Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe.

Leaders from Ukraine, Europe and the U.S. have all hailed what they see as significant progress during this week’s peace talks to end Russia’s nearly four year-long war on Ukraine.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been talking up the prospect of striking a peace deal, saying Russia and Ukraine are closer to an agreement than they’ve ever been. Russian officials have also mentioned being on “the verge of a deal,” despite flatly dismissing some of what’s been tentatively agreed on by Ukraine and its Western allies.

Even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has expressed wary optimism, though cautioning that “many difficult questions remain, not least about territories and whether Russia wants peace at all.”

But besides the million-dollar question about Russia’s sincerity, there’s another problem that’s been largely overlooked: What Ukrainians themselves think, and what they’re ready to accept.

Can Zelenskyy even sell a peace deal that involves Ukrainian troops withdrawing from territory they’ve contested in the Donbas Basin, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — Ukrainian land that soldiers have bled and died for?

As intense negotiations were underway in Berlin this week, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology published a poll suggesting 75 percent of Ukrainians consider any “peace plan” involving territorial concessions by Ukraine completely unacceptable.

This should give us all considerable pause — although it hasn’t with Trump and his aides, despite their persistent complaints about establishment politicians in Europe ignoring the will of their own people.

The cast-iron security guarantees Zelenskyy is demanding aren’t only important to deter a repeat Russian invasion but also to help market a deal to skeptical Ukrainians. In short, if a deal involving Ukraine’s territorial withdrawal is ever struck, the message he’ll likely seek to convey is that these concessions are worth the sacrifice to gain reliable U.S.-backed security guarantees, which could prevent a subsequent return to war.

Imperfect though it may be, Ukraine will need such a deal to stop shedding more blood — a land for lives trade-off. But that’s still going to be a very difficult sell. Though, something that might sweeten it for Ukrainians may be turning the unoccupied parts of the Donbas into a “free economic zone” rather than hand them over to Russia — an idea floated by U.S. negotiators.

So far, Zelenskyy hasn’t committed to any territorial concessions, and he’s negotiated hard for the land Russia hasn’t occupied in Donetsk and Luhansk to remain under Ukrainian control. However, he hasn’t ruled out the free economic zone idea out of hand either, saying on Tuesday that “the Americans are trying to find a compromise. They are proposing a ‘free economic zone’ [in the Donbas]. And I want to stress once again: a ‘free economic zone’ does not mean under the control of the Russian Federation.”

To that end, Zelenskyy’s been sticking to the position that any possible deal can’t go beyond freezing forces along current front lines. And according to the KIIS poll, most Ukrainians would accept that. Seventy-two percent of respondents said they’d support such a deal as along as there are also reliable Western security guarantees, and Ukraine and the rest of the world don’t officially recognize Russian-occupied territory in eastern Ukraine as part of Russia.

Anything beyond that, any surrender of land, risks rejection and pushback from Ukrainians, despite Trump’s insistence that Kyiv will have to cede territory in line with what Russia’s demanding.

But if Zelenskyy’s forced into that situation and given no alternative for fear of losing what remains of U.S. support, could he sell it to his own people?

Ukrainian lawmakers from both Zelenskyy’s ruling Servant of the People party and opposition factions who POLITICO has questioned on the matter for months are adamant he won’t be able to.

For one thing, they said, Ukraine’s parliament would be unlikely to endorse any such proposal. “I don’t see the parliament ever passing anything like that,” opposition lawmaker Oleksandra Ustinova said. “It would be seen as a capitulation.” And after all they’ve suffered at the hands of the Russians, Ukrainians are in no mood to do so.

According to the KIIS poll, 63 percent are prepared to continue to resist Russia for as long as necessary. And while that’s a decrease from the 71 percent to 73 percent recorded from May 2022 to February 2024, it’s also a significant uptick from the 57 percent to 54 percent recorded from December 2024 to March of this year.

“Despite the war fatigue, despite all the troubles we have, I’m pretty sure there aren’t many people who are ready to pay any price to stop the war,” said Yehor Cherniev, deputy chairman of the Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence and a member of Zelenskyy’s party.

Building a political consensus around a deal involving territorial concessions and withdrawal will be difficult, agreed a former high-ranking Ukrainian official, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “[Zelenskyy] will have to talk to people he hates among the political and military elites and who don’t trust him. He will have to get them on board to make sure they all agree on the same message and argue collectively that the deal is the best we can get.”

And pulling that off would be a considerable challenge for the Ukrainian leader.

During the 2019 election campaign, Zelenskyy went after his predecessor Petro Poroshenko for signing the failed Minsk agreements, which were highly unpopular and which Russia failed to implement, the official recalled. And if Zelenskyy sought to argue territorial concessions were necessary, those who oppose the surrender of land would remind him of that at every turn.

The official also questioned whether Zelenskyy has the skill or temperament to build a large enough political consensus, especially in the absence of Andriy Yermak — his powerful former chief of staff who’s been embroiled in a widening corruption scandal and was forced to resign last month. For all his faults, Yermak was a political mechanic.

The Ukrainian president has been high-handed with his political opponents, shutting the parliament out and ruling in a way critics argue has been semi-authoritarian. Through the war years, he’s brushed off repeated calls to include opposition politicians in a unity government and has purged more independent-minded ministers and officials.

He would have to change his style of governing dramatically, explained the official. “If the way Zelenskyy governs and treats the government and the parliament doesn’t change, it would be almost impossible for him to secure the political consensus he would need.”

But former Zelenskyy aide-turned-critic Iuliia Mendel isn’t so sure. “For many Ukrainians, it’s now very hard to voice a desire for peace because it can be misunderstood,” she said in an interview with Hungarian media. “Anyone who speaks of willingness to cede territories can be labeled a traitor. Anyone who calls for ending the war can face accusations of treason or collaboration with Russia — though it has nothing to do with collaboration. The truth is that we will either lose this territory now or lose far more later,” she argued.

Maybe so, but others worry that any attempt to foist a land surrender on Ukraine could quickly spin out of control and spark turmoil — or worse. Many patriots who fought in the war would see it as a stab in the back, warned Ustinova. “Remember what happened in Ireland after the treaty with Britain. It ended up with a civil war.”