Russian President Vladimir Putin is demanding that Ukraine abandon the entire Donbas region, give up its prospects of joining NATO, remain neutral and exclude the presence of Western troops on its territory, according to sources familiar with the Kremlin's intentions who spoke to Reuters.

These terms seem to have been at the center of the meeting the Russian president had with Donald Trump in Alaska, at the first Russian-American summit in four years.

The meeting lasted three hours and, according to the same sources, almost exclusively concerned the conditions for a possible compromise.

It is recalled that after the summit, Putin appeared optimistic that the path to peace was opening, but without providing details.

Moscow's proposals

In his new proposal, the Russian president insists on his demand for Ukraine to completely withdraw from the parts of Donbas it still controls, according to the aforementioned sources. In exchange, however, Moscow will stop its advance on the front lines in Zaporizhia and Kherson.

Russia currently controls approximately 88% of Donbas and 73% of Zaporizhia and Kherson, according to the latest estimates.

Moscow is also willing to hand over the small parts of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions of Ukraine that it controls, as part of a possible deal, the same sources said.

Putin is also sticking to his previous demands that Ukraine abandon its NATO membership ambitions and at the same time obtain a formal commitment from the alliance that it will not expand further eastward.

Putin also wants restrictions on the Ukrainian army and an agreement that Western troops will not be deployed on Ukrainian territory as part of a peacekeeping force.

This directly conflicts with the prerequisite of security guarantees that Ukraine and its allies have put on the negotiating table. As it turns out, the two sides remain far apart, more than three years after Putin ordered thousands of Russian troops into Ukraine in a full-scale invasion of the country, which followed the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014.

Ukraine's position

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has not yet commented on the proposals, but the Ukrainian leadership has repeatedly rejected any territorial concessions in recent times.

President Volodymyr Zelensky even stated that Donbass is a fortress holding back Russia and that abandoning it would be tantamount to suicide for his country.

NATO membership also remains a constitutionally enshrined goal, while Zelensky stressed that it is not Moscow's prerogative to decide on the Alliance.

Washington and NATO have also not responded so far to the Russian proposals.

Trump, for his part, appears determined to go down in history as a president of peace and has undertaken to mediate a Putin-Zelensky meeting, while also wanting a  trilateral US-Russia-Ukraine summit afterwards.

Scenarios for security guarantees and the European stance

Regarding security guarantees, different scenarios are on the table, and more specifically the following: A trilateral agreement between Russia - Ukraine - the US, which could be approved by the UN Security Council, as well as a return to the Istanbul talks in 2022, with Ukraine's neutrality in return for security guarantees from the five permanent members of the Security Council.

At the same time, the fact that Putin does not seem to be making any particular compromises, at least for the time being, seems to confirm the judgment of European leaders, as expressed recently through diplomatic sources, that the Russian president does not actually want peace.