Impasse over land-grab in Ukraine

A long time ago a very sensible chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said that the war in Ukraine would come to an end only through a diplomatic deal and that such a deal would inevitably require compromise on both sides. Are we now at a pivotal point where a deal is at least theoretically on the cards? Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are to meet in Alaska on Friday to go through the possible deals and all of them will include some form of land-swap, or land-grab, to put it more honestly. Sources from within the Trump admnistration have said that Trump will be ready to accept the reality that to get a brokered aggrement, Putin will have to be allowed to hang on to some of the territory his troops have seized both before and after the February 24 2022 invasion. In other words, the whole of Crimea, annexed illegally in 2014, and much of the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, some of it grabbed before 2022 and most of it since the invasion. This has been in Trump's thinking ever since he promised to end the war within 24 hours of taking office for his second term in the White House. But President Zelensky who has not been invited to the Alaska summit, has now said, as he has always said, that no peace can ever be achieved if the aggressors - ie Moscow - are gifted chunks of Ukrainian land. Europe has always said the same thing, so there won't be any European leaders who will agree to what Trump appears to have in mind. The Alaska summit will, therefore, be a total waste of time. Or will it? Zelensky has understandably taken his position on land because it is his country which is the victim of Moscow's aggression and he cannot voluntarily agree to hand Russia the land which his army has fought over so hard and with such sacrifice. But the reality is that if he wants "peace" he will need to compromise. There will be no deal without compromise. What Zelensky needs to focus on is what he can get in exchange from Moscow if he concedes some territory. Russia MUST be seen to have compromised as well. Even if it's not on land it will have to be something else that is important to Ukraine, such as its survival as an independent country and protected by some form of Western-backed structure.