The collision between diplomatic outreach and military force rarely reveals itself as starkly as it does this week. On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner will sit across from Vladimir Putin in Moscow for talks the Kremlin itself requested. The meeting comes as Russian forces mount one of the most intensive aerial campaigns against Ukraine's civilian infrastructure since the war began, leaving cities dark and populations freezing in the depths of winter.
Witkoff frames the moment optimistically, claiming a peace deal is "90% complete" following what he described as "very positive" discussions at Davos. Yet the gap between this diplomatic confidence and the military reality on the ground exposes the central tension in any negotiation conducted under conditions of active coercion. The question is not whether talks are happening, but whether they represent genuine movement toward settlement or merely the continuation of war by diplomatic means.
The architecture of apparent progress
The U.S. delegation arrives in Moscow armed with a 20-point peace framework dispatched to Russian officials in early January, a streamlined version of an earlier 28-point proposal that gained no traction. According to Witkoff, the outstanding issue is straightforward: "land deals." He has termed this the "800 lb elephant in the room," a characterization that dramatically understates its significance.
Territory is not a final detail to be resolved after everything else falls into place. It is the entire substance of the conflict. From a realpolitik perspective, a negotiation that has resolved "90%" of issues but left territorial disposition untouched has resolved precisely nothing. The control of land determines security arrangements, resource access, population governance, and the strategic depth of competing powers. Everything else—humanitarian corridors, prisoner exchanges, economic frameworks—is ancillary to this core question of sovereignty and control.
While U.S. officials have described talks with Ukraine as "substantive" and "productive," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has expressed skepticism about Russia's genuine desire for peace, focusing instead on their ongoing missile and drone attacks. Zelenskyy has indicated he would travel to Davos for a signing only if documents were ready, and has emphasized the need for clarity on post-war security guarantees rather than echoing the U.S. assessment of a near-complete deal. A planned meeting in Istanbul between Zelenskyy and Witkoff's special envoy fell through after Zelenskyy declined to attend. This sequencing is telling. Kyiv remains cautious about the diplomatic process, dependent on developments between Washington and Moscow. The active belligerent with the most at stake has significant concerns about the shape of any emerging settlement.
Members are reading: Why Moscow's simultaneous escalation and diplomatic engagement reveals a calculated strategy to fracture Western unity and dictate settlement terms.
Assessing the probability of breakthrough
The confluence of diplomatic engagement and military escalation points toward a specific outcome: continued maneuvering rather than imminent resolution. The notion that territorial disposition—the core driver of the entire conflict—will be resolved in a single meeting or even a concentrated negotiating phase is inconsistent with the strategic stakes involved.
Russia has invested enormous resources and absorbed significant costs to secure territorial gains in eastern and southern Ukraine. Those gains represent tangible strategic assets: land corridors, resource deposits, and buffer zones. Moscow is unlikely to relinquish them based on diplomatic pressure from an administration whose commitment to Ukraine's territorial integrity remains ambiguous. Conversely, any Ukrainian government that formally cedes sovereign territory faces potential domestic collapse and the delegitimization of its entire wartime narrative.
The most probable near-term outcome is that talks continue, plans circulate, and both sides use the diplomatic process to advance strategic objectives. For Russia, engagement with Washington signals great power status and creates opportunities to weaken transatlantic cohesion. For the United States, the talks demonstrate active crisis management and provide domestic political cover for shifting Ukraine policy. For Ukraine, the process offers hope of relief but little actual agency in determining the terms.
What Thursday's meeting will definitively establish is not the contours of peace, but the architecture of future negotiations: bilateral discussions between Moscow and Washington, with Kyiv in a consultative rather than determinative role, and European capitals watching from the sidelines. That structure itself represents a significant diplomatic outcome, regardless of what specific proposals are exchanged across the table. The question remains whether we are witnessing the prelude to settlement or simply the next iteration of a conflict whose resolution remains determined by force, not diplomacy.
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