“Obviously, that’s a “no”.
Ukraine will agree.
They don’t have a reasonable choice. Continuing the war will eliminate the Ukrainian state and result in the entire regime hanging by the neck until dead.
They don’t have a reasonable choice.
If Britain and France send their peacekeepers to Ukraine. Then maybe. Otherwise, no deal. You just don't give up your land for nothing.
Several wars were fought in Europe to try to match borders with various concepts of territorial integrity. Alsace-Lorraine was the primary cause of two bloody wars, it’s in France now, not everyone living there was French and some wanted to be part of Germany. It’s pretty much the same situation in eastern Ukraine, not everyone there wants to be in a country called Ukraine, but at the same time, quite a few don’t want to be in Russia. And language is not the only determinant. Some Russian speakers want to remain citizens of Ukraine. Probably a higher percentage of people in Crimea want Russia to annex them. A small number in so-far unoccupied parts of Ukraine (like Odessa) speak Russian and some of them want to see Russia succeed in its widest possible goals. Many don’t.
The existential question on the table is, do various stake-holders want the bloodshed to continue indefinitely, or are they willing to cede eastern Ukraine and Crimea to Russia?
I don’t have a dog in the hunt, and frankly, it’s not the business of people outside of Europe anyway, unless it begins to threaten global security. It is good of President Trump to try to end the bloodshed, I think that’s part of his objective and also to rebuild cordial relations with Russia that existed for a while after 1991. Our violations of the Minsk agreements were a foolish backward step, but Putin is no saint and uses any pretext (Nazis running Ukraine for example) to stir up trouble.
You sort of wish both Putin and Zelensky could lose comprehensively, that cannot happen, it’s either a draw or one loses. But you know, Japan and Germany “lost” world war two and by 1960 had a better economic situation than France or Britain, and nearly equal to America and Canada, who “won” that war. So losing a war is not the end of a country, just a regime.