Behind closed doors in Moscow, Kyiv, Brussels, Washington, and other capitals, diplomats, elected leaders, and military officers are gearing up for what will likely be a full-court press to find a resolution to Europe's largest land war since World War II.
On the battlefield, momentum has shifted decisively toward Russia, its forces grinding down Ukrainian troops across the 1,100-kilometer front line. It's pummeling Ukraine's energy infrastructure, trying to black out and freeze an exhausted population.
In Western negotiating rooms, sentiment has shifted decisively toward a push to resolve a conflict that has killed or wounded more than 1 million men on both sides over 34 months and counting.
Nowhere else is the shift more apparent than in the election of Donald Trump who, even before his inauguration in January as the next U.S. president, has insisted he will find a way to end the fighting "within 24 hours."
"There's a lot of talk, a lot of noise that some peace talks are imminent," Rosa Balfour, director of Carnegie Europe, a Brussels-based think tank, said on December 12. "We don't really have a plan. Nobody seems to have a plan yet. And of course, the situation on the ground is not in favor of Ukraine at the moment, so it's a very difficult moment."
Here's what we know about the ideas under discussion, for a cease-fire or otherwise.
Blood And Treasure
European and U.S. officials this week took up active discussion about whether Western troops could be sent to Ukraine as peacekeepers, once the shooting stops and a cease-fire or armistice is in place.
French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly floated the idea of 40,000 troops being deployed to Ukraine, and he traveled to Warsaw to discuss the idea with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on December 12.
At a news conference after the meeting, Tusk told reporters that Poland did not intend to send troops to Ukraine, and he said Warsaw would not be forced into doing so.
The proposal for Western peacekeepers also came up five days earlier in Paris, when Macron hosted a meeting that included Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump, who has repeatedly said Europeans should take a more active role in supporting and defending Ukraine, said that he wanted European soldiers on the ground to monitor any cease-fire.
Trump does not want U.S. troops involved, the Journal reported, though he backs some sort of U.S. support for the effort.
Ukraine's leadership, which released a five-point Victory Plan in October, supports Western peacekeepers. But there's little incentive for Moscow to agree, says Oleksandr Khara, a former Ukrainian diplomat.
"Of course, it's good that they're talking about this, but…there's no basis for the beginning of peace talks to begin," Khara, now an expert at the Kyiv-based Center for Defense Strategies, told Current Time.
"Since Russia believes that it can still break Ukraine, and the West has wavered, and Trump is going to put pressure on Ukraine and stop supplying weapons and other aid, why then sit down at the negotiating table when it's possible to seize more Ukrainian territory, kill more Ukrainians, and, in fact...show that there's no point in [arguing] with Russia?" he said.
North Atlantic Allies
One of the Kremlin's original grievances in justifying its February 2022 invasion continues to be one of Kyiv's central demands: NATO membership.
As recently as December 9, Zelenskiy repeated his insistence that membership was paramount.
But many NATO members are cool to the idea of Ukraine's membership.
At a summit in 2008, U.S. and European leaders hashed out a weak compromise that pledged eventual membership but didn't actually set up a road map. Some officials and experts have argued that was a mistake that led to Russia's 2022 invasion.
Since the invasion, NATO has expanded, admitting Sweden and Finland. But admitting Ukraine at present would mean admitting a battered, exhausted country partially occupied by a foreign power, problematic to many alliance members.
The United States is also cool to the idea. In Paris this week, Trump reportedly told Macron and Zelenskiy he didn't support Kyiv's membership bid, according to the Journal.
Deferring membership is "capitulation to Russian demands, and this will be a massive win for Putin," Mick Ryan, a retired Australian major general, wrote in a blog post. "This will justify in the minds of Putin, and authoritarians like him, that the Russian aggression against Ukraine has worked because keeping Ukraine out of NATO was a core demand of Putin before the war."
Buffer Zones
Barring some unforeseen event, Ukraine is all but certain to lose territory to Russia, which currently occupies around 20 percent of Ukrainian land. That includes nearly all of the eastern Donbas region, plus the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.
For most observers, setting up some sort of no-man's-land. The demilitarized zone that has separated North and South Korea for decades is a model for many.
Putin floated the idea in March after winning reelection.
"I do not exclude that...we will be forced at some point, when we deem it appropriate, to create a certain 'sanitary zone' in the territories today under the Kyiv regime," he said.
For Ukraine, the tricky part is where that line will be drawn -- and how much of its economic base it will lose. Much of Ukraine's mining and heavy industry is in the Donbas occupied by Russia; and about 8 million hectares of Ukrainian farmland is occupied, according to one estimate.
In an audacious move, Ukraine invaded Russian territory in August, seizing part of the Kursk region. Zelenskiy later said the aim was to create a buffer zone and to push Russian missiles further away from Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkiv.
Since that time, however, Russia has ground down Ukrainian troops, taking back nearly half of the Kursk territory initially seized by Ukraine.
Also tricky with such a zone -- buffer, sanitary, demilitarized -- is surveillance and verification: what each side, or the peacekeepers, would be allowed to do to keep an eye on the other. The explosive evolution of drone warfare could potentially complicate this.
The Elephant In The Room
The biggest question mark for future talks may be Ukraine's largest weapons supplier: the United States, and the incoming Trump administration.
Trump has for years complained about the amount of U.S. weaponry sent by the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden and has suggested Zelenskiy was a con man. He has also said that his skills as a businessman and real estate developer make him a negotiator capable of reaching a deal with Putin.
Trump's point man is Keith Kellogg, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who advised Trump's vice president during his first term.
In a widely cited paper he co-authored before Trump's November election, Kellogg laid out a plan including freezing the front lines and using both sticks and carrots to get Kyiv and Moscow to negotiate.
For Kyiv, for example, the sticks mean cutting off U.S. weapons. For Moscow, that means things like flooding global markets with oil to drive down prices for the commodity, which Moscow relies heavily on for revenues.
Carrots for Moscow would be lifting Western sanctions or delaying Ukraine's NATO ambitions. For Kyiv, it would be continued military aid, funding for reconstruction, or even nonrecognition of Russian-occupied territories -- similar to what Washington did over four decades regarding the Soviet annexation of the three Baltic states.
"We tell the Ukrainians, 'You've got to come to the table, and if you don't come to the table, support from the United States will dry up," Kellogg told Reuters in June. "And you tell Putin, 'He's got to come to the table, and if you don't come to the table, then we'll give Ukrainians everything they need to kill you in the field.'"
The Kremlin itself -- impatient with an invasion that was supposed to be over in just days and that has thrown its economy out of whack -- has signaled openness to a new, Trump approach.
But there are doubters.
"We don't think [Putin] is serious about negotiations," a senior NATO official, speaking on condition that he not be identified publicly, told RFE/RL last week.
"He may be willing to talk, but as long as he believes that he is winning, there is no incentive for negotiations. And he continues to believe that time is in his favor."
