President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine will not be present when the leaders of the United States and Russia discuss, and possibly decide, the fate of his country on Friday (August 15). And as Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times, wrote: “If you are not at the table, you’re on the menu.”After President Donald Trump indicated on August 8 that Ukraine would have to make territorial concessions in order to end the war; Zelenskyy and European leaders immediately pushed back.“Ukrainians will never give up their land to occupiers,” Zelenskyy said the next day. But given the state of the war, and Trump’s seeming determination to force peace on Ukraine whatever the cost, any deal he strikes with President Vladimir Putin in Alaska will likely leave Kyiv unhappy.The grim challenge that Ukraine facesThree and a half years into the war, Ukraine is well and truly on the defensive. Russia now occupies large swathes of territory in the four eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. As its casualties mount, Ukraine is running out of men to send to the frontlines.“The fact is that the Russians are winning the war, and there’s no way that Ukraine can rescue the situation,” John J Mearsheimer, the veteran Chicago University political scientist who has been credited with making several fairly accurate predictions and analyses of the war, told the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson in an interview late last month.While many Western analysts are still optimistic about Ukraine’s ability to eventually claw back, this would require “vastly more aid, as well as a level of escalation — possibly including Western troops or direct NATO involvement — that democratic governments appear unwilling to contemplate,” according to an article published in Politico.Also Read | Explained Interview | What to expect from the Trump-Putin meetingA few pundits also continue to hold on to the pipe dream of an imminent Russian economic meltdown, despite evidence of the country’s remarkable resilience to Western sanctions.Story continues below this adAlso, as Nandan Unnikrishnan, one of India’s leading experts on Russia, recently told The Indian Express, “From a Russian perspective, they are fighting against an existential threat… Even if Western sanctions hurt, they will not stop the Russian war effort.”Most realistic assessments agree that a continuation of hostilities would be to the detriment of an already exhausted Ukraine. Ukrainians themselves realise this. In the most recent Gallup poll on Ukraine, conducted in early July and published last week, 69% respondents said they favoured a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible — a near complete reversal from 2022, when 73% favoured Ukraine fighting until victory.That said, another poll, conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in late July-early August, found that only 17% Ukrainians would accept a peace plan on Russian terms.About 76% of respondents were “categorically against” making compromises such as permanently renouncing NATO membership, giving up claims to lost territories, and reducing the strength of its armed forces.Story continues below this adThis is the fundamental challenge before Ukraine: it wants the fighting to end, but not on Russia’s terms.A ‘bad’ deal may be Ukraine best hopeKyiv’s worry about the Trump-Putin meeting is that the two leaders will agree to a deal that will exact a heavy price of peace from Ukraine. The Ukrainians rightly fear that Trump, in his rush to end the war — it has been repeatedly suggested that he covets the Nobel Prize — will agree to Putin’s demands and will then pressure Ukraine to accept the deal by threatening to withdraw vital American support.The details of the deal supposedly on the table, reported piecemeal by Western media outlets, have thus far only confirmed Kyiv’s anxieties.“The plan…is that the Ukrainian army should unilaterally withdraw from the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk it still controls… In exchange, the Kremlin would agree to freeze the lines in other places,” The Guardian reported.Story continues below this adThis would be a “major win for Putin”, Bloomberg said. It would mean that Russia will retain control of three full provinces of Ukraine (including Crimea), and large parts of two other provinces, adding up to around a quarter of the country’s landmass. And as Russian troops make further advances ahead of the meeting in Alaska, Ukraine could lose still more territory.This is undoubtedly a bad outcome for Ukraine. The question to be asked, then, is: Will continuing to fight yield a better outcome?Given the state of the war — experts say that Russia will likely control all four of Ukraine’s eastern provinces by the end of the year — and Western reluctance to get further embroiled in it, agreeing to a ‘bad’ deal now might well be the best outcome that Kyiv can hope for.“A legal recognition of Russia’s forcible annexation of Ukrainian territory is rightly unacceptable to Ukraine, the EU and the UK. But a de facto recognition of Russian occupation of some territory as a brutal reality — in the context of a broader peace deal — may be necessary,” Rachman wrote.Story continues below this adThe long game holds out hope for a better outcomeAt the end of the day, territory, important as it is, cannot be Ukraine’s sole concern.At a meeting with Zelenskyy in February, Finnish President Alexander Stubb said: “…This war is about the existence of nationhood in Ukraine, and that nationhood is based on a triangle…that is independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity…”.Given that Russia’s territorial gains may be difficult to undo, there is an argument for Kyiv to focus on the other two components of Stubb’s triangle.Express View | For end to conflict between Russia and Ukraine, all parties need to be on the tableWhile being shunted out of the negotiations between the US and Russia will not help — the Kremlin insists that Putin meeting Zelenskyy is a no-go — Ukraine has no option but to play the long game.Story continues below this adThe summit in Alaska is at best likely to be only a milestone in a long journey to peace, as the Trump administration has hinted. “The goal of this meeting for the President is to walk away with a better understanding of how we can end this war,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday. The meeting would be a “listening exercise” for Trump, she said.This means that there is still ample opportunity for Zelenskyy, with the support of European leaders, to lobby Trump and convince him of the risks of capitulating to Putin. Since entering the White House in January, the US President has seemingly changed his mind twice on Putin. In theory at least, Trump’s famous unpredictability may yet be made to turn to Kyiv’s advantage.