Trump has announced a Ukraine ceasefire. Is it a sham or showstopper?

 President Donald Trump has announced an “energy ceasefire”. For one week, Ukraine and Russia will cease attacks on one another’s cities and critical infrastructure.

Details are sparse, beyond Trump’s claims that he asked Putin “not to fire into Kyiv and various towns for a week. And he agreed to do that”. The Kremlin has yet to confirm or deny Trump’s claim. Nor has Ukraine said whether it will refrain from strikes on Russian energy and oil refining infrastructure, which have wreaked considerable damage to the Russian economy.

But in the context of a four-year war without a single day of meaningful progress, such a truce would be a landmark.

If it happens – and more importantly, holds – Trump will at long last be able to point to genuine progress from his hitherto fruitless peace-making efforts.

The greatest beneficiaries will be ordinary Ukrainian civilians. Russian bombardment of energy infrastructure has left Kyiv and other cities facing catastrophic failures of basic utilities amid the coldest winter in a decade. The past week has been particularly brutal, with most of Kyiv, a city of three million people, left without basic utilities for days on end.

After a few nights at -15C in a pitch black city, with no electricity, hot food, running water or flushing toilets, one Kyivan told me it begins to feel like the end of the world: “You have to make a great effort not to go mad.”

On Wednesday, President Zelensky said Ukrainian intelligence had detected Russia preparing another large-scale attack this week, apparently planned to coincide with another cold snap forecast for Friday.

Dozens of emergency repair crews have been brought from across the country in a bid to keep the capital from freezing over. Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, has advised those who can to leave the city.

Beyond helping freezing Ukrainians, the potential ceasefire’s timing could make it even more significant. Russian and Ukrainian delegations are due to meet for talks brokered by the US in Abu Dhabi on Sunday.

A series of talks in recent weeks, including a meeting between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Florida, have produced optimistic statements, but few specifics on a possible deal.

Kyrylo Budanov, Zelensky’s chief of staff and former spy chief leading the Ukrainian delegation, insisted last week that “there is movement and it is real. We are genuinely making progress”. The “infrastructure truce”, if it materialises, would be the first evidence of such progress.

Talks would still have to bridge enormous gaps between the two sides to actually stop the war, however.

Zelensky said after meeting with Trump in Davos last week that the pair had drawn up the text of a US post-war security guarantee, which Ukraine considers vital to a peace settlement.

But the text has not been made public, and neither president has signed it.

This week, the Financial Times reported that the White House was trying to make the promise of security guarantees conditional on Ukraine first surrendering Donbas to Russia – something Zelensky has ruled out. The White House denied the report.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said on Thursday that Putin would talk peace with Zelensky, but only if the Ukrainian president came to Moscow to do so. That is a condition Putin knows Zelensky could not possibly accept.

Going on bitter experience, there is an even chance that Trump’s infrastructure truce will never materialise. If it does, it is quite likely to break down immediately.

But ordinary Ukrainians will be praying that this time, somehow, the diplomats will deliver a miracle.