The U.S. says the 'ball is now in Russia's court.' But what really happens if Putin agrees to a ceasefire?
Ukraine has agreed to 30-day ceasefire, but Russia says it needs details before responding
After nine hours of talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, officials emerged to announce that Ukraine had agreed to a U.S. proposal for an interim 30-day ceasefire and that "the ball is now in Russia's court."
While the announcement was billed as a step toward peace, and marked an abrupt turn in acrimonious relations between Washington and Kyiv, Russia has not commented on the proposal and said it is waiting to hear the details from U.S. officials.
U.S. President Donald Trump is expecting to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the next few days, and Steve Witkoff, a special envoy for the Trump administration will be visiting Moscow this week.
Getting Russia to agree to a short-tem truce, which Putin has previously said he is against, will be a challenge. Russia holds the momentum on the battlefield, including in the Kursk region where troops are rapidly pushing Ukrainian forces back and retaking Russian settlements.
U.S. and Ukrainian officials have not released any details about what the ceasefire would entail or how it would be monitored. It's also not clear how soon it could come into effect if Russia did agree to it.
"For a ceasefire to be durable, the sides will have to hammer out a wide range of technical details," said Walter Kemp, a senior strategy adviser at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
"But an interim cessation of hostilities could open the way for negotiations to end the war."
As the agreement between the U.S. and Ukraine was announced, Washington confirmed that it had also lifted its suspension of military aid and intelligence sharing for Ukraine. This marked a sharp shift from just a week ago, when the now-notorious confrontation at the White House between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy upended the two countries' long-standing alliance.
Much depends on Russia's response
But the path to secure a truce remains fragile, fraught and driven by political leverage.
Kemp says pressure from Washington will now have to be applied to Moscow, in order to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree.
If he does, the challenge becomes how to implement a ceasefire and make it last.
If he doesn't, experts say the U.S. may focus on smaller "confidence building" agreements in an effort to build trust between both sides.
"I think it's more realistic to have some kind of de-escalation measures than a ceasefire," said Kemp. "It doesn't have to be that there's a complete ceasefire," he said. "You can talk and shoot at the same time."
Ukraine had earlier suggested a partial ceasefire, which would include a halt in attacks by sea and by air, but U.S. officials pushed further for a cessation of hostilities along the entire frontline.
While officials spoke briefly after the talks, they did not elaborate on how a ceasefire, even a temporary one, would be enforced and who would be responsible for monitoring it, and whether thousands of peacekeepers would need to be deployed along a frontline that weaves through heavily mined battlefields.
Kemp, who is originally from Canada but is now based in Vienna, Austria, has been part of a group of peacekeeping and mediation experts who have been meeting regularly in Geneva since 2022 in an effort to strategize the logistics around a prospective ceasefire agreement and lay the groundwork needed for such a deal.
"The challenge is to actually get into the nitty-gritty of what the ceasefire means, how it works and also how it's implemented," Kemp said.
"There's no point in having a ceasefire that's then broken the next day,"
Report detailed how ceasefire might be enforced
Unlike the current negotiations, which have often played out in public, the group of security experts met behind closed doors and produced a detailed paper first shared last month at a meeting in Switzerland, attended by foreign policy experts from the U.S., Russia and Ukraine. It was subsequently published online and detailed possibilities for monitoring and enforcing a ceasefire.
The report suggested setting up a 10- to 15-kilometre buffer zone, where Ukraine and Russia would not be able to position troops or weapons, and would be banned from using drones.
It stated that demining would be key, so monitors and peacekeepers could operate safely in the buffer zone.
While both Britain and France have committed to deploying peacekeepers, Russia has said it won't agree to a force from NATO countries on the ground in Ukraine.
Kemp says given that, it may be necessary to include peacekeepers from the Global South, from countries like India or Nepal.
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy has previously said that 200,000 peacekeepers would need to be on the ground to enforce a ceasefire, but the report called that number "unlikely and dangerous."
The report stated that even 50,000 armed peacekeepers would seem unrealistic, and suggested that an option might be a peacekeeping mission made up of 10,000 military members, along with a few thousand police officers and civilian monitors
"You could use satellite imagery, acoustic sensors and other things to take the pressure off of having tens of thousands of people along this line," said Kemp.
After Russian-backed separatists seized parts of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) started monitoring the line of control separating the two sides.
However, Kemp said one of the reasons it didn't work was because there were no accountability measures: if the ceasefire was violated, which it was repeatedly, monitors could only record the actions in a report.
In addition to accountability, experts say it's imperative that both sides feel a deal could be "sold" to citizens without a high political cost.
Appetite for truce has changed
Throughout much of the war, there was very little public push for a ceasefire.
On the contrary, earlier on, Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, said he received pushback for even suggesting there should be a deal.
"The general reaction when I first started calling for a diplomatic end to the war in Ukraine, was I got hit with a ton of bricks from many people I knew and many people I didn't know," said Kupchan, who spoke to CBC News from Washington.
Kyiv and its supporters in the West had hoped Ukrainian forces would reclaim the occupied territories and leave Moscow weakened.
Russia — which has held the momentum on the battlefield for most of the war, and has managed to mostly steer its battered economy through the resulting worldwide sanctions — has repeatedly said it's ready for negotiations, but has never agreed to make any concessions.
In the early months of Russia's full-scale invasion, there was a draft peace agreement that had been partially drawn up in Istanbul in April 2022, but it unravelled and was abandoned.
"There was also an effort to try to get Russians and Ukrainians this past year to meet in Qatar to talk about implementing this kind of partial ceasefire, but it never took place," said Kupchan.
Now, with the Trump administration in place and the weariness of a war that has ground on for more than three years, the appetite for a truce has changed.
But if Russia, which has refused to withdraw its troops and hasn't signalled it is ready to make concessions, rejects the deal, then Kupchan says negotiators need to try to push for small agreements, like no more attacks on energy sites or civilian infrastructure.
"I'm guessing that we're just going to have to test the waters," Kupchan said.
"You can build a level of confidence on both sides before you try to actually say, OK, it's done. It's quiet on the line."
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