Behind closed doors in Moscow, Kiev, Brussels, Washington and other capitals, diplomats, elected leaders and military officers are preparing for a powerful push to find a solution to end the world's largest war. in Europe since World War II.
On the battlefield, the advantage is now decisively on Russia's side, as its forces are crushing Ukrainian troops along the 1,100-kilometer-long front line. The Russian military is crushing Ukraine's energy infrastructure in an attempt to lay waste to and maim an entire people.
The mood has changed in the West's negotiating rooms and there is now a decisive effort to resolve a conflict that has left more than 1 million men dead or wounded on both sides over the past 34 months.
Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the election of Donald Trump, who, even before taking office in January as the next US president, has insisted he will find a way to end the fighting." within 24 hours".
"There is a lot of talk, a lot of noise that some peace talks are inevitable," Rosa Balfour, a director at Brussels-based Carnegie Europe, said on December 12.
"We don't really have a plan. It seems that no one has a plan yet. And, of course, the situation on the ground does not benefit Ukraine now, so the situation is very difficult," she added.
Last week, European and American officials began active talks on the possibility of sending Western troops to Ukraine as peacekeepers once the fighting stops and a ceasefire, or cease-fire agreement, is in place.
French President Emmanuel Macron is believed to have suggested the idea of sending 40,000 troops to Ukraine. He visited Warsaw on December 12 to discuss the issue with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
At a press conference after the meeting, Tusk told reporters that Poland has no intention of sending troops to Ukraine and that Warsaw will not be forced to do so.
The idea of Western peacekeepers came to the fore a few days earlier in Paris, when Macron hosted Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump, who has repeatedly said the Europeans should take a bigger role in supporting and protecting Ukraine, said he wants European soldiers on the ground to oversee any ceasefire.
According to the newspaper, Trump does not want US troops to be involved, however he supports some sort of US assistance for the effort.
Ukraine's leadership, which published a five-point victory plan in October, supports the presence of Western peacekeepers in Ukraine. But there is little sign that Moscow will agree, says Oleksandr Khara, a former Ukrainian diplomat.
"Of course, it's good that it's being talked about, but... there is no basis for starting peace talks," said Khara, who is now an expert at the Kiev-based Center for Defense Strategies.
One of the Kremlin's original appeals to justify the invasion of Ukraine, launched in 2022, remains one of Kiev's main demands: NATO membership.
As recently as December 9, Zelensky reiterated that membership remains of primary importance.
But many NATO members are reluctant to support Ukraine's membership.
At a summit in 2008, US and European leaders reached agreement on Ukraine's future NATO membership, but did not set clear guidelines. Some officials and experts believe this was a mistake that led to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Since the start of the invasion, NATO has expanded to include Sweden and Finland. But accepting Ukraine at this time would mean accepting a country in ruins, crushed and partially occupied by a foreign power, which would trouble many of the alliance's members.
Even the United States is cold to this idea. According to The Wall Street Journal, last week in Paris, Trump is believed to have told Macron and Zelensky that he does not support Kiev's bid for NATO membership.
Postponing membership is "giving in to Russia's demands, and it will be a huge victory for Putin," retired Australian general Mick Ryan wrote in a blog post. "This will justify in the minds of Putin, and authoritarians like him, that Russian aggression against Ukraine has worked, because keeping Ukraine out of NATO was one of Putin's main demands before the war."
Barring something unexpected, Ukraine will lose territory to Russia, which currently controls about 20 percent of Ukrainian land. So, almost the entire eastern Donbas region, as well as the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea.
For most observers, the creation of some kind of "no man's land" is a likely scenario. The demilitarized zone that has separated North and South Korea for decades is seen by many as an example.
Putin gave this idea in March after he was re-elected president.
"I do not exclude the possibility that... we will be forced at some point, when we consider it convenient, to create a 'sanitary zone' in the territories that are currently under the Kiev regime," he said.
For Ukraine, the trouble is where that line will be drawn – and how much of its economic base it will lose. Much of Ukraine's mining and heavy industry is located in the Donbas, which is occupied by Russia; and about 8 million hectares of Ukrainian agricultural land are occupied, according to one estimate.
Ukraine invaded Russian territory in August, taking control of part of the Kursk region. Later, Zelensky said the goal was to create a safe zone and repel rockets away from Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkiv.
However, since then, Russia has managed to recapture almost half of Kursk's territory.
Another challenge for such a zone – whether a security, sanitary or demilitarized zone – is surveillance and verification: what each side, or peacekeepers, will be allowed to do to observe the other side. The rapid development of drone warfare may further complicate this issue.
The biggest sticking point for future talks may be Ukraine's biggest arms supplier: the US, and the Trump administration.
For years, Trump has expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of weaponry sent by the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden and has described Zelensky as a fraud.
He has also said that his skills as a businessman and entrepreneur make him an able negotiator to reach an agreement with Putin.
Trump's point man is Keith Kellogg, a retired US Army colonel who advised the former vice president during Trump's first term.
In a widely cited document he co-authored ahead of the November election, he laid out a plan that includes freezing front lines and using "carrots and sticks" to force Kiev and Moscow to negotiate.
For Kiev, for example, "sticks" mean that the US stops its supply of weapons. For Moscow, this includes measures such as flooding global markets with oil to drive down the prices of this product, on which Moscow depends heavily for its revenues.
Carrots for Moscow would mean the West lifting sanctions against it, or delaying Ukraine's NATO membership. For Kiev, those would include continued military aid, funding for reconstruction or even derecognition of territories occupied by Russia — an approach similar to the one Washington pursued for more than four decades over the Soviet annexation of the three Baltic states.
"We tell the Ukrainians 'you have to come to the negotiating table, and if you don't, the support from the United States will end,'" Kellogg told Reuters in June.
"You tell Putin 'you have to sit down at the table, and if you don't, then we will give the Ukrainians everything they need to kill you on the battlefield,'" he added.
The Kremlin itself — growing impatient with an invasion that was due to end in days and has disrupted its economy — has hinted that it is open to Trump's new approach.
"We don't think that [Putin] has the negotiations in mind," a senior NATO official told REL, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"He may be willing to talk, but as long as he believes he is winning, there is no incentive to talk. And he continues to believe that time is in his favor"./REL (A2 Televizion)
A2 CNN Livestream
MUND TE LEXONI GJITHASHTU
