The Trump administration has so far played its cards in the Ukraine peace process with great skill. Pressure on Kyiv has led the Ukrainian government to abandon its impossible demands and join the U.S. in calling for an unconditional temporary ceasefire.

This call, together with the resumption of U.S. military and intelligence aid to Ukraine, is now putting great pressure on the Russian government to abandon its own impossible demands and seek a genuine and early compromise. A sign of the intensity of this pressure is the anguish it is causing to Russian hardliners, who are demanding that Putin firmly reject the proposal. We must hope that he will not listen to them.

That does not mean that Moscow either will or should simply agree at once to a ceasefire. It will not, because the Russian government has always insisted that certain things have to be firmly nailed down in advance. It should not, because unless key things are agreed and/or excluded, there will be a grave risk that the ceasefire will collapse and the war will resume. These issues will now be discussed in the next round of U.S.-Russia talks, and we must hope that they can be agreed upon with reasonable speed.

Among the things that Russia will have to abandon is Putin’s previous demand that in return for a ceasefire Ukraine withdraw from those parts of the four provinces that Russia claims to have annexed but Ukraine still holds. That is not going to happen, any more than Russia will withdraw from the territory it now holds. The ceasefire line will run where the battle line stops. However, it seems probable that before agreeing to a ceasefire Russia will do its utmost to drive the Ukrainian army from the sliver of Russian territory it holds in Kursk, and it may well achieve this in the coming days.