The Ukraine peace process is now moving as fast as can reasonably be expected. Only two months ago, all sides were still locked in positions that gave no chance at all of progress. Russia was demanding complete Ukrainian withdrawal from all the four provinces it claims to have annexed, and a bar on all Western arms supplies to Ukraine—things that neither Ukraine nor Western governments could possibly accept.

The Trump administration and the Kyiv and European governments were demanding a prior ceasefire before beginning talks on an agreement—something that Moscow has made clear for months that it would not accept, since Russian advances on the ground are by far the most important leverage that Russia can bring to bear in talks (just as the Ukrainians rejected a ceasefire when they thought they were winning).

Of course, major obstacles remain. Of these, the greatest from Ukraine’s point of view is probably the continued Russian demand for Ukrainian military withdrawal from the approximately 30 percent of Donetsk region that Ukraine still holds. It would be appallingly difficult for any Ukrainian government to agree voluntarily to withdraw from this land, given the number of Ukrainian lives sacrificed to hold it, and the effort put into fortifying the Ukrainian front line. It seems plausible that a Ukrainian government that agreed to this would be in real danger of being overthrown—unless the Ukrainian army had already been defeated and was in the process of losing the region anyway.

It is also necessary to point out—since most Western reporting and analysis have obscured this—that this is one of the few issues in dispute which is actually up to Ukraine to decide. NATO membership, Western security “guarantees” for Ukraine and Western arms supplies for Ukraine are all issues for the US and European governments to decide on. Ukraine can ask them to provide these; it cannot decide for them or compel them to do so.

Control of the whole Donbas is of considerable symbolic importance to Russia. Barely covert Russian troops fought in support of separatists in the region since 2014. Russian recognition of the region’s independence heralded the launch of the Russian invasion of the rest of Ukraine in 2022. Since the early months of the war, Russian observers have been telling me of their view that if Russia could take the whole of the Donbas, that could be enough for Putin to declare victory and end the war.

To date, however, while Russia has taken virtually the whole of Lugansk province, around 30 percent of Donetsk province and a quarter of a million of its people remain under Ukrainian control. Trump has raised the idea of a swap of this territory for the small areas that Russia holds in Kharkiv and Sumy provinces (which Russia does not claim as its territory). This would, however, mean Ukraine exchanging around 3,000 square miles of territory for 150 square miles, which hardly looks like an equitable deal.

After a year in which the Russian army advanced with glacial slowness, in recent weeks it has advanced more rapidly, and now seems close to surrounding and capturing the town of Pokrovsk in southern Donetsk. Unless, that is, the Ukrainian army collapses, for Russia to capture the line of heavily defended towns in northern Donetsk will be a very long and bloody business; and even if the Russian army succeeds, the area it takes will be completely devastated.

The Trump administration should therefore explore whether US offers of compromise on other issues could get Moscow to abandon its demand for the rest of the Donbas, or reduce it to a much fairer swap of the frontline towns of Pokrovsk and Konstantinovka (which appear close to falling anyway) for occupied land elsewhere.

An obvious deal could involve Russia dropping its territorial demand (or rather, like the Ukrainians, deferring the whole issue of legal sovereignty over the four provinces for future negotiation) in return for the West giving up the idea of a European reassurance force for Ukraine, backed by US airpower. This idea is, in any case, foolish. First, if insisted upon in negotiations, it is likely to make a peace settlement impossible. When Trump raised it during the talks in Washington, the Russian Foreign Ministry responded thusly: “We reaffirm our repeatedly stated position on our categorical rejection of any scenarios that envisage the appearance in Ukraine of a military contingent with the participation of NATO countries, which is fraught with an uncontrolled escalation of the conflict with unpredictable consequences.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has stated that Western security guarantees to Ukraine are acceptable to Moscow only if Russia and China are included alongside the US, France, and Britain. This obviously makes a European force for Ukraine impossible. What Lavrov’s choice of countries suggests, however, is a treaty guaranteeing no further changes of border by force that would be signed under the aegis of the United Nations Security Council and endorsed by the General Assembly. This would not, of course, provide a military guarantee to Ukraine, but given Russia’s dependence on China and efforts to woo what it calls the “global majority,” it would provide rather strong political and diplomatic assurance.

A European force is foolish from a US and European point of view because it would obviously run the risk of becoming embroiled in a direct war with Russia—something that almost every NATO government, including the Biden administration, has rejected. US air cover for this force would then draw in the United States, raising the real possibility of nuclear cataclysm.