At this point, it’s virtually impossible to suggest the Kremlin’s serious about finding its way to a compromise that stops the fighting in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin spent the last 12 months buying time, which in this case means stringing Donald Trump along, a charade so transparently disingenuous that even Trump — an avowed fan of Putin’s — lost patience with it.

Notwithstanding Steve Witkoff’s best (read: shameful) efforts to placate the Kremlin, it’s very hard to discern what, exactly, would constitute an acceptable peace proposal for Moscow.

If we’re honest, Putin won’t be satisfied with anything less than the whole of Ukraine or, failing a formal conquest, the installation of a puppet government in Kyiv that forswears any inclination (never mind ambition) to more closely tether Ukraine’s security, economic and cultural fate to Europe.

In other words: This war’s going to continue even if there’s a ceasefire arrangement. On Sunday, following a harrowing day in Kyiv where two people were killed and dozens injured by Russian missiles and drones, Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Florida to meet Trump at the “winter White House.”

After receiving input from European leaders and Mark Carney, Zelensky came to Mar-a-Lago prepared to advance a modified version of a Trump-endorsed, multi-point ceasefire plan.

To be sure, Zelensky isn’t any more thrilled with the terms than Moscow. Rather, he’s trying to box the Kremlin in such that Trump can’t make any more excuses for Putin. Or, more to the point, such that Trump’s again aware of the extent to which he’s being played for a fool by Moscow.

For example, Zelensky’s expressed a willingness to pull some of his troops from areas Ukraine still controls in the Donbas in the interest of setting up a demilitarized zone. Russia would have to move some of its troops back too, but that hardly seems like an unreasonable ask.

In addition, Zelensky indicated he’ll call an election as soon as Ukraine’s security is guaranteed, a prospect that undermines Putin’s (unironic) claim that Zelensky presides as an iron-fisted, inflexible dictator, a narrative Trump (unironically) amplified.

I could go on, but I think you get the point: Zelensky’s strategy is to leave Putin with no plausible deniability and no excuses. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say the deal on offer to Moscow would’ve been unthinkable to Kyiv in 2022, and looks attractive even now, which is to say it’s favorable to the Kremlin even in the context of the Russian military’s grinding battlefield advance.

The issue is that Putin doesn’t want a favorable offer. He wants a total victory, and while he knows that’s infeasible in the short-term — assuming Ukraine continues to demonstrate anything like the tenacity they’ve shown over nearly four years of war, it’d take years for Russia to capture the capital — he learned from the Crimea experiment that as long as Ukraine doesn’t have security guarantees, he can continue to pursue a covetous agenda towards the country.

Any ceasefire proposal that binds Ukraine’s fate to the US or Europe is thereby unacceptable for Putin, as is the prospect of a European peacekeeping mission that entails putting boots on Ukrainian soil. He wants free rein to restart the war under the pretext of Ukrainian provocations (Russia’s famous for creating such pretexts), and that won’t be possible if there are European troops roaming around Kyiv or, for example, if US contractors are involved in the post-war operation of power plants and mining sites.

And, so, Moscow will almost surely reject whatever plan does (or doesn’t) come out of Zelensky’s Sunday meeting with Trump. Putin may be running out of excuses, but the West’s running out of leverage. Everything Russian is already sanctioned and Putin’s proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s more than willing to gamble his country’s future on a revanchist lark.

Russia’s doing ok as a pariah state, and although the war in Ukraine’s a second-hand liability for Xi Jinping, Beijing has a lot of experience managing unruly, militaristic, nuclear-armed hermit kingdoms. At least Moscow has energy to offer, which is more than you can say for Pyongyang.