On Tuesday, President Donald Trump declared that, upon being presented further information, he believed Ukraine was in a position to restore its 1991 borders.
The announcement marked the most blatant reversal by a United States president since the war began. Most analysts had written off the possibility that Ukraine could restore its 1991 borders after Kyiv’s failed counteroffensive in the summer of 2023. Even Kyiv ceased presenting this as its ultimate goal in 2024.
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Trump’s Truth Social post appeared to imply the possibility of two territorial outcomes — Ukraine’s 2022 borders, “the original Borders from where this War started,” and Ukraine’s 1991 borders, Ukraine’s “original form.”
Five different borders
As it stands, modern Ukraine has effectively had five incarnations border-wise since it achieved independence in 1991:
- 1991 borders, including Donbas and Crimea.
- 2014 borders, 1991 borders minus Crimea.
- Pre-2022 borders, 1991 borders minus Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk rump states.
- September 2022 de facto borders: 1991 borders minus Crimea and most of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
- September 2022 de jure borders: 1991 borders minus Crimea and all of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
How did Ukraine get its original borders?
Ukraine is made up of two historical regions — Ruthenia, the western part ruled by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after the Mongol conquests of the 13th century and later subsumed by the Austrian Habsburgs, and Little Russia, the eastern part ruled by Russia after its capture from the Mongols. The cultural clashes between these two regions, the western part desiring closer relations with the West, and the eastern part desiring closer relations with Russia, would form the basis of the conflict today.
The word “Ukraine” as a label to describe the modern country first entered widespread usage around the beginning of the 20th century. The first Ukrainian state, the Ukrainian People’s Republic, was formed amid the chaos of the Russian Revolution in 1917, first proclaiming autonomy after the February Revolution, then independence after the October Revolution. The UPR’s borders at this time are largely recognizable when superimposed on modern Ukraine, but were heavily contested at the time by the Russians, Poles, and Romanians. The short-lived Hetmanate of the pro-German Pavlo Skoropadsky claimed lands in southern Russia’s Don region.
The six-way Ukrainian Civil War of 1917-1921 ended in a Bolshevik victory. Following the conclusion of the overall Russian Civil War, the modern borders of Ukraine were split between the Ukrainian SSR and the Second Polish Republic. The Ukrainian SSR was the second-largest Soviet Republic after Russia, partly due to Moscow’s strategy of using minority populations in foreign countries as a bridge for expansion. The Soviets eyed eventual expansion into eastern Poland, using the Ukrainian minority as a cudgel. Ukrainian culture was promoted among everyone within the Ukrainian SSR’s borders, including traditional Russian areas in the east and north.
The Ukrainian SSR’s borders underwent frequent alterations during the interwar years, but they saw their greatest addition as part of the Nazi-Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which gave eastern Poland to the Ukrainian SSR.
The Nazi invasion of the USSR triggered bloody ethnic violence between Ukrainians and Poles, the former coalescing around the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were killed or ethnically cleansed by the OUN’s armed wing, depopulating the area of Poles to the extent that the remainder were deported to modern Poland after the war. The area formerly part of eastern Poland was adopted into the Ukrainian SSR, while Poland was compensated with parts of eastern Germany.
The final major alteration to Ukraine’s borders came in 1954. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev transferred the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine as a gesture of goodwill. The transfer had little real effect then, as the Ukrainian SSR and Russian SSR were both part of the USSR. This would later become the most controversial part of Ukraine’s borders, as Crimea was populated mostly by ethnic Russians and was unique in that it had not historically been considered part of Ukraine.
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the countries that seceded took on the borders of their Soviet Socialist Republic predecessors. Some Russians viewed Ukraine’s keeping of Crimea as an outrage, but most were unconcerned. Many Russian politicians, including President Boris Yeltsin, assumed that Russia and Ukraine were so closely tied culturally and historically that their borders could soon become irrelevant. Yeltsin and other major Russian figures, including writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, believed that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus would unite into a Slavic confederation, making Crimea’s status less contentious.
Moscow was also too weak to try to take Crimea for itself, with Yeltsin more concerned with avoiding a war with Ukraine and assuming the Soviet Union’s seat in the United Nations.
Borders 2014-2022
Ukraine’s borders would remain unaltered until 2014. Though more independent than Yeltsin and other Russians’ initial hopes, Kyiv and Moscow remained on good terms. This changed in 2014 when the pro-Western Euromaidan resulted in the ousting of the Russia-friendly government with one largely hostile to Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin responded with an asymmetric operation to seize Crimea, springboarded from the Russian naval base in Sevastopol. The fractured Ukrainian state was too weak to respond, and a controversial referendum was soon held that legitimized Moscow’s annexation.
Though legitimate in Moscow’s eyes, most of the world still doesn’t recognize Crimea as part of Russia. Ukraine has enacted laws to punish those who travel to what it considers an occupied territory, and Russia incurred its first major round of sanctions over the annexation.
Separate from the annexation, activists within the majority ethnic Russian Donbas oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk, supported by some factions within Russia, launched an uprising to separate from Ukraine and join Russia. Smaller protests in cities such as Odesa were crushed, causing the situation in Donbas to escalate into a civil war. Kyiv mobilized government and paramilitary forces to put down the uprising, getting the upper hand until Moscow intervened outright.
Most fighting ceased after the signing of Minsk II in 2015. As part of the deal, the self-declared Peoples’ Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk were to be granted autonomy but reintegrated into Ukraine. The majority of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts remained in the hands of the Ukrainian government.
In practice, however, Russian and Ukrainian interests prevented the rump states from being absorbed back into Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists feared the oblasts being used as a Trojan horse to sneak Russian influence into Ukraine, while Russian nationalists feared a state crackdown on former separatists. Minsk II was never fully implemented.
Ukraine’s borders post February 2022
On Feb. 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Within days, its forces had blitzed through vast swathes of southeastern Ukraine. After the government in Kyiv failed to fall, Russia’s goals changed to conquest.
Following Russia’s defeat in Kharkiv in September 2022, Putin announced referendums in the oblasts where Russia controlled a majority of territory. Under the purview of Russian soldiers, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts all voted to join the Russian Federation. The referendum officially encompassed the entirety of each oblast; however, it even included parts not under full Russian control. The only oblast under effective full Russian control was Luhansk.
Though not recognized by most of the world, the last batch of annexations marks the most recent de facto incarnation of Ukraine’s borders.
After Russian forces withdrew from northern Ukraine in April 2022, Kyiv repeatedly boasted that it would retake the entirety of Ukraine, pushing Russian forces back to its 1991 borders. These calls were echoed by many of its Western allies.
TRUMP MAKES MAJOR UKRAINE REVERSAL, SAYS IT CAN WIN ALL OF ITS TERRITORY BACK FROM RUSSIA
After the crushing defeat of its summer 2023 counteroffensive, hopes have largely receded to freezing the front line as a peace settlement. Trump’s surprise announcement that Ukraine could win back its 1991 borders, which would necessitate an amphibious assault on the fortified Crimea after breaking through Russia’s main defensive line, came nearly two years after the last time it was widely considered a serious possibility.
Ukraine has been on the back foot for nearly two years, incurring significant battlefield losses and steadily losing territory. Russia has emerged dominant in the drone war, wrecking Ukrainian infrastructure, as increasing manpower issues threaten a Russian breakthrough along the front.