In June last year, Russia’s Vladimir Putin proposed a deal in which Ukraine would pull its forces from the areas it controlled in the four provinces in southeastern Ukraine that had been invaded by Russian forces and then annexed in 2022. That would definitively resolve (not merely freeze) the war, Putin said, and Russia, Ukraine, and Europe would then “promptly” embark on extended negotiations on other issues.

The proposal was a non-starter not least because Ukraine controls considerable swaths of territory in two of the four provinces, including their capital cities. Today, Russia seems to have reduced its demands, indicating that Ukraine need withdraw only from the other two provinces, combining this with a swap in which Russia would withdraw from a few smaller Ukrainian areas to the north.

This seems likely to be a non-starter as well, however. Some of that land, though substantially depopulated, includes considerable fortress areas and Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, contends that his country’s constitution forbids his turning over land that way. He also has a problem with public opinion: polls suggest that, while half of Ukrainians in 2024 had come to support a negotiated end to the war, only half of those said they were “open to” territorial concessions to get that result.

But there is another issue as well, one that Zelensky is likely to be well aware of and is especially mind-concentrating. Ukraine’s former foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, laid this out in an interview in April on American television (at 32 minutes). No Ukrainian leader, he candidly pointed out, “will be in a position to sign a paper that legally gives any part—any piece of territory—to Russia or puts it under international control or anything else.” This, he calmly added, is “for a very simple reason: because that person will know that the risk of him being assassinated by Ukrainian patriots will surge immediately.”

Putin’s proposal to end the fighting could still be accepted. However, any ceasefire (or armistice as it has been put of late) would have to be set up in place, and any formal territorial issues would be included in the subsequent negotiations Putin proposed. These could go on, like the ones in Korea that ended the fighting there in 1953, for decades.