To anyone who’s been a diplomat, the choreography of Donald Trump’s White House meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky was bizarre. Its purpose was Zelensky’s signature of the US-Ukraine rare earths agreement, so the sensible disaster-avoidance strategy would have been a private meeting followed by a signing in front of the cameras, with handshakes, back-slapping and perhaps a few media questions. By contrast, it should have been obvious to White House staff that a 50-minute Trump-Zelensky meeting in front of the media before the signing risked highlighting differences and was asking for trouble. Predictably, tempers flared as Zelensky argued with and interrupted Trump and Vance, who didn’t respond with the good-humoured tolerance they might have shown towards the leader of a brave, wronged country. A private meeting would have avoided Zelensky’s ugly ejection from the White House and the derailment of Trump’s peace efforts.

Trump deserves praise for making the first concerted efforts in almost three years to end the Ukraine war. These efforts obviously got off to a rocky start, with Trump wrongly accusing Zelensky of starting the war and of being a dictator (he later withdrew the latter insult) and then the terrible punitive step of suspending military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine.

Trump could nevertheless yet produce a deal to end the war. This was a key campaign promise. And Trump repeatedly says one of the defining legacies of Joe Biden was his abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taleban. He won’t similarly surrender Ukraine to Putin – including for the green light that would send China on Taiwan. Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, which he won’t get for emulating Chamberlain at Munich. The narrative among much of the media that Trump isn’t prepared to put pressure on Putin as well as Zelensky is simply incorrect, as his threat of new sanctions and tariffs in response to Putin’s latest brutal bombing of Ukraine shows. Republican Senator Rick Scott, former governor of Florida, says Trump wants Russia to lose and Ukraine to win.

While parts of Trump’s peace plan remain unclear, it would be a peace for land deal, with Ukraine barred from joining Nato. Putin would keep the 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory he occupies – Crimea and the four eastern provinces (Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Kherson), probably minus areas held by the Ukrainians. But Putin would be denied his original central ambition of putting Ukraine back under Moscow’s control.

Putin keeping territory seized through violence is a terrible compromise. But most Ukrainians now think that continuing the carnage would be worse. Earlier in the war, it was reasonable to hope that Russian forces might be driven out, and/or that Putin’s regime might collapse. Three years on, with stalemate and half a million Ukrainian casualties, a Gallup poll shows 52 per cent of the country (in areas controlled by Kyiv) want a negotiated end to the war, and are open to territorial concessions to achieve that.

Most Ukrainians would now probably accept the loss of Crimea, part of Russia until 1954 and since the second world war majority ethnic-Russian. Other compromises would be more traumatic, especially the surrender of the other four provinces, majority Ukrainian at least until recently. But all signs point to Zelensky being prepared to accept a peace deal if what remains of Ukraine can be offered genuine security. A secure rump Ukraine would have every chance of moving on from traumatic partition and thriving like South Korea.

As far as Putin is concerned, Trump is offering less than the victory he craves. And yet he’s probably desperate to end the war and could decide Trump’s offer is his best chance of achieving that. The conflict his military told him would be over in three days has been a catastrophic failure, with only the main Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine and Crimea occupied, an estimated 850,000 Russian casualties, humiliating and unprecedented Ukrainian military attacks on Russian territory, huge economic damage and the country reduced internationally to a sanctioned pariah. And far from stopping Nato’s eastern expansion, his war terrified two other neighbours, Finland and Sweden, into abandoning long histories of neutrality and hugely expanding Nato’s presence along Russia’s western border.

Despite Putin’s probably strong interest in a peace deal, he’d need to be able to spin it as a victory. Peace would allow fresh Ukrainian elections, which he’s demanded. He’d continue to fantasise about engineering a pro-Kremlin regime in Kyiv. But with Ukrainian hatred of Russia deeper than ever, he’s probably blown any chance of that.

Security guarantees for Ukraine will likely prove to be the biggest hurdle to a peace deal. Trump says Ukraine’s future security will be in Europe’s hands and supports the Anglo-French offer of a peacekeeping ‘coalition of the willing’. But given fierce Russian objections to any Nato presence in Ukraine, the plan looks like a non-starter. Trump’s line that a substantial US business and mining presence in Ukraine would deter Russian aggression is a creative way of getting around Moscow’s red lines, but would probably be an inadequate security guarantee for Kyiv. The Ukrainians will probably also insist on some kind of international peacekeeping force.

The treatment of Ukraine has been the most shameful chapter in the West’s post-Cold War history. In 1994, the country was persuaded by the US and the UK to sign the Budapest Memorandum, under which, in return for giving up its nuclear weapons, Russia promised respect for Ukraine’s borders and not to use force against it. Putin’s later invasions showed how trustworthy he is. In the decade after the Budapest agreement, Nato, in addition to admitting Moscow’s former satellites, welcomed the Baltic states, like Ukraine ex-Soviet and with large Russian minorities. It was never made clear why Ukraine wasn’t also offered Nato membership. Had that happened, Putin would never have dared attack.

Trump has left open the possibility that his peace efforts might fail – a deal, he has said, would be ‘fairly soon or it won’t be at all’. But after the recent setbacks, there seems to be renewed momentum towards peace talks. We should hope Trump succeeds and that at least the greater part of much-wronged Ukraine can look forward to a secure and happier future.