A key meeting between the coalition of the willing European leaders, Ukraine and the US negotiating team in London was cancelled on April 23 after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy rejected a seven-point peace plan.

As bne IntelliNews reported, the talks were always going to be very difficult, as the US was demanding a long list of conditions that favour the Kremlin, but take account of few of Ukraine’s demands.

Instead of holding a fruitless meeting, the participants decided to cancel it. No new date for the meeting has been set.

The talks were to have been chaired by British Foreign Secretary David Lammy and "official talks will continue but are closed to the media," according to the British Foreign Office.

Ukraine has rejected the deal and reportedly wants to focus on organising a 30-day ceasefire agreement first that would also clear the way for direct talks between Zelenskiy and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin).

The Trump administration had suggested seven main points for the deal:

• Immediate ceasefire;
• Direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia;
• Ban on Ukraine joining Nato;
• Official US recognition of Crimea as "Russian territory";
• De facto recognition of Russia’s occupation of four Ukrainian regions along the front line;
• A resource agreement: Ukraine transfers part of its profits from natural resources to American companies; and
• Removal of all sanctions on Russia and US-Russia energy cooperation.

Under the deal Ukraine was to get several but vague concessions:

• Security guarantees from a group of countries (excluding the US);
• Withdrawal of Russian troops from part of Kharkiv region;
• Free navigation along the Dnipro River at the southern frontline;
• Compensation and reconstruction assistance without specifying the amount or the source; and
• Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) under US management, supplying electricity to both Ukraine and Russia.

One important point that seems to have disappeared from the list is Russia’s earlier insistence that Ukraine demilitarise and significantly reduce the size of its army.

This may have been dropped by the Kremlin as Ukraine is actively investing into its domestic defence sector with the help of the so-called Danish model and that output is expanding rapidly. Moreover, Europe has made it clear it will also support the growth of Ukraine's defence sector with investment and joint ventures with leading European weapons manufacturers.

Putin has offered a few concessions ahead of the cancelled talks. He said this week that he is prepared to meet Zelenskiy for direct negotiations. He also said a day earlier that he was ready to freeze the conflict along the current line of contact, implying that Russia will not claim de facto control over the parts of the four regions it annexed in 2023 that it does not currently control.

While Ukraine could in theory agree to most of the conditions other than sovereignty over Crimea, the other highly problematic condition is the call for all sanctions imposed since the start of the sanctions regime in 2014 must be lifted.

As bne IntelliNews has argued, this is an all-or-nothing moment for Putin to get both Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea at least recognised by the international community and to have sanctions lifted. Putin is looking down the road to the point when Trump eventually leaves office. If the Crimea is not acknowledged as Russian it could lead to the West rearming Ukraine and the outbreak of a new war. And Russia’s experience with sanctions is that once they have been imposed it can take decades to have them lifted again. The Jackson-Vanik sanctions were imposed on the Soviet Union due to restrictive emigration rights of Jews in particular in 1974 restricting trade, but were only removed in 2012.

Trump’s team called the current deal the “final offer” and have threatened to walk away from supporting Ukraine if it was rejected.