Just last Friday, US President Donald Trump had demanded that Ukraine accept a US peace plan to end the war by this Thursday, on Thanksgiving Day.
Yet, like many of Mr Trump's deadlines, this one too has been afforded an extension.
Last night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Ukrainian people in a video address that talks the previous day in Geneva between US and Ukrainian officials had reduced the number of points outlined in the US peace proposal, which previously numbered 28.
"Many correct elements have been incorporated into this framework," he said.
Sources close to the talks said the document was whittled down to 19 points, though it is still unclear which points were cut entirely.
One of the lead Ukrainian negotiators told the Financial Times that the US side appeared willing to remove its proposal to cap the size of the Ukrainian armed forces at 600,000.
Listening to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaking to reporters in Geneva on Sunday evening, it was evident that, contrary to Mr Trump's hard deadline, the terms of the initial US peace proposal were not fixed.
"This is a living, breathing document. Every day with input, it changes," said Mr Rubio.
Read more:
Latest Ukraine stories
US and Russia hold peace talks in Abu Dhabi as missiles pound Kyiv
Europe's amendments on Ukraine peace plan 'don't suit' Russia
The US peace plan leaked last week was a Russia-friendly document.
It required Ukraine to withdraw its forces from Donbas and cede almost one-fifth of its territory to Russia, for Ukraine to limit the size of its armed forces to 600,000 personnel (down from almost one million currently) and to give up its NATO ambitions in perpetuity.
Also, there would be no role for NATO peacekeepers in Ukraine. Russia could argue that this point rules out the deployment of troops from individual NATO countries that form part of the Coalition of the Willing, a British and French-led initiative, of which Ireland is a member, set up to monitor the peace in a post-ceasefire Ukraine.
A number of the US proposal's points repeated demands made by Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Kremlin officials since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. A Ukrainian withdrawal from unoccupied Donbas was reportedly demanded by the Russian leader during his meeting with Mr Trump in Alaska last August.
The US proposal also calls for Ukraine to hold elections within 100 days. Senior Russian officials have demanded the same for more than a year, part of a false Kremlin narrative that paints Mr Zelensky as an unelected leader given that his five-year term officially ended in May 2024, a narrative that Mr Trump has also repeated. (Ukraine is under martial law and its constitution forbids elections during wartime).
But the biggest concern for Kyiv must surely have been the wording of point 5 of the US proposal: "Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees".
Those six words offered little clarity on the kind of security guarantee, if any, the US would be willing to extend to Ukraine in the event of a future Russian invasion.
According to an upbeat Mr Rubio on Sunday, none of the discussion points were "insurmountable".
However, the differences between both sides do appear to be insurmountable, most notably over the key issue of territory.
It remains the case that the lion's share of concessions are being asked of Ukraine, and not of Russia, which began this war with an unprovoked invasion.
Some of the points in the US plan read like a rehash of previous ideas floated by senior US officials, namely US special envoy Steve Witkoff following his five separate meetings with Mr Putin and other senior Russian officials in Moscow and St Petersburg over the past nine months.
But this time, the US proposal for Ukraine to cede Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk and occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to Russia, spelled out as official US policy, packed more weight.
There seems to be no comeback for Ukraine from the stark reality that an eventual peace deal will mean losing almost 20% of its territory, albeit under de facto Russian control, rather than de jure.
The European counterproposal, viewed and reported by Reuters on Sunday evening, states that negotiations on territorial swaps should start from the current line of contact – a marked difference from the US plan.
It also includes a proposal to cap Ukraine's military at 800,000 at peacetime (a reduced, but still larger force than envisaged under the leaked US plan) and does not bar Ukraine from joining NATO.
Crucially, the European document proposes that the US provide Ukraine with a security guarantee that "mirrors Article 5", the clause in the NATO Treaty that means an attack on one member is an attack on all.
Predictably, the Kremlin said yesterday that the European counterproposal does not work for Russia.
Mr Zelensky, speaking yesterday via video link to the Swedish parliament, said the return of all Ukrainian prisoners of war and the return of abducted Ukrainian children by Russia were "on the table".
These are important wins. Russia has abducted more than 19,000 Ukrainian children since the start of the war and moved them to Russian-occupied Ukraine or Russia.
But the key issues of occupied territory, NATO membership and the form of a US-backed security guarantee for Ukraine remain up for discussion, just as they were before the US peace proposal was leaked late last Thursday.
All this has come at a challenging time for Mr Zelensky, lumbered with the fallout of a corruption scandal that has enveloped Ukraine's energy sector and led to the resignation of two senior cabinet ministers.
Selling an unfavourable peace would dent his popularity with voters.
Russia sees the original 28-point plan, or the 'Trump project' as its officials have started calling it, as the basis to start negotiations and is unlikely to budge from its maximalist demands.
And so if another Trump-Zelensky meeting takes place in Washington by the end of this week, the Ukrainian president is likely to face renewed pressure to accept the loss of territory and a vague take-it-or-leave-it security guarantee.
