Ukrainian fighters in Sloviansk oppose the Trump-Putin summit swap plan, warning it would strengthen Russia’s position.
The city of Sloviansk, prewar population just over 100,00, sits smack in the middle of the territory Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will discuss “swapping” when they meet on Friday in Alaska—the first U.S.-Russia summit since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Moscow and Kyiv have been fighting over Sloviansk more or less nonstop for more than 11 years, since Russian proxies first tried to take over the Donetsk province in 2014. With one exception—three months in spring 2014—the city has remained in Ukrainian hands.
Now, as world leaders talk over Ukrainians’ heads about giving up Sloviansk without another shot fired, I sat down with two soldiers who have been defending the city for over a year. Vlad Huma, 38, and Hlib Velitchenko, 32, say a swap of the kind Putin has proposed is unthinkable. But they know the conversation won’t end there, and they are girding for the worst.
Sloviansk is one of four front-line cities that make up what the Institute for the Study of War calls Ukraine’s “fortress belt,” a north-south defensive line some 300 miles east of Kyiv. After more than a decade of fighting, the line is heavily fortified—one of the most effective bulwarks holding off the Russian advance. In the last three and a half years of all-out war, both sides have lost thousands of men—tens of thousands of Ukrainians, hundreds of thousands of Russians—with little change on the ground. In the year Huma and Velitchenko have spent in Sloviansk, the front has shifted just 3.2 miles west. “We measure it in meters, not kilometers,” Huma explained.
At that rate, it would take the Russians more than a decade to conquer the territory Putin is asking Trump to give him in exchange for a ceasefire. The so-called swap—it’s not clear what territory Russia is being asked to give up—would also put the Kremlin in a much better position to take the rest of Ukraine, starting with the Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk provinces just to the west, which would be left relatively defenseless once Moscow controlled the fortress belt.
Years of fighting have transformed the region around Sloviansk. Thousands of Ukrainian fighters live garrisoned in the half-destroyed villages scattered around the city, mostly in modest houses with well-tended gardens and old fruit trees now abandoned by the people who once lived there.
