Ukraine has turned to an unorthodox method in a bid to win President Donald Trump’s support in negotiations with Russia, reportedly proposing to name a strip of the Donbas still under its control “Donnyland.”
The proposed name combines Trump’s first name with Donbas, and invokes the fantastical amusement park Disneyland, four people familiar with the matter told the New York Times. Donnyland could hardly be more different than the famous park. The region is saturated with mines, fortifications, anti-drone nets, and thoroughly depopulated amid the fiercest fighting in Europe since World War II. Nevertheless, some Ukrainian negotiators hope that renaming the area to honor Trump would both appeal to his ego and give him a public relations interest in preventing its capture by Russia.
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The seriousness of the proposal, and whether it’s been a significant point of negotiation for Ukraine, are in question.
“This was an idea brought up in jest by the Ukrainians,” a source familiar with the idea told the Washington Examiner.
Trump’s foreign policy in his second term has blended the personal and political to an extent not seen before in U.S. history. Ukraine’s reported gambit to boost U.S. interest in the conflict is just the latest in a pattern of foreign states trying to win the president over through symbolic gestures.
The invoking of Trump’s name to garner U.S. support has ample precedent. Last year, the centerpiece of the peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan was a corridor linking Azerbaijan with its Nakhchivan exclave, to be backed by the U.S. under the name “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.”
Numerous international actors have appealed to Trump’s ego in other ways, such as numerous global leaders dangling the promise of a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Trump if he helps broker a peace deal, as was the case with the Pakistan-India conflict and the Rwanda-Democratic Republic of the Congo conflict.
The area that would bear the president’s name has been subject to some of the most intense fighting of the modern age, with tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian troops killed in the Donbas over the past few years. The area that would be renamed Donnyland under the plan is 50 miles long and 40 miles wide, but holds Ukraine’s best fortifications. Kyiv has chafed against suggestions that it should give it up for peace, afraid that a possible future Russian invasion could bypass its most effective defensive line.
Ukraine has shown willingness to treat the rest of Donetsk as a demilitarized zone, but Moscow insists on full Russian control. The disagreement was the reported cause of the most recent collapse of talks in February.
The Donnyland plan had some effort behind it, with a Ukrainian negotiator reportedly going so far as to design a green-and-gold flag for the entity and creating its own national anthem with ChatGPT.
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The Donnyland plan could also be a pro-Trump veneer for a more solid plan that appeared in peace drafts, which would turn the remaining Ukrainian-controlled area of Donetsk into a neutral semiautonomous ministate, modeled on the Mediterranean city-state of Monaco. The phrase “Monaco model” reportedly appeared in peace drafts.
“Having a Trump imprimatur on a free economic zone, I think, probably, they would consider to be something of a deterrent,” Samuel Charap, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told the New York Times.
