Something subtle is shifting beneath the noise.
High above the Atlantic, aboard Air Force One, Donald Trump offered a calm but revealing observation. After years of hard positions and public defiance, he believes both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky now want a deal. Not a press conference deal. Not a slogan. A real one.
That alone is worth pausing on.
For much of this conflict, the defining feature has been refusal. Refusal to bend. Refusal to concede. Refusal to even acknowledge the other side’s red lines. Trump’s assessment suggests that phase may be fading, replaced by something quieter and more uncomfortable: negotiation.
But wanting a deal and being able to reach one are not the same thing.
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The fault line remains territory. Not abstract territory, but specific land carved by rivers, roads, neighborhoods, and history. Trump described it as complex, and that word does more work than it seems. Borders here are not clean lines on a map. They cut through lived spaces, identities, and competing narratives of legitimacy.
Moscow’s position has not softened. Russian officials continue to argue that any lasting peace requires Ukraine to withdraw from Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye, regions Russia claims voted to join it in 2022. Added to that are demands for Ukrainian neutrality, demilitarization, and what the Kremlin calls denazification. These are not minor asks. They are structural.
Kyiv, meanwhile, has drawn its own hard boundary. Zelensky has repeatedly ruled out territorial concessions. For him, giving up land is not a bargaining chip but a line that cannot be crossed without unraveling the state itself. Earlier this month, Trump openly suggested that Ukraine may now be less prepared to compromise than Russia, a remark that quietly reframed the usual Western narrative.
Behind the scenes, the diplomatic machinery is humming again.
Trump has welcomed the idea of three-way talks between Russia, the United States, and Ukraine in the United Arab Emirates. Not because meetings guarantee progress, but because silence guarantees stagnation. Any time adversaries sit at the same table, something changes, even if no agreement is signed.
That same week, a US delegation met late into the night with Putin in Moscow. The Kremlin described the discussion as frank and substantive, language often used when real disagreements are aired rather than smoothed over. Once again, territory was identified as the hinge point on which everything turns.
Zelensky, for his part, met Trump on the margins of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Expectations were high. Economic recovery frameworks and post-war security arrangements were reportedly ready. Yet nothing was signed. The Ukrainian president left without a deal, later acknowledging that territorial questions remain unresolved and may be pushed into a broader trilateral format.
This is what an inflection point looks like when stripped of drama.
No breakthroughs. No announcements. Just a growing recognition, on all sides, that the war cannot end without confronting its hardest truths. The question now is not whether Putin and Zelensky want a deal. It is what kind of future each is willing to accept in order to reach one.
And whether the world is prepared for what that deal might actually require.
