April 11th 2025
In April 2025, a senior U.S. envoy proposed dividing Ukraine along the Dnipro River — not as metaphor, but as policy. General Keith Kellogg, former national security advisor and now foreign policy confidant to Donald Trump, told The Times of London that Ukraine might benefit from a post-conflict structure modeled on Cold War Berlin. In his vision, British and French forces — part of a “reassurance force” — would occupy the western portion of Ukraine, while Russian troops remained entrenched in the east. Between them would lie a demilitarized zone, perhaps 18 miles wide. The United States, Kellogg clarified, would not provide ground troops — a telling caveat.
Kellogg was quick to stress that this arrangement would not be “provocative” to Moscow. After all, Ukraine is a large country. In his words, there’s “room” for multiple armies.
From Washington or London, this might read like strategic innovation. From Kyiv, it looks disturbingly familiar — a revival of the partition mindset, a sanitized proposal for the partial surrender of sovereignty. Ukrainians do not see Cold War Berlin in this vision. They see Czechoslovakia in 1938, carved apart by allies in a failed effort to contain a dictatorship. They see Sudetenland-style logic, updated for the 21st century.
This is not diplomacy. It is capitulation, dressed in khaki and maps.
The Specter of a Divided Ukraine
To Ukrainian observers, the substance of Kellogg’s proposal is as alarming as its precedent. Partitioning Ukraine along the Dnipro would not mark a ceasefire — it would entrench conquest. It would cement Russia’s illegal hold over swaths of the Donbas and southern Ukraine, including Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. It would transform temporary military occupation into de facto political reality. All this, without a shred of international accountability for the war crimes committed to obtain it.
Worse still, such a partition would do nothing to stop future aggression. It would not defuse the conflict. It would freeze it, preserve it, and invite its re-eruption. Ukrainians have lived this pattern before: ceasefires that serve as breathing space for Russian rearmament; buffer zones that become frontlines; demilitarized strips that collapse under the weight of Moscow’s ambitions.
But beyond even this strategic danger lies a far more volatile risk — one rarely acknowledged in the clean diagrams of ceasefire proposals: the specter of regional entanglement, particularly involving Hungary and Poland, two neighbors with historic claims, ambiguous ambitions, and increasingly nationalist governments.
Reassurance, or Revanchism?
Kellogg’s proposal did not specify which European nations might join Britain and France in the hypothetical reassurance force occupying western Ukraine. But reports in European media — and quiet conversations in diplomatic circles — have raised the possibility of Hungary and Poland contributing troops or administrative roles to such a force.
To outsiders, this might seem natural: they are both NATO members, both geographically adjacent, both ostensibly aligned with Western interests. To Ukrainians, however, the inclusion of Hungary and Poland evokes a historical nightmare — one that risks not stabilizing Ukraine, but shattering it further.
In the months following the Munich Agreement in 1938, not only did Hitler’s Germany annex parts of Czechoslovakia — so did Hungary and Poland. Under the pretense of “protecting” their ethnic minorities and restoring “historic lands,” both states seized territory from a dismembered neighbor. What followed was not peace, but chaos, occupation, and the eventual obliteration of Czechoslovak statehood.
Ukrainians remember this history vividly. The memory of Carpatho-Ukraine, briefly independent before being crushed by Hungarian forces in March 1939, remains a symbol of betrayal. So does the occupation of Lviv and surrounding regions by Polish forces in the interwar period — a time when Ukraine was denied statehood altogether.
Fast forward to the present, and those same anxieties are inflamed by the domestic politics of Hungary and Poland. Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, has cultivated a policy of “strategic ambiguity” on Ukraine. It has refused to supply arms, obstructed EU sanctions, and cozied up to the Kremlin under the banner of defending Hungarian minorities in Transcarpathia. Orbán’s rhetoric often blends pan-Hungarian nationalism with barely concealed nostalgia for the pre-Trianon borders. For Kyiv, the prospect of Hungarian troops on Ukrainian soil — even as peacekeepers — is profoundly destabilizing, and could be interpreted domestically as an occupation, not protection.
Poland, meanwhile, presents a more complicated case. The Polish state has offered immense support to Ukraine during the war: military aid, humanitarian corridors, and refuge to millions of displaced people. Yet Polish domestic politics — increasingly shaped by right-wing nationalism and historical grievance — has recently taken a sharper turn. The rise of territorial revisionism in fringe political discourse, including references to “historic Polish lands” in Lviv and Galicia, has alarmed Ukrainian scholars and diplomats alike.
Were Poland to deploy troops as part of a “reassurance” force in western Ukraine, it would risk reinflaming ancient territorial wounds — especially if Kyiv were sidelined in the process. Even if Warsaw’s intentions were entirely noble, the optics of Polish soldiers patrolling Ukrainian cities like Lviv — once the crown jewel of the Austro-Hungarian and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealths — would play directly into Kremlin narratives of Ukraine being a “zone of foreign occupation.”
The last thing Ukraine needs, after fending off a Russian invasion, is the appearance of becoming a military condominium for neighboring powers with complicated pasts and politicized maps.
Sovereignty Is Not an Auction Item
This is the fundamental flaw in Kellogg’s proposal: it reduces Ukraine to a territorial problem to be managed, not a nation to be defended. It treats the country’s borders as flexible. It implies that sovereignty is conditional — that political survival can be negotiated in foreign capitals if the right minerals are on offer, and the right powers get a zone.
It is a plan born of exhaustion. It reflects the quiet whisper of resignation now circulating through parts of the West: that perhaps Ukraine is too difficult, too fractured, too expensive to preserve whole. That perhaps it would be more efficient — less risky — to hand Russia what it already holds, and cordon off the rest.
But for Ukrainians, this is not an abstraction. This is a country where towns are still being bombed, where children are still being abducted, where millions are still displaced. To suggest that this nation, of all nations, should accept partition and supervision by historical antagonists is not only tone-deaf. It is offensive.
Ukraine does not seek peace at any cost. It seeks a just peace — one based on international law, not geopolitical choreography. It will not submit to a peace that makes a mockery of its sovereignty, codifies its victimhood, and invites its dismemberment.
The West must decide, once again, what kind of international order it wishes to uphold. One in which borders mean something — or one in which the strong take what they can, and the rest are managed like estates in a decaying empire.
The True Lesson of 1938
The lesson of 1938 is not merely that appeasement failed. It is that once great powers begin dividing democracies without their consent, the entire moral foundation of diplomacy collapses. Czechoslovakia was not just betrayed by its enemies. It was abandoned by its allies. Ukraine, in 2025, refuses to play that role.
A peace that begins with partition cannot end in stability. A reassurance force that includes nations with historic claims risks reigniting the very nationalism it seeks to contain. And a deal that reduces Ukraine to a resource-rich buffer zone will not preserve the rules-based international order — it will bury it.
The Dnipro is not a fault line between East and West. It is a river in a sovereign country. And that country will not be divided. Not by tanks. Not by treaties. Not by “reassurance forces.” Ukraine has survived war. It will not accept peace on terms that erase its right to exist — whole, free, and sovereign.