The much-discussed disastrous and unprecedented public argument between presidents Trump and Zelenskyy on February 28th, and the creeping loss of territory in Ukraine have made the need for a resolution urgent. Making it even more urgent is the possibility of a wider international war in Europe and beyond - what Trump revealed truthfully, albeit while falsely casting the entire blame on Zelenskyy in the infamous White House meeting - only adds to the urgency.
The time to have stopped Russia was shortly after the 2014 de facto annexation of Crimea and before the closely subsequent invasion of the Donetsk region. Arguably, Russia had to stabilize the Sevastopol port - Russia's largest military warm-water port - during the color revolution 2 weeks after the Sochi Olympics or risk a siege in Crimea and direct attacks on support personnel of Russians in that area. Only a puppet Ukrainian previous administration had allowed Russia to continue occupying Ukraine's Sevastopol after the fall of the USSR but that vanished quickly, without warning, and without clarity what would come next in 2014.
It's gone on too long now for Russia to withdraw from the southeast of Ukraine - the only connection to Crimea before the Kersh bridge was built years later, itself a tenuous connection that has already been attacked by Ukraine. See current war map here.
Unfortunately, there is no combination of rivers or mountains that would form a natural or defensible geographical new border between "new" Ukraine and an expanded Russia, i.e. the frontlines are indefensible and have been laid with over a million land mines instead, which, it's estimated will take decades to clear (I modeled a unique anti-mine drone, so I know something about landmines from that research).
President Zelenskyy has suggested a buffer zone. I think he actually does have some negotiating power about that, but it'll have to be in Ukrainian territory and he's unwilling to consider that. It would be like the Korean DMZ, barely stable, heavily patrolled and extensively cleared and mined for the foreseeable future.
There might be an agreement for the U.S./Euro region to maintain the new "border" against future Russian incursion, but not NATO; a new peacekeeping force. Just agreeing on that, as well as the fate of Sevastopol, could take weeks or months, and time is not on Ukraine's side, as Trump has correctly, if unsympathetically, pointed out.
Life, and war, is deeply unfair. But we should not fall in love with lines on a map. dozens of countries have formed, broken up, reformed, since the world's largest nation-recognizing body - the U.N. - was formed. No one can defend the indefensible, but agreements over new realities are still possible.
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