There’s one key thing that one should know about Ukraine peace talks scheduled to begin in London today, and that is that they will fail. The reason is simple: Volodymyr Zelensky is being asked to concede Russia’s legal possession of the Crimean peninsula which Moscow annexed in 2014. And Ukraine’s president has said, in the most emphatic possible terms, that he will not do it.

Zelensky cannot accept it because such a concession will be political suicide

That’s not because Zelensky is pig-headed, a warmonger, or refuses to accept the reality that there is no way for Ukraine ever to recover the lost peninsula. Zelensky cannot accept because such a concession will be political suicide. It runs the strong risk of triggering a civil war inside Ukraine. And it’s constitutionally impossible for him to do so. Whatever compromises Kyiv could reasonably make on the de facto occupation of its territory, the one red line that Kyiv cannot ever cross is to accept the de jure loss of its own lands.

To put it another way, there was perhaps a diplomatic road towards a Cyprus solution, similar to the de facto political division of the island after the Turkish occupation of 1974 in which neither side recognised the other, yet somehow they eventually found a means to get along. But what Putin is demanding – and what, amazingly, the US seems to be backing – is no less than America rewriting the internationally recognised borders of Europe to suit the Kremlin.

The enormity of that demand is extraordinary on many levels. First, it shows that Trump’s negotiator Steve Witkoff has apparently already struck a deal with Putin during talks in St Petersburg last week, and that the US is now seeking to impose that deal on the Europeans and on Ukraine.

Second, it signals that Putin, apparently giddy with the success in co-opting the Trump administration to his side, seems to have completely lost touch with practical reality. There are many things that Moscow could at this stage, from its position of strength, realistically (though not reasonably) demand of Kyiv. One is formal diplomatic neutrality – in other words a pledge not to join Nato. Another is some kind of long-term armistice that amounts to a recognition that Ukraine’s lost territories are lost in fact, if not in law (the Cyprus solution). Russia could demand the formation of a US administered demilitarised zone around the Zaporizhiye nuclear power plant, as well as sanctions relief and the restoration of banking ties and flight connections.

All those things could and may be on the table in London today. But there are three things that are absolute deal breakers. One is the formal, legal division of Ukraine. Another is restrictions on the size of Ukraine’s armed forces. The third, which hardly needs stating, is that Ukraine will never voluntarily cede any more of its territory – for instance the remainder of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhiye and Kherson provinces – in exchange for peace.

The bitter irony of this unfolding diplomatic train wreck is that Zelensky and the entire political class of Kyiv know full well that Crimea will never return to Ukraine. Indeed during talks in Istanbul in March 2022, Kyiv’s delegates conceded both Ukrainian neutrality and a fudge over the legal status of Crimea, suggesting that final talks over which nation the peninsula belonged to be postponed for fifteen years.

If Kyiv’s negotiators were willing to sell Crimea down the diplomatic river back in 2022, is it reasonable that peace talks should shatter on this same point after three years of bloody war? There’s a key difference in the two cases. The can-kicking fifteen-year deal suggested in March 2022 was a compromise, a mealy-mouthed diplomatic accommodation designed precisely to save Ukraine the national humiliation of forcing a state to accept its own dismemberment. Yet precisely that is what is apparently to be suggested in London this week.

Zelensky touched it with a needle when he spoke to reporters yesterday in Kyiv. “As soon as talks about Crimea and our sovereign territories begin, the talks enter the format that Russia wants to prolong the war,” Zelensky said. “There is nothing to talk about. This violates our Constitution. [Crimea] is our territory, the territory of the people of Ukraine.”

All of which begs a crucial question: given that what the US has put on the table is on its face unacceptable, is Washington in fact setting these talks up to fail, and for Europe and Ukraine to take the blame? It certainly looks that way. Already US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has pulled out of the London talks, leaving Keith Kellogg, a retired US Army lieutenant general, to face the music.

Ominously, on Monday Rubio warned that: “If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on…We need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable.”

Just days before, Trump sounded a similar note. “If, for some reason, one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say, ‘You’re foolish, you’re foolish. You’re horrible people,’ and we’re just going to take a pass,” Trump told reporters on Friday, apparently referencing alleged Ukrainian intransigence.

Today in London, it seems, the rubber will hit the road and the talks will derail. The US demands – which, remarkably, appear to be precisely Putin’s demands – will be formally presented to Ukraine and its remaining European allies. And, as any sane heads in the Trump administration with any knowledge of Ukrainian realities will know already, they will be rejected.

Ukraine did not fight the Russian army to a standstill, inflicting a humiliation every bit as historic as the Finns’ victory in the Winter War of 1939-40, in order to capitulate at the final moment. No, the Ukrainians have not won the war. But neither have the Russians. Putin has captured 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory at vast human cost and devastated it. But he has failed in his basic stated objective of subjugating the country to Moscow’s will.

In this stalemate there are compromises that can and should be made – for instance, Ukrainian neutrality, and even some kind of soft acknowledgement that Kyiv will not attempt to recapture lost territory, an equivalent to Korea’s 38th Parallel arrangement. But what is being offered at the moment is very far from a reasonable compromise. It is Putin’s attempt at imposing victor’s justice in a war he has, mercifully, not yet won. The shocking part is that in this bullying effort the Trump administration appear to be acting the part of Putin’s useful idiots.