At this point, Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky would have to make whatever deal he still can.
If the Ukrainians feel the time has come to surrender to the Russians, they don’t need Donald Trump’s help.
The “ungrateful” wretches can do that for themselves.
The Russian “peace” offer that the US president is trying to force on Ukraine this time is almost identical to the one that Russian leader Vladimir Putin pitched to him in Alaska in August.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will reject it again unless he thinks Ukraine’s defences are about to collapse – but why have they all been stuck in this loop for so long?
Putin’s goal is to reunite the parts of the former Soviet Union where at least a minority of the population speaks Russian, and Ukraine is the biggest of those parts. (Others are Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and maybe Kazakhstan.)
Beyond that, he probably has no territorial ambitions, but just doing that would involve conquering around 50 million people.
Putin’s Ukraine invasion can best be seen as a heritage project to secure his historical position as one of Russia’s greats (Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Putin the Great).
But he would certainly not have attacked Ukraine in 2022 had he known it would be a four-year war, not a four-week one.
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Too late – and he must now have a big win in Ukraine to justify a million Russian casualties.
Otherwise he will certainly lose power and, perhaps, also his life.
In this strictly limited sense, his current refusal to bargain or compromise is rational, although there has never been a plausible military threat to Russia.
Zelensky’s position is equally rational and equally inflexible. Although he is the most unlikely war leader – a Russian-speaking Jew from the world of entertainment – he quickly realised that his job was to hold on as much Ukrainian territory as possible for as long as possible.
God is still ultimately on the side of the bigger battalions, but new technology – mainly drones – mean that Ukraine can lose very, very slowly.
Ukrainian forces periodically retreat in baby steps along parts of the 1 250km front, but the Russian army at its rate of advance would not reach the eastern suburbs of Kyiv until 2030.
Losing slowly is, therefore, not necessarily a futile waste of Ukrainian lives.
Every month brings another chance for some political, economic or technological change that alters the equation and gives Ukraine a better bargaining position for an eventual ceasefire.
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Zelensky’s job is to know if and when the morale of the Ukrainian army and the public is starting to break. At this point, he would have to make whatever deal he still can.
But since the deal Trump’s people and Putin’s people have cooked would already reduce Ukraine to the status of a Russian colony, he has nothing to lose by saying “no” now.
Trump is the only one in hurry. He would likely collect enough frequent peacemaker points to win the Nobel Peace Prize if he can impose a ceasefire before next year’s winner is chosen.
It would have to be a deal that gives Russia its maximum demands, partly because of Trump’s weirdly intimate relationship with Putin, but mainly because Putin believes he is winning.
Besides, a Ukrainian surrender would mean an end to sanctions on Moscow and lucrative trade deals for Trump’s family and friends.
However, Trump’s leverage on Zelensky has diminished because he has managed to monetise US arms aid to Ukraine.
Now, instead of going directly from Washington to Kyiv as aid, it is sold to Nato countries at full price and they pass it on to Ukraine as interest-free loans, or gifts.
The Ukrainians have not lost the war yet, this is probably just one more trip around the loop.
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