There's a funny thing Trump cultists do, where they describe reality(as they see it) without giving their own opinion.
Why would the president of Ukraine just give away land to Russia? Are you fucking high?
Well there's a lot of lenses to give opinions. Do you want to know what Americans think is in our interests, or what is in Ukrainian interests, or who's interests hold sway?
Personally I've always tried to figure out the dynamics of systems and explain what
will happen, and treated the personal opinion of what
should happen as largely irrelevant.
Western ultranationalists led a revolution in 2014 because they wanted a country aligned with the US/EU. They wanted to take Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of interest, and were led by zealots who viewed it as a cause worth dying for. A cynical pragmatist could have pointed out at the very start of the war, like I did repeatedly, that Russia would be willing to invest force to preserve its sphere and the west had left its proxy governments high and dry every single time.
To that point: Why would the president of Ukraine just give away land to Russia? Its in effect exactly what Viktor Yanukovych as doing in 2014. He was ceding a degree of sovereignty to Russia to avoid a worse outcome for his country in the pull between east and west. If he had his way, all the young men of Ukraine would be growing up like past generations, in a poor but stable and peaceful country. As opposed to
not growing up at all, which is what America offered them. Why would president Zelensky in 2025 just give away land to Russia? Well it depends on whether Zelensky serves the interests of the Ukrainian people, whether he serves a fatalist view to lead his people to their deaths, or whether he serves western interests as a mere puppet. If Zelensky can end the war by ceding land he can save lives and give his people a degree of sovereignty. He's losing the war, that is when people sue for peace and that means giving up the stakes you fought for. And considering the "lands being ceded" are ethnic Russian eastern oblasts that the western revolutionaries never held once in the past 11 years, Russia's demands are pretty lenient.