Donald Trump wants a peace deal in Ukraine very badly.
Kyiv wants peace even more, just not at any cost.
That’s why when the US began pushing it to agree to a deal by Thanksgiving on what looked close to surrender terms, Ukraine pushed back.
It scrambled senior officials to talks in Geneva and all of Sunday we saw delegates from the US and Ukraine shuttling back and forth between the two main venues in black limousines with darkened windows.
They were joined by national security advisers from Germany, France and the UK.
The only time I glimpsed Andriy Yermak, heading the negotiating team from Kyiv, he looked stony-faced.
No wonder: the starting proposal on the table was so skewed towards Russia’s demands, the talks began with the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio having to deny it had been written by the Kremlin.
But Donald Trump had been clear that Ukraine needed to sign up fast or face unspecified consequences. So Kyiv had to engage.
On Sunday night, Marco Rubio declared there’d been “tremendous progress” in the talks with just a “couple of things” still outstanding. When pressed, he wouldn’t be more specific, calling the situation “delicate”.
But a joint Ukraine-US statement says there’s now a whole new deal in play, which it calls an “updated and revised framework document”.
We haven’t seen that yet. The Financial Times newspaper quotes one of the delegates, though – Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister Sergiy Kyslytsya – who talks of a new 19-point plan with “very little left” from the original draft.
That new document likely incorporates at least some of the amendments proposed by the Europeans and published by Reuters news agency that point to something far more palatable for Kyiv.
In that version, an automatic veto on future Ukrainian Nato membership is gone – as well as a cap on troop numbers for the country’s armed forces.
It says no Western troops would be deployed to Ukraine permanently, but that’s not an all-out ban.
On the sensitive question of territory – land Ukrainian soldiers have been fighting and dying to defend for 11 years – there would be no handover of the rest of the Donbas region to Russia for free, and Ukraine would aim to recover occupied areas through exclusively diplomatic means. That’s something Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky previously accepted.
The full amnesty for war crimes is deleted, too.
But most critically, there’s reference to security guarantees.
Several officials, including the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, have talked about Ukraine getting Article 5-style protection, meaning the US would be bound to come to its defence if Russia ever invaded again.
That’s the key issue which Ukraine says it can’t negotiate on.
We don’t know how many of these European ideas have made it into the new proposal, but Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz calls the deal “significantly modified” – in a positive sense.
So how did we get from a pro-Russian deal to this in just a day? It’s hard to be sure, with US hawks like President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff in the room.
The initial Kremlin-friendly plan was rooted in Witkoff’s own visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin this spring, when he returned quoting Russia’s controversial narratives almost verbatim.
Instead, this plan seems like something Ukraine might sign up to – eventually.
Which must be why Trump has gone from berating officials in Kyiv, again, for supposedly showing him “zero gratitude”, to proclaiming that “something good” may be coming.
But how good? There is still no sign that Russia is ready to give up fighting unless it’s forced to.
“Putin is much more self-confident militarily, right now,” Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center believes.
She points to a corruption scandal and political crisis in Kyiv, problems mobilising soldiers there, and military gains for Russian forces on the ground – all driving Putin’s thinking.
At best, some suggest Trump’s demand for a deal has injected new momentum into efforts to find peace, which Ukrainians, under fire, desperately want.
But it’s hard to escape the sense that these days of frantic diplomacy have only brought us back to where we started
“Russia’s position is, ‘we have laid out our demands, so do you take them or not?’ Stanovaya said. “‘If so, we will stop the war – if not, we’ll just wait until you’re ready.'”
