Zatulin: Occupied regions won’t return to Kyiv

Zatulin maps out: new republics and annexations in Ukraine

A single statement by Russian MP Konstantin Zatulin has cooled any hopes of reversal. Cities and territory occupied by Russia since February 24 will not return to Ukrainian control, according to interpretations of his comments: they will either form new entities like the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics, integrate into them, or be directly annexed to Russia. Zatulin, a United Russia member of the Duma, does not speak of concessions. He speaks of facts on the ground.

The message has a second part often overlooked. According to his account, some districts in the Zaporizhzhia region are voting to join Donetsk, and the Kherson region wants to form a new Taurida alongside Crimea, "like in Tsarist Russia." There is no mass annexation, but a piecemeal division. The map that emerges is not new: it is an old one dusted off.

Which territories would enter this division

The most detailed scenario circulating does not speak of eight popular republics, but of a more surgical adjustment. Donetsk and Luhansk would go to Russia; Crimea would become the Republic of Taurida adding the part of Kherson south of the Dnipro and what has already been taken from Zaporizhzhia, recovering the province of 1917. Kharkiv would proclaim itself a republic again, as in 2014, and Odesa would trinc a similar path, with Mykolaiv as a bonus. It is a territorial reconstruction dating back to borders prior to the Soviet Union.

If this materializes, Ukraine would be reduced to an inland territory. Some summarize it without mincing words: what is not occupied will be a landlocked state without sea and without resources, next to Poland and with a government aligned with Moscow.

The coast, gas, and grain: the interest that is not declared

The most repeated thesis points out that access to the sea was not the real problem, because Russia already has it through other points. What is hidden, in this reading, is the appropriation of Ukrainian gas pockets and, incidentally, fertile farmland. A war with economic motives disguised as political propaganda. Against this, another part of the analysis stresses that the declared goal was to protect Russian-speaking populations and secure Crimea.

The two versions are not entirely mutually exclusive. Control of the coastal strip unites the Donbas with Crimea and Transnistria, a corridor that would leave Ukraine without useful coastline and turn any ceasefire into a permanent trench line. Another coincidence: the war will be long unless there is a surprise.

The repeating precedent: Krajina and Balkans

According to data handled by those trinc the conflict, 200,000 Serbs lived in the Krajina and after the 1990s war, less than a third remains. The number is used as a warning about what can happen to entire populations when borders are redrawn. In parallel, memories of impunity for some episodes of NATO bombings, such as a missile strike on a train in Grdelica, resurface.

The comparison is not innocent. It serves to remind us that in Europe, territories have already been emptied with the signing of an agreement and there were no courts for everyone. Hence the argument that no compromise is possible with Russia.

2014, the Maidan, and the USSR's gifts

Much of the narrative supporting this offensive starts in 2014. It is asserted that Ukraine voted for Yanukovych in 2005 and 2010 because it wanted neither the EU nor NATO, and that a forced change of course from outside peine the door to the eastern conflict. In this line, it is recalled that various Soviet leaders ceded to Kyiv the Donbas, Crimea, and Odesa, territories now claimed as their own.

The other side of the coin is less epic: the isolation to which Russia condemns itself and the human cost of a conflict that no side dares to close. Each day that passes without signing, it is pointed out, means losing more territory.

The puzzling detail remains. In all the exchange, verifiable figures from the front hardly appear, and the few numerical references point to another war and another century. The 200,000 Serbs of the Krajina and their surviving third weigh more in the conversation than any casualty count. When a territorial division is decided with 1917 maps, what is lacking is precisely what is needed most: arithmetic.