By agreeing to a US proposal for an immediate 30-day ceasefire, Ukraine has turned the tables diplomatically on Russia.
If the Kremlin maintains its military campaign to subjugate Ukraine, it now risks being framed as the obstacle to peace and incurring the wrath of US President Donald Trump.
Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin has always insisted that a ceasefire could only come alongside a final settlement. He has shown no sign of stepping back from his maximalist demands, which would undermine Ukraine’s existence as a functional state. Last week, he told the mother of a Russian soldier killed in action that he would pursue nothing short of “victory”.
What do Moscow and Kyiv each want now?
Moscow’s objective is to deceive the Trump administration into a “deal that — to the US team — looks like Trump gets what he wants (just a ceasefire), while in fact it will lead to what Russia wants (Russian control over Kyiv)”, said Janis Kluge of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Ukraine, meanwhile, aims to dispel “illusions on the side of the US about what Russia is willing to do”, said Kluge. “It’s basically like a discovery process for the US team to understand where Russia really stands.”
Ukraine’s agreement to the ceasefire has gained it a more sympathetic hearing from the Trump administration, after several weeks during which Washington sided squarely with Moscow.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio on Tuesday said he aimed “to end this conflict in a way that’s acceptable to both sides, sustainable, and that ensures the stability and security of Ukraine for the long term”.
If Russia agrees to a truce, talks will progress to more substantive issues. But the gulf between the two combatants looks hard to bridge, and Ukrainian and western officials fear a capricious Trump may still try to coerce Kyiv into an unfavourable peace.
Can the combatants make a deal on territory?
Rubio on Monday said Kyiv would have to accept Russian control of the fifth of Ukrainian territory it currently occupies. He argued that “it’ll be very difficult” for Ukraine to force Russia “back all the way to where they were in 2014”.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has conceded this point. However, Ukraine will never formally recognise Russian sovereignty over those areas, which would reward Russian aggression and its violation of international law.
“We are not going to recognize any territories occupied by Russia,” Zelenskyy said on Wednesday. “And we will not forget about this issue.”
Russia annexed the south-eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in 2022, adding to the Crimean peninsula it seized eight years earlier.
Though Russia does not control any of those four regions in full, it has demanded that Ukraine surrender them in any final settlement. The Kremlin last week dismissed Ukraine’s ambitions to reclaim its lost land, saying Zelenskyy was ignoring “the real situation”.
Would Ukraine have to remain ‘neutral’?
Zelenskyy appears to have accepted that there is little chance that the Trump administration will agree to Ukraine joining Nato. A commitment to Nato accession was written into the Ukrainian constitution in 2019.
One option would be to suspend Ukraine’s application process for, say, a decade. However, Putin is likely to demand a commitment to neutrality, although the Kremlin has acknowledged Ukraine’s “sovereign right to join the EU”.
Through back channels with western officials, Russian experts have promoted a scenario in which Ukraine becomes a “big Austria” with a constitutional guarantee of neutrality, said a senior European diplomat.
That would in effect allow Russia to “pull the strings” and increase its control over Ukraine, the diplomat said, adding that the Russians “want to replace Zelenskyy and put in a puppet regime”.
Thomas Graham, former senior director for Russia at the US National Security Council, said the Kremlin wanted Ukraine to be “well within Russia’s orbit”, much like neighbouring Belarus, while Kyiv’s ambition was to integrate with the west.
That represented “two irreconcilable views on the future of Ukraine”, he pointed out.
Would Kyiv get guarantees of its future security?
If Nato membership is not an option, Kyiv wants security guarantees from its allies. London, Paris and other capitals have said they are willing to deploy a deterrence force to Ukraine that could call in massive air power if Russia attacked again. But they want a US “backstop”, which Washington has declined to offer.
Russia has said it will not accept any Nato country deploying troops within Ukraine. “He won’t allow any boots on the ground. Putin would rather keep fighting,” said a former senior Kremlin official.
But if a final agreement can be reached, Putin would not object to any bilateral security arrangements Ukraine made with western countries, the former official added.
European peacekeeping troops would amount to “quasi Nato membership” and would be unacceptable, the person said.
Would Ukraine have to demilitarise?
Russia’s insistence on limiting Ukraine’s armed forces to a mere 50,000 personnel, together with a ban on deploying long-range missiles, was one of the issues that scuppered peace talks in the weeks following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Since then, the Kremlin has moved the goalposts on Putin’s vaguely defined aims several times: Russia’s ambassador to the UN said nearly a year ago that the “demilitarisation” of Ukraine had been “completed”.
But Russian officials have repeatedly spoken of the need to eliminate any future “threats” from Ukraine. Kyiv and its western allies take that as a sign that Putin wants Russia to re-arm, and potentially complete its conquest later.
The resilience of Ukraine’s military — which has held Russia to only incremental territorial gains at immense cost — is Kyiv’s greatest asset, and not one it will agree to dismantle.
Kyiv’s European partners also have every interest in arming Ukraine to the teeth, as the country is their first line of defence against Russian aggression. Given the challenges of deploying western troops there, long-term commitments to train and equip a powerful Ukrainian army may be the best guarantee of security that Ukraine can get.
Could Russia regain access to the international financial system?
When he set out his conditions for a ceasefire last June, Putin insisted on the lifting of all western sanctions imposed since 2014. The Trump administration may look favourably on such a demand, as it is eyeing business opportunities arising from a normalised relationship with Moscow.
Some European leaders have recently voiced concern that Washington could start to ease sanctions on Russia as a declaration of intent to encourage Moscow to strike a deal.
Ukraine, meanwhile, wants Europe to tighten sanctions on Russia, and to confiscate and use about €200bn in frozen sovereign assets held in the Eurozone banking system.
European governments are coming around to the idea that they may have to seize the assets — one of their few points of leverage with Moscow.
What would happen to Zelenskyy?
Putin has described Zelenskyy as an “illegitimate” president with “no right to sign” a peace deal. People who have spoken to him during the war, as well as others familiar with his thinking, say Putin wants to install a pliant Ukrainian leader who would in effect be under Russian control.
This Russian narrative has since been echoed by Trump, who called Zelenskyy a “dictator”, while his allies have urged Ukraine to hold new elections soon.
In Ukraine a presidential election is not allowed as long as martial law remains in force. Ukrainian officials say forcing early elections — potentially after a ceasefire but before a final settlement — would destabilise and divide the country at a critical juncture, while Zelenskyy said on Wednesday that martial law would have to be ended first.
Cartography by Steven Bernard
