Zaporizhia, an industrial nucleus of southeast Ukraine, has become a key scenario to understand the debate that crosses the country today: accepting a high fire in the current lines of the front – or even an agreement of “Earth for Peace”, as Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump suggest, or resist without giving up a centimeter of sovereignty.
Since the invasion began in February 2022, this city of wide avenues and gray blocks of the Soviet era lives only half an hour from the front. The noise of drones and missiles is part of the daily routine: last Sunday, a Russian air bomb reached a bus station and wounded 24 people. It was simply another day of war.
In Zaporizhia two moods coexist. Some inhabitants, exhausted after more than two years of nights and constant losses, believe that a peace pact – although it is imperfect – would be the only way out. But others, perhaps most, do not accept or imagine that Moscow consolidates their dominance over occupied territories. They know firsthand what it means: arbitrary arrests, disappearances, the prohibition of the Ukrainian language and an accelerated process of rusification that, over time, would almost impossible to recover those lands.
In a volunteer warehouse, where a group of women makes camouflage networks, the question about whether they would accept freezing the front lines causes a unanimous choir: “No!” One of them, with tears in the eyes, explains it like this: “What about our homes, with our lives? If Ukraine abandons us, we can never return.”
The issue has been revived with speculation around a possible encounter between Putin and Trump in Alaska. According to several versions, the Russian leader would have stated that kyiv renounces what he still controls in Donetsk and Luhansk, in exchange for small stripes of territory in Kharkiv and Sumy and a truce. Trump presented it as if it were an equitable exchange, almost a real estate transaction. For Volodimir Zelenski, on the other hand, the idea is unacceptable: it is not just maps, but about millions of citizens.
The model that Russia has applied in occupied areas is known: it presses mayors and councilors to collaborate, and those who refuse are imprisoned or forced into exile. In Zaporizhia, in a building that was once a technical institute, the administrations of municipalities under occupation work in exile. There, Dmytro Orlov, mayor of Enerhodar – where the largest nuclear power plant in Europe is located – remembers how they first invited him to “collaborate” and then threatened him. When they arrested his second, he fled. Today more than half of his city has been empty.
The flow of dramatic stories does not stop. A newcomer man in Zaporizhia said he had spent ten days crossing Russia, Türkiye and half Europe to be able to tour a few kilometers that separated him from his home in Enerhodar. His brother is still imprisoned for collaborating with the Ukrainian army; He himself had just released. He arrived with a couple of suitcases and nothing else.
The Russian strategy is clear: replace population. According to Iván Fedorov, regional governor, Moscow has sent officials, police and teachers from Russia, along with retirees attracted by the temperate climate. The goal, he says, is to alter the identity of these territories: “They want to change the DNA of our cities.”
In this context, accepting an “land exchange” would not only draw new borders: it would be equivalent to condemning hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to lose their home and identity forever.
