After three and a half years of gruelling, brutal attritional war, with casualties numbering in the millions, serious diplomacy to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict and secure peace in Europe is underway. That is the chief outcome of the meeting of US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, last Friday. Trump’s meeting on Monday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and several European leaders marked another step in what could prove to be an intense set of negotiations over the next several weeks.

Many, perhaps most, Western commentators, blinded by their loathing of Trump, cannot see the possibilities or the probabilities. Their focus is on how the US leader could betray Ukraine, fracture the Transatlantic alliance, and hand Putin, the aggressor, an unseemly strategic victory. Trump’s effusive reception of Putin, they stress, ended Western efforts to isolate him diplomatically and presented him unwarrantedly as the equal of the leader of the world’s pre-eminent power. Russia’s media is already exalting in in its country’s regained status as a superpower.

In the pundits’ view, the greatest cause for concern arises from Trump abandoning his earlier insistence that Putin agree to an immediate ceasefire or face devastating sanctions. Putin appears to have persuaded Trump that a comprehensive peace agreement, which deals with the root causes of the conflict, must precede any ceasefire. That allows Putin to press his battlefield advantage to gain an edge at the negotiating table – and that is the very reason why the Ukrainians and their Western backers have long insisted on a ceasefire as a precondition for peace talks.

Trump’s acquiescence, however, marks not so much a betrayal of Ukraine as an acceptance of reality. Ukraine and its western backers lack the means to compel Putin to accept a ceasefire.  Moreover, it is hardly unusual for combat and negotiations to proceed simultaneously – that occurred during America’s wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. The real question is how much Trump understands the actual process.

Negotiating a comprehensive peace deal is not a matter of days or even a few weeks. It will take months, probably years, to negotiate the details of devilishly complex issues, which include not only the Russia-Ukraine war but also the broader related matters of European security and US-Russian strategic stability. What could be developed in a relatively short period is a framework agreement that lays out the principles and parameters of a final settlement, including on the critical questions at the centre of current talks: security guarantees for Ukraine and the disposition of disputed territory. Once agreement is reached, a ceasefire could be put in place and talks immediately commenced on elaborating the details. That is a viable way forward, which would meet the needs of both Russia and Ukraine, and it should be Trump’s immediate goal.

The United States is well-positioned to push for a framework agreement. The reality is that both belligerents need to end the war as soon as possible. The case for Ukraine is obvious. The war is already a demographic catastrophe. Kyiv is having trouble mobilising forces for the front. The millions of Ukrainians who have fled abroad are less likely to return, the longer the war rages on.  The costs of reconstruction, already in the hundreds of billions of dollars, will steadily mount. Less widely acknowledged, but of great import nevertheless, continuing warfare erodes the foundations of Ukraine’s fragile democracy, as it fosters the hyper-centralisation of power to deal with urgent national security threats.

Kyiv will have to make major, distasteful concessions to end the war; that is the inevitable fate of the weaker power. It has already acknowledged that it cannot liberate all the territory Russia has seized through military force. It will have to reconcile itself to the de facto loss of about one fifth of its territory for a considerable period, perhaps forever. It will also have to abandon its quest to join NATO. But it can still achieve what is essential: the preservation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence, including the domestic military capacity and Western security guarantees it needs to deter renewed Russian aggression, and the ability to further its ambitions to join the European Union.

The case for Russia is less straightforward, yet also compelling, despite Putin’s insistence that Russia will achieve all its war goals. The human costs are already horrific – more than a million casualties, many times more than in any Russian conflict since the end of the Second World War.  The war effort is straining the economy. Russian economic officials are warning of a looming recession to be followed by a long period of stagflation. Russia is foregoing the investment in the cutting-edge technologies it needs to compete effectively on the global stage in the future. Each day the war continues, the further Russia falls behind the United States and China, and arguably Europe and India, as a world power.

Moreover, the war remains a formidable obstacle to the normalisation of relations with the United States. Putin seeks that, not only because it could open up significant commercial horizons for Russia, especially in the Arctic, but because it would enable Putin to rebalance relations with China, which clearly has the upper hand in bilateral relations given Russia’s isolation from the West.

In these circumstances, waging war makes little strategic logic, especially when Russia can get most of what it wants at the negotiating table, including Ukraine’s renunciation of ambitions to join NATO and de facto recognition of its seizure of Ukrainian land.

This strategic situation creates opportunities for Trump to make good on his promise to end the war, but he must play his hand carefully. He will remain the West’s critical interlocutor with Putin. He needs to be sensitive to the Russian’s goals and capabilities, while he aligns to the greatest extent possible US, Ukrainian, and European positions. The greater unity among these three parties, the greater Trump’s leverage with Putin. In that sense, Monday’s meeting with Ukrainian and European leaders was a major success, even if Western unity is far from complete.

Contrary to prevailing Ukrainian and European views, Trump does not necessarily need to raise the pressure on Putin with further sanctions. The critical step is to demonstrate that he is prepared to sustain support for Ukraine for the long term and thereby disabuse Putin of his conviction that time is on his side. And he needs to continue the dialogue with Putin, making clear his desire to normalise relations while underscoring that normalisation is not possible without progress on settling the war.

Above all, Trump will have be patient and persistent. His threats to abandon his peacemaking efforts are not credible. He has already staked too much publicly on his ability to use his dealmaking skills to bring peace in Europe. Neither can he pressure Ukraine to make concessions that border on surrender and hope to win accolades at home or a Nobel Peace Prize. He needs an outcome that preserves Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence – on this he must defy Putin. He has the leverage to do that, if only he applies it with skill.

Peace is not at hand by any stretch of the imagination. But for the first time since Putin launched his war of aggression against Ukraine, the dim outlines of a way forward to a diplomatic resolution are finally emerging. Trump deserves credit for that. The critical question is whether he is enough of statesman to follow the path to its end. We should find out in the next few weeks.