1938 concessions

Why Munich 1938 concessions to Nazi Germany haunt Washington 2025 talks

Vladimir Putin’s desire to grab Ukraine’s key defensive lines echoes how Adolf Hitler secured Czechoslovakia’s fortifications.

By Chris Lunday, Jacopo Barigazzi and Veronika Melkozerova

Handing over massive fortification lines to an expansionist neighbor hellbent on destroying your state tends to be a bad idea.

In 1938, ceding the Sudetenland and its dense network of forts, forests and trenches led to the rapid collapse of Czechoslovakia's ability to defend itself against Nazi Germany. There are fears in Europe that Kyiv's ability to resist Russia will be similarly devastated if Donald Trump — swayed by Russian President Vladimir Putin — presses Ukraine to hand over key defensive lines in its eastern Donbas region.

This danger was uppermost in Volodymyr Zelenskyy's mind as he met with Trump in Washington on Monday following the U.S. president's meeting last week with Putin. While Trump may see a slice of the Donbas as a bone to throw to Putin to secure a deal, Zelenskyy knows such a concession would undermine any peace deal and position the Russians to charge further into the heart of Ukraine.

“It is crucial for Europe not to turn this into another Munich or Yalta moment,” Tomáš Kopečný, Czech government commissioner for the reconstruction of Ukraine, told POLITICO, referring to the Western betrayal of the Czechs at the Munich summit of 1938, and the selling out of Central and Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin at Yalta in 1945.

Trump reportedly said he believed Putin would agree to a peace deal ending the war if Ukraine hands over the whole of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces in the east; Russia occupies almost all of Luhansk and three-quarters of Donetsk.

A defiant Zelenskyy has said he won't do that.

“We will not leave Donbas. We cannot do this. Donbas for the Russians is a springboard for a future new offensive,” Zelenskyy told journalists in Kyiv last week.

Military analysts also warn that any concessions in Donbas could have devastating consequences on the battlefield.

According to the Institute for the Study of War, the Kremlin is demanding that Ukraine hand over what Ukrainians call their “fortress belt” — a defensive line based on heavily fortified cities that runs through hills, woodlands and along rivers that has served as the backbone of their defenses since 2014.

"Ukraine has spent the last 11 years pouring time, money and effort into reinforcing the fortress belt and establishing significant defense industrial and defensive infrastructure in and around these cities," the institute said.

If that happens, Russia would move its frontline roughly 80 kilometers further west, while Ukraine would be forced to build new defenses on flat and open terrain in neighboring Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk — far harder to hold than the fortified cities it controls now.

"If today we leave Donbas, from our fortifications, from our terrain, from the heights that we control, we will clearly open a bridgehead for preparing an offensive by the Russians," Zelenskyy warned.

ISW agrees. A ceasefire on those terms would give Moscow “a much more advantageous launching point for a future offensive” and shows Putin’s “continued disinterest in good-faith negotiations.”

The U.K. Ministry of Defence estimated it would take over four years of fighting and would cost Russia 1.9 million dead and wounded soldiers to fully capture the four regions it illegally annexed from Ukraine.

It's not the first time external powers have been keen to ram through a potentially unfavorable deal to prevent a war.

In September 1938, Adolf Hitler argued that handing over the ethnic-German majority Sudetenland region to the Reich would satisfy his ambitions and end the threat of war in Europe. France and Britain agreed, and browbeat Prague into accepting. Hitler — whose word was as reliable as Putin's — said he had no further territorial ambitions.

Czechoslovakia had spent several years building thousands of pillboxes, blockhouses and fortresses in the forested and mountainous region — staffed by a modern and well-equipped army of 1.2 million. Germany took it all without firing a shot.

In March 1939, German troops swept into the rest of the country with the Czech army unable to put up any resistance.

Kyiv eyes Munich

The Ukrainians are very well aware of what happened to the Czechs 87 years ago.

“Without security guarantees, freezing the war means a second Munich 1938,” warned Olexiy Haran, professor of comparative politics at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, in a comment for Germany’s Federal Center of Civic Education.

That's a reference to supposed security guarantees for Kyiv, which Trump's Ukraine war negotiator, real estate developer Steve Witkoff, has said are similar to NATO's Article 5 common defense provision — although Trump has repeatedly ruled out Ukraine's joining the far more reliable Atlantic alliance.

Haran argued that “if we sign a ceasefire agreement or even hold an election without security guarantees, Putin could resume his aggression the very next day.” Such an agreement, he said, would “de facto recognize Russia’s control of Ukrainian territories for an indefinite period” and repeat the mistakes of 1938, when concessions to an aggressor only invited further escalation.

Yaroslav Hrytsak, a Ukrainian historian and professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University, warned that the danger goes beyond another Munich-style betrayal. “It’s the Yalta moment too,” he said.

There is also a human element to shifting borders.

Europe has had long experience of that. During World War II, the Germans and the Soviets inflicted massive ethnic cleansing programs on their captured populations. In 1945, millions of ethnic Germans were kicked out of Czechoslovakia and Poland.

If Ukraine is forced to give the whole Donbas to Russia, Hrytsak argued, this will give Moscow the right to “decide the fate of the people living in former Soviet bloc countries.” That will be done against the will of the local population, he added, “just using the status of a big powerful state’s right to rule over the smaller and weaker states.”

Deferring to Moscow

Diplomats and governments on NATO’s eastern flank warn that Russia is trying to use peace talks to obtain a strategic advantage it hasn't been able to win on the battlefield despite three-and-a-half years of bloody fighting that cost it over a million casualties.

“Russia is likely aware that it currently does not have sufficient military capabilities to achieve its maximalist goals on the battlefield alone,” Latvia's intelligence agency wrote in its most recent report. Instead, Moscow “is trying to force Ukraine toward concessions through various influence measures."

Still, despite the worries about Trump handing Ukraine over to Putin, there are notable differences between 2025 and 1938.

When the deal on the Sudetenland was reached, Czechoslovakia was not invited to the table. This time, Zelenskyy has been to the White House to talk with Trump and has made clear he wants a ceasefire that is based on the current front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces.

Some European officials remain cautiously optimistic that the U.S. will not betray Europe.

“I do not see this is happening," said Kopečný, the Czech special envoy for Ukraine, noting that Trump is talking with Zelenskyy and with European allies.

“This is not what Munich and Yalta looked like.”