). Our research indicates that they fall into three categories—(I) regaining all internationally recognized territories within Ukraine’s 1991 borders; (II) making partial concessions (regaining all territories except Crimea or the Donbas or most territories occupied by Russia since the full-scale invasion in 2022); and (III) retaining only the currently held territories (essentially agreeing to freeze the current front lines). The phrasing of the question does not imply endorsement of de jure recognition of Russian control over any Ukrainian territories; it rather leaves open the possibility that Ukraine may regain control over any occupied territories through negotiations in the future, even after agreed-to concessions. 

Russia’s demand, following the first (Alaska) summit, that Ukraine cede all of the territories currently occupied by the Russian army, as well as the unoccupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, was not listed as an option in our surveys—this was out of concern, based on knowledge of the Ukrainian public’s temperament, that proposing it would result in refusals to answer the question and even to continue the survey, thus jeopardizing our entire multiyear longitudinal study. Most likely, if anyone in Ukraine supported this option, they would be among the respondents who in our polls opted for retaining control over currently held territories or who refused to answer the question.[1]

To assess the impact of hypothetical security guarantees for Ukraine on territorial preferences in the event of a ceasefire or a peace deal—relevant to proposals discussed before and during the summits—we added an experiment in our post-summit survey. We split the sample randomly into three groups: The control group (N=159) had the same question on territorial settlements as we asked before the summit; the first experimental group (N=149) received a treatment in the form of a conditional statement (a prime) preceding the question, “If Ukraine is given NATO membership…”; and the second experimental group (N=151) was primed instead on NATO-style security guarantees with the preamble, “If Ukraine gets the same security guarantees as NATO members have…” We then ran a series of paired-sample T-tests to assess differences in responses from before and after the summits and across the experimental conditions.

Our key statistically significant finding is that the summits have moved the needle on the willingness of Ukrainians to consider territorial concessions—a difficult and emotionally charged issue in a state continuing to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity at massive human cost through years of Russia’s full-scale armed aggression. Difference-of-means tests showed that support for partial territorial concessions in the control group rose by 6.7 percent after the summits, reaching over 27.0 percent of the total. The increase was larger—8.2 percent—among respondents who after the summits were primed on the possibility of Ukraine getting NATO-style security guarantees.

Sources of Leverage and Limitations to Security Inducements

Validating Trump’s efforts, these shifts indicate that Ukrainians are amenable to compromise, giving Zelensky additional leeway in negotiations. At the same time, our data is clear that for Trump’s push for peace to succeed, Moscow must desist from its maximalist demands on Kyiv, specifically on territory, since Ukrainian society’s capacity for compromise has significant limitations, which are grounded in resilience hardened in years of spirited resistance to Russia’s invasions since 2014.

To agree on territorial issues in a way that would end the war, Ukrainians must see any settlement as entailing compromise by both sides, with substantial give-and-take, starting with a ceasefire agreed to by Moscow.

Based on our survey experiment, security guarantees—front and center at the U.S.-Ukraine/Europe summit and subsequent high-level meetings—are unlikely on their own to induce Ukrainians to accept territorial losses.

• While the prime on NATO-style guarantees somewhat moved the needle in the direction of willingness to accept concessions (when compared to preferences before the summits), this effect was not substantially larger (1.5 percentage points) than the summit effect without the prompt. This indicates that without major diplomatic moves at the highest level—particularly Trump getting tougher on Moscow—the option of NATO-style guarantees will not make much difference in terms of Ukrainian public opinion.
• In the poll after the summits, neither on NATO membership nor on NATO-style guarantees did priming translate into consistently stronger or weaker support for regaining or conceding some territory (compared to the control group and between the two primes).
• Contrary to expectations that stronger security guarantees might induce Ukrainians to make more territorial concessions, the NATO-membership prompt generated a drop of about 11 percent in the number of respondents willing to freeze the front lines. This was the only significant difference in the post-summit poll regarding the effect of security guarantees.

We see two issues underlying those findings. One is the ambiguity about specific security guarantees and their implementation. Putin’s purported acceptance, “in principle,” of some form of security guarantees for Ukraine reveals the complexity of the issue and raises questions about the role of different states and about their coordination, potentially sowing seeds of discord and threatening to entangle the peace process in debates.

The other issue is Ukrainians’ strong attachment to their state’s territory. Despite Russia’s steady net territorial gains over the last two years, and even though over 80 percent of Ukrainians report personal losses in the war and over 90 percent report war-related distress, the absolute majority of respondents in our surveys remain committed to eventually regaining all territory under the internationally recognized 1991 borders: 54 percent in November 2024 (N=765), 52 percent in July–August 2025 (before the summits) and 49 percent in August 2025 (after the summits), with the difference within the sample and estimate error margins.

Importantly, this attachment to territory appears intrinsically linked to Ukrainians’ yearning for political freedom. Compared with the July–August respondents who were unsure whether democracy was important, those who believe democracy was mostly or very important for Ukraine’s future (86.5 percent of the sample) were about 15 percent more likely to prefer Ukraine regaining all of its internationally recognized territory. It is hard to imagine this motivation to defend Ukraine’s territory declining as long as Russia is an autocracy.

Limitations on Pressure to Surrender

Our research also indicates that threatening to withdraw military and economic support to Ukraine is unlikely to force Ukrainians to accept Russia’s peace terms, which essentially amount to Kyiv surrendering its sovereign right to defend itself now and in the future. Respondents polled before the summits who believe Ukraine did not get enough international military or economic aid were no more or less likely, before or after the summits, to support regaining territory, partial concessions, or a frontline freeze. It means that threats to pull support will not diminish Ukrainians’ commitment to political freedom, since those perceptions and preferences are not significantly interrelated.

Despite Russia’s persisting daily attacks on Ukraine—involving hundreds of long-range drone and missile strikes across Ukraine every day, as well as around 100–200 infantry assaults, 4,000–5,000 artillery bombardments of Ukrainian positions, around 5,000 frontline kamikaze drone attacks, and 100 or so air strikes (most with the use of massive glide bombs carrying 0.5–3.0 tons of explosives each)—our data further indicates that this military pressure is unlikely to force Ukraine into surrender any time soon, quite possibly not even during Trump’s current presidential term.

• Acceptance of the survey option representing the largest territorial concessions for Ukraine (i.e., retaining only currently held territories) varied most widely in our July–August 2025 poll (N=539) by belief in Ukraine’s victory in the war—by about as much as 50 percentage points (see Figure 1). This means that among about 82 percent of the respondents who fully or mostly believe in Ukraine’s war victory, support for a frontline freeze was on average around 13 percent, or about 7 percent below average.
• Despite Russia’s grinding territorial advances over the past nine months, faith in Ukraine’s victory in July–August 2025 stayed exactly the same (82 percent) as it was in our November 2024 poll (Wave 6; N=765).

Figure 1. Acceptance of territorial arrangements is contingent on belief in victory

Source: LSWD, Wave 7, UNASIS, July–August 2025

The bases of resilience in the face of the war and violence have remained strong.

• We find no significant relationship between territorial preferences and cumulative war losses—based on the additive index of survey items identifying respondents who reported losing businesses, jobs, or property, sustaining injuries, losing family or friends or having them wounded, or becoming displaced due to war.
• Nor do we find that cumulation of symptoms consistent with wartime trauma—regular feelings of tension or anxiety; fear of being alone (monophobia); and nightmares around the war—is significantly related to preferences for territorial concessions. In fact, we find the opposite: Medium cumulative stress levels are associated with stronger support for regaining all Ukrainian lands than the lowest stress levels.

None of this is to discount the incredible strain and devastating impact on Ukrainian society of the destruction and death in Ukraine due to Russia’s continued attacks. In our analysis, willingness to accept larger territorial concessions in the form of a frontline freeze is significantly related to one’s perception of the course of the war—rising from the average of about 20 percent to about 35 percent among those who expected Russia to keep inexorably gaining territory (that group comprises about 29 percent of all respondents).

Nonetheless, this preference was voiced no more than average by about a quarter of survey respondents who believe the war would be mostly a stalemate, and less than average by all others. Another important finding is that respondents who saw the most likely war scenario as a stalemate on average mostly believe in Ukraine’s victory in the war.

These results indicate that the effect of one’s expected war scenarios on acceptance of territorial concessions is hardly straightforward. On the one hand, Russia has been making net gains on the battlefield since Ukraine’s successful, rapid incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region in autumn 2024. On the other hand, the gains have been slow and costly for Russia, in terms of both manpower and equipment, which to some respondents may seem generally consistent with a stalemate as the likely future war scenario. Other respondents might have also factored in Ukraine’s growing capacity to hit targets deep inside Russia with Ukrainian-made weapons.

The most likely conclusion from this analysis is that barring rapid and sustained Russian advances that would directly threaten the loss of big cities such as Kharkiv, Poltava, or Dnipro, Ukrainians’ resilience and opposition to wholesale territorial concessions akin to those demanded by the Kremlin will persist. Yet even in such a worst-case scenario, a wholesale sentiment shift in favor of territorial concessions is hardly a given, since a rising sense of existential threat might trigger pushback and mass mobilization similar to that which we saw when Russian forces closed in on Kyiv at the start of the war.

The Wave 7 surveys were made possible with support from the National Science Foundation RAPID program (SES 2309901) and from the Petrach Program on Ukraine at the George Washington University. The research benefited from valuable suggestions of Petrach Program Director Henry Hale.

[1] The percentage of refusals to answer this question was around 7.0 percent in Wave 7 before the summits and 1.5 percent after the summits, with a wide dispersal of the error term in difference-of-means tests for this subgroup, which indicates that those respondents did not significantly differ from those picking other options and that, therefore, they are unlikely to hold any singular territorial preference.

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