The international community has before it two official proposals—Ukrainian and Russian—for a peace settlement to end the war in Ukraine. Both as they stand, and in present circumstances, are absurd. Diplomats and analysts should however give thought to whether they could nonetheless in the future provide the starting point for negotiations leading to an eventual compromise.

The Ukrainian government’s 10-Point “peace plan” demands complete withdrawal of Russian forces from all the Ukrainian territory that Russia has occupied since 2014 as a precondition for holding talks at all. Presumably those talks would then deal with other Ukrainian points, including war crimes trials for the Russian leadership, and Russian compensation for the damage caused by the Russian invasion.

In addition, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials have declared that Ukrainian neutrality is also a priori unacceptable—though it should be noted that an invitation to join NATO is a matter not for Ukraine but for existing NATO members, and can be blocked by one national veto.

If however Ukraine is defeated and suffers much greater loss of territory, then future generations of Ukrainians may regret that Kyiv did not treat Putin’s proposal at least as a starting point for negotiation and bargaining.

As revealed this week by The New York Times, these Ukrainian demands are radically different from Ukraine’s positions in peace talks with Russia that took place in Istanbul in the first weeks of Russia’s February, 2022 invasion. The paper quotes one of the Ukrainian negotiators, Oleksandr Chalyi: “We managed to find a very real compromise… We were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April, to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.”

At that point, the Ukrainian government was prepared to agree to a permanent treaty of neutrality (allowing for membership of the European Union but not for NATO) in return for security guarantees from all members of the U.N. Security Council. The Ukrainians refused to recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea or the independence of the Russian-occupied areas of the Donbas, but were prepared to leave these under de facto Russian control pending future negotiations at an indeterminate date.

There were however some serious sticking points. Russia demanded that actions by the U.N. Security Council in defense of Ukraine would have to be agreed unanimously—which would have given Russia the right of veto. Russia also demanded that Ukrainian missiles be limited to a 25-mile range, while no such limits were to be placed on Russian weapons. These conditions were obviously unacceptable to the Ukrainians. It is impossible to say whether these disagreements could have been overcome or nuanced in some way, because the Ukrainian side broke off the talks, for reasons that are hotly contested.

If Ukrainian conditions have hardened enormously in the subsequent two years of war, so too have those of Russia. In a statement in response to the “Peace Summit” convened by the West in Switzerland, President Vladimir Putin demanded that Ukraine withdraw its troops from the whole of the four Ukrainian provinces that Russia claims to have annexed since the start of the war (in addition to Crimea, annexed in 2014)—although Russia does not occupy the whole of........

© Common Dreams