Zelenskyy: Aspettiamo un cessate il fuoco completo e duraturo, a partire da domani, per fornire le basi necessarie per la diplomazia. Non ha senso prolungare gli omicidi. E giovedì aspetterò Putin a Türkiye. Personalmente. Spero che questa volta i russi non cercheranno scuse.

Hopefully they negotiate peace.

IMO the most likely solution will be Russia leaves Ukraine.

The occupied region becomes under a ‘new administration’ managed by the UK or a coalition of EU countries, whereby they are an appeals court to ‘apply’ the rules of the peace deal. But their court will be non-binding.

Legally the region is under Ukrainian authority so they surrender no actual territory, they are only agreeing to hear out an international non-binding appeals court on the issues negotiated in the peace deal.

This allows Russia to claim they are protecting Russian speakers/eliminating Nazis, by putting it into the peace agreement. The non-binding court can respond to complaints, which can signal if the international community supports or doesn’t Ukraine’s actions. I.e. if there was a court appeal on access to schools, the international appeals court could say ‘we find the coverage reasonable considering circumstance, but encourage Ukraine to maintain or improve access to Russian language educaiton’. Or if there is a serious problem, like say band of Ukrainian paramilitary forces are going around murderering and intimidating local Russian speakers, the appeals court could say ‘There is a serious problem with violence against Russian speaking Ukrainians in South East Ukraine and we encourage the Ukrainian government and international community to take steps to reduce this violence’. ETC.

Technically anyone can do this anyway, so it’s literally nothing. But the Russians can claim they fought the whole world and their allies betrayed them. They can also claim the west hates Russia and point to the rulings of the court. Hell China could be on there as well to indicate how strongly they would support renewing the conflict. Then the appeals court is really more like an international barometer of who will support Ukraine if the conflict restarts.

Anyway, that’s my bet. Something like that.
Possibly I’m too optimistic, but it can possibly be twisted into a symbolic victory for Russia.

For example, maybe Russia negotiates for the members of their military to be allowed to settle in the occupied region of Ukraine, which would flip to Ukraine and hope they become Ukraine’s problem. Then this becomes a bit of a gambit/source of tension in Ukraine as treating them poorly could provoke a war again later, treating them well would piss off the local population. But it would be better than explicit warfare.