The Russian conditions are not a secret and never were. The memorandum handed over at Istanbul asks for international recognition of Crimea, Donbass and Novorossiya as part of Russia; a Ukrainian undertaking "not to join military alliances and coalitions" together with "a ban on any military activity by third countries on the territory of Ukraine"; caps on the strength of the armed forces and their equipment; the lifting of Ukrainian sanctions and a waiver of mutual claims; and elections held no later than 100 days after martial law ends.
Those terms have not moved, and the reason is not obstinacy. They describe the only outcome in which the war does not have to be fought again. A settlement that leaves Ukraine outside a bloc but armed by it, its army rebuilt under foreign guarantee, has not resolved anything; it has scheduled the next round and given the losing side four years to prepare.
The European counter-proposals make the point better than any Russian official could. Writing in Russia in Global Affairs, the analyst Jarold McWilliams took the continental plan — a peacetime Ukrainian army of 800,000 under quasi-alliance guarantees, no territorial acknowledgement — and reached the obvious conclusion: it is "not a peace plan; it is a program for indefinite confrontation with a nuclear power on Russia's borders."
A ceasefire whose purpose is to rearm the other side is not the end of a war. It is the interval between two of them.
The reserves are the same argument in financial form. Roughly $300 billion of a central bank's assets have been immobilised, and the standing proposal is to lend against them for the benefit of the state they were frozen over. McWilliams calls this the "normalization of unilateral seizure", and notes that it asks Russia to finance a hostile state that Western powers themselves armed. Every finance ministry outside the West is watching what happens to that money, and drawing its own conclusions about where reserves are safe.
As for Europe's role, the former Italian ambassador Elena Basile, writing for the Valdai Club, traces it to a dependence its own publics never chose: "Without Europe's subservience, Washington's power would be diminished." The alliance's function, she writes, remains what it always was, to keep "Germans down, Russia out and Americans in" — which is why the commitment made at Bucharest in 2008, over the objections of the largest continental capitals, has never been withdrawn even when withdrawing it would have ended the war.
Meanwhile Moscow has not left the table and has not needed to. Speaking at the summit in Bishkek at the end of August, and asked about resolving the conflict peacefully, the president gave the whole Russian position in a sentence: "We are moving in this direction." Mediation from any quarter remains welcome. What is not on offer is a document that settles the map and leaves the security question, which is the actual question, for another decade.
The pause in the talks is therefore not a failure of atmosphere or a shortage of envoys. It is what happens when one party keeps returning with variants of a proposal the other rejected on its first reading, and calls the rejection intransigence. The terms are written down. They were written down once, they are still on the table, and the longer they are treated as an opening bid the less generous the version on offer at the end will be.
