Doesn't say much, but what this does at least signal is that both sides seem to understand how this war ends - with both sides unhappy.
This is Zelensky stating their likely starting postion: Unconditional ceasefire along current lines. Followed by diplomacy and security guarantees. The first part is easier. The second part, less so. Doesn't seem like much, but it IS the first time that they have said even that much.
Russia has spent too much to be content in the long term keeping only what they have now - and the heavy emphasis being on NOW. Including the exorbitant reconstruction costs they would have to pay. And I mean just internally within Russia to repair their oil & gas infrastructure to some new baseline level. But they ARE sort of, kind of, in the traditional bad-faith Russian way, acknowledging that their original war aims of total regime change and Belarus-ization of Ukraine aren't going to happen. Yet.
Unconditional ceasefire means exactly that - no conditions, including no reparations intially. That's what the diplomacy and security guarantees are for. But - who's going to provide security? Not the current U.S. administration, that's for sure. So what would that look like? For sake of argument, let's say a Euoprean NATO ground monitoring force and no-fly zone 100km from Ukraine's borders with Russia and Belarus. Total guess, but not that hard to imagine.
And what about reparations? Ukraine will want and deserves them in any world where justice matters. Russia will never, ever, EVER pay reparations willingly unless they are actively collapsing, like in WW1 with the treaty of brest-litovsk. BTW - the Russians paid only $6 billion marks then - like $160m dollars, or $3.5B dollars today. Seems like a bargain, but that's another story. The important part is there's no way Russia willingly pays out of pocket. Period. Too much pride and ego and nothing would get Putin killed faster than obliging oligarchs to pay a tax on their future earnings to get out of the war he started.
Ukraine might be assessing that an unconditional ceasefire is acceptable, because the future post-putin instability might present new opportunities to regain territory without having to do the bloody business of fighting for it today.
As for reparations - Ukraine COULD probably succesfully seek a portion of the seized assets post-war. Russia will lose their minds, and threaten to restart the war. This often happens in negotiations, but....rarely actually does. Let's assume that they aren't ready to resume fighting midway through peace talks. There would be signals like mobilizations if they were.
But, it's not crazy to think they might accept losing SOME of the $300 billion that Belgium is currently sitting on if it meant getting the rest back. They've lived without it for nearly 5 years, and they absolutely need it for their own post-war reconstruction costs. And it is not quite the political humiliation of outlaying new money. There's probably a way to do it quietly enough that even if the average russian muggle understands that it's reparations by other means, that it comes from already-stolen money that was never going to come to them anyways.
That settlement will be done during the Diplomacy phase. The glass-half full view is that IF the fighting stops per the initial Unconditional Ceasefire, it is hard to restart the war at the same intensity. There's so many issues of logistics, momentum, economic re-configuration and morale. Nobody on either side really wants to be the last person to die while diplomats quibble over semantics far away. Battlefield conditions rarely change much DURING negotiations - that's why they're really significnat even if it seems pointless. We're only JUST at the initial stages where they talk about their opening positions. You don't do even THAT when you think your position will be stronger tomorrow.
All this to say - both sides are going to end up unhappy, at least at first. But - in what seemed hopeless until pretty recently, both sides are publicly stating their positions. That's SOME kind of good news.
Thoughts?