In the morning on March 11, the Guardian ran an article by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. It stated that a ceasefire in the Russo-Ukrainian war would be meaningless without security guarantees for Kyiv, more sanctions against Russia and transferring frozen Russian assets to Ukraine.

In the evening on the same day, after eight hours of negotiations with state secretary Marco Rubio and national security advisor Michael Waltz in Saudi Arabia, the same Ukrainian official agreed to endorse the American proposal which envisaged a 30-day comprehensive ceasefire without any mention of the said conditions.

Yermak also walked away from Ukraine joint initiative with the UK and France which suggested that the ceasefire should be limited to airspace and sea. As he left the meeting, Rubio said that the ball was now in the Russian court.

Russia’s reaction came two days later and it was initially ambivalent. Putin’s foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov said that ceasefire would only give a respite to Ukrainian forces, while Russia wants a comprehensive settlement rather temporary freezing of the conflict. But he didn’t reject the American proposal out of hand saying that it needed to be adjusted taking into account Russian interests.

A few hours later Putin appeared before cameras to say that he was endorsing the ceasefire plan but he listed various caveats making it certain that ceasefire talks will be difficult and protracted.

The proverbial ball is thus in the American court and it is up to Trump’s administration to decide whether it wants to adjust the proposal as per Russian suggestion.

What did we die for?

The moment Jeddah talks finished and the ceasefire proposal was announced Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijarto felt vindicated. “For three years, we have been urging a ceasefire and peace talks in Ukraine - only to be insulted for our stance”, he said. “Now, after three years, ceasefire and negotiations are finally being discussed. Perhaps if there had been less condemnation, hundreds of thousands fewer would have died, millions fewer would have been displaced, and the damage would be far less”.

Ever since Ukraine’s failed counter-offensive in 2023, it was only a matter of basic intellectual decency to realise that the longer this war continues, the worse the final outcome for Ukraine will be. But pro-war lobby made both Zelensky’s administration and numerous governments in the West too invested in delusional expectations, which is what is making damage control particularly tricky at the moment.

Sadly for Western liberalism, it is now left to far-right governments of Victor Urban and Donald Trump to deliver the bitter truth. That’s because they have never been invested in the risky enterprise of challenging a major nuclear power to what Western politicians, like Marco Rubio and former British prime-minister Boris Johnson are now openly calling a proxy war.

What politicians and lobbyists who helped to derail Istanbul agreements in the spring of 2022 (and Minsk agreements before that) can’t possibly admit, is that Ukraine’s terrible sacrifice was in vain.

Hence the attempts to make the war last for another year or two - in the hope that some miraculous black swan event, be it a sudden economic crisis or military uprising along the lines of Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin putsch in 2023, will bring Russia on its knees. None of that seems conceivable as things stand now.

The benchmark for what Ukraine would see as a success or failure in the full-out war was spelled out in March 2022 by Oleksiy Arestovych who was Yermak’s aide and one of Ukraine’s top spokesman on all things related to war. Anything worse than the conditions of Minsk agreements, which ended the hot phase of the conflict in 2015, would be deemed as Ukraine’s defeat, he said a few weeks into the full-out war and at the time when Istanbul talks were in full swing. Minsk agreements is what Kyiv effectively rejected in the run-up to full-out invasion, perhaps believing that it was calling Putin’s bluff or that the invasion was doomed to failure.

Ukraine is further away from achieving these goals today than any time during the three years of the full-out conflict. That creates a major headache for war enthusiasts who spent three years promoting delusional expectations in order to make Ukrainians fight a losing battle - effectively for nothing. The bitter pill Ukraine and Europe will have to take will need to be explained to the voters. More than a few political careers will unravel as the blame game ensues.

For Russia, on the other hand, it is the moment when its skilful diplomats, led by foreign policy veteran Sergey Lavrov and the above-mentioned Ushakov, may help it seal what has been achieved on the battlefield over the last three years.

Dancing around ceasefire

On the face of it, ceasefire is disadvantageous for the Russians who have been slowly advancing all along the frontline since the end of 2023, with the notable exception of the debacle in Kursk region where the Ukrainians managed to seize a chunk of rural territory. By the time Jeddah talks happened, however, this area had been all but liberated with remaining Ukrainian troops either trapped without supplies in Russian territory or fleeing across the border.

But the 30-day limit on ceasefire, negotiated by Yermak and Trump’s envoy, may provide an opening for Putin. This term is short enough for any major changes with regards to military capability on either side. There is not much Moscow is losing by agreeing to ceasefire while signalling its willingness to cooperate with Trump. If nothing is achieved, it can resume the offensive. At the same time, it will incentivise Trump to exert more pressure on Ukraine and extract more concessions.

Besides, agreeing to talk about a ceasefire is not the same as agreeing to ceasefire per se. Ceasefire talks will be difficult and highly technical - the separation of troops and effective monitoring of ceasefire violations proved a major sticking point already when Minsk agreements were still alive. Both sides may eventually pull out blaming each other for failing to achieve a result. Ceasefire talks may drag on for months while the Russian army will continue advancing along the frontline. Most crucially, Moscow will be able to bring up any kind of conditions in the meantime steering the conversation towards its desired format of long-term settlement.

Over many months, the Kremlin repeatedly said that it is interested in a comprehensive peace treaty not just with Ukraine but also with the West - not in a ceasefire that could result in the Korean-style freezing of the conflict.

That suggests that it will try to at least agree upon the general framework of the future peace negotiations before committing to the end hostilities. Russia insists on reviving the Istanbul framework which envisaged Ukraine’s neutrality and limiting the size of its armed forces. In addition, Moscow insists on keeping the territory it has occupied so far or even on the Ukrainian withdrawal from the rest of the four regions Russia has formally annexed after sham referendums in 2022. The latter demand shouldn’t be taken too seriously - it is the reaction to similarly unrealistic demands by the Ukrainian/Western side, like deployment of NATO “peacekeepers”.

Peace according to Putin

Territory is not what Putin is fighting for in Ukraine - it is a tool of punishment for intransigence and a bargaining chip in negotiations. What Moscow is going to be focused on in the talks both prior and after the prospected ceasefire is a new security architecture in Europe that will set a red line for NATO’s eastward expansion for decades to come.

As for Ukraine, multiple statements and leaks suggest that Moscow will be satisfied with it attaining the status similar to Finland’s and Austria’s after the World War II. That will effectively mean a return to the status quo prior to Maidan revolution in 2014 when Ukraine was geopolitically equidistant from Russia and the West. Incidentally, it was also more democratic and inclusive.

But Moscow will insist on the removal of all kinds of NATO infrastructure, specifically the CIA listening stations which emerged along the Russian border after 2015, as per reports by the mainstream American media. It will also insist on the de-Americanisation of Ukrainian security agencies, the SBU and the HUR, parts of which are all but run by the CIA, according to investigative reports by Washington Post and New York Times.

This might be the toughest bargain of all for the West because the withdrawal of both the CIA and the MI6 from Ukraine will be the West’s most tangible defeat in its confrontation with Putin’s Russia over Ukraine.

Moscow will also likely to insist on the decriminalisation of political forces representing Russian-speakers as well as on ending the ban on the formerly Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It is also hard to imagine Putin agreeing to peace that doesn’t envisage the end of the culture war on Russian language and all vestiges of Russian culture currently under way in Ukraine.

But this is also something that will be fairly easy for Kyiv to agree with and get a sympathetic response from the public. As the Ukrainian leadership very well understands, rather than harming Ukraine, ditching ethnonationalist policies is what will help make Ukraine genuinely democratic, inclusive and compatible with EU standards. Xenophobia and discrimination will make little sense once the conflict is properly over.

Will Ukraine and the West agree to all of that? Not immediately for sure. But what we saw over the last several months was them slowly backtracking on key issues with regards to the future settlement, starting with the de-facto acceptance of Ukraine’s territorial losses.

Trump administration may try and pressure Putin into accepting what he doesn’t want to accept. Whether that strategy will succeed depends on how Putin sees the prospect of Russia sustaining the war effort for another few years in the face of potentially increasing Western sanctions. All signals so far have indicated that Moscow is ready to engage in fighting for much longer than the West. Unlike the latter, it is genuinely seeing this war as existential.

But for Trump, pressuring Putin too much means getting invested in a project he is not invested in at the moment and the one which by all means looks doomed to failure, even putting aside the moral qualms associated with the idea of “fighting to the last Ukrainian”.

What we are seeing now is likely to be the beginning of a long negotiations process in which the performative aspect will be more prominent than any other. Western and Ukrainian leaders will need to produce a lot of “tough talk” while gradually backtracking on key issues and carefully selling these concessions to domestic audiences which was being sold delusional expectations over the last three years.

Some goodwill gestures by the Kremlin are not inconceivable since ultimately it wants to restore good relations with the West - on its terms. These terms, however, appear to be largely non-negotiable and Putin appears to be dead certain that time is on his side.