A meeting between Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyj and his American counterpart Donald Trump in Washington last week is reported to have gone heated.
American is said to have put forward proposals that largely agree with Vladimir Putin's.
Zelenskyj and allied leaders in Europe write in a joint response that they do not accept the demands in their entirety.
Fredrik Wesslau, researcher at the Center for Eastern European Studies and with a background in the EU mission in Ukraine, gets stuck on the formulation that a negotiation "shall be based on the current contact line".
For what Trump seems to have proposed is that Ukraine should withdraw from Donetsk and Luhansk entirely, which is exactly what Putin has demanded. And it is probably what Putin conveyed to Trump in the phone call beforehand.
"Taking advantage of his desire"
In this way, Russia can lay its hands on the territories before the negotiations have even begun, Wesslau assesses.
Russia is taking advantage of Trump's strong desire to broker peace by forcing certain concessions from the Ukrainian side, he says.
Trump said over the weekend that he wants an immediate ceasefire where the parties "stay where they are".
Ukraine has for some time been open to freezing the frontline provided the country's security is guaranteed. And together with European allies, it has been clear that the occupied areas should not be allowed to become formally Russian.
But there is still a certain pragmatism: that Ukraine accepts that it does not try to take back these territories now and that it is willing to in practice accept that Russia controls them. But then they want robust security guarantees from Europe and the USA.
Lost the cards
The signal to the President of the USA is that the other allies do not think that Ukraine should withdraw from the whole of Donbass, according to Fredrik Wesslau.
Signaling that Russia can continue to control parts of Ukraine is not to reveal the cards before sitting down at the negotiating table, as he sees it.
Rather, it is the USA that has lost a lot of cards to Russia.
