Adviser and son-in-law of US President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, said something diplomats usually keep behind closed doors: most of a possible peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine has already been worked out. One question remains. Just one - but it is the territory.

Specifically, the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the part of Donbas that Moscow is demanding. Kushner said it at the "Yalta European Strategy" conference in Kyiv, in front of a Ukrainian audience, without much diplomatic packaging.

"If Ukraine wants to pull back to the Donbas line, then obviously the rest of the deal is already worked out and agreed", he said.

The sentence that changes the entire frame

Read that sentence again. It does not say the negotiations are difficult. It says everything else is finished, and one single price sits on the table - and that price is a piece of a country. From a mediator's position, it sounds like a technical question left unresolved. From Kyiv's position, it is the entire war in a single line item.

Kushner himself acknowledges Ukraine does not want that at present. "Our job as mediators is to work out how we can find a creative solution that does not contradict their wishes and helps them achieve their goal, while at the same time allowing us to persuade Russia to end the conflict", he said. A creative solution to the question of who a territory belongs to - it is hard to imagine what exactly that means, other than a different way of drawing the same line on a map.

"Dynamic on the battlefield" - translation: time is not working for Kyiv

One clarification of his is worth more than the rest of the statement combined. The hardest question, Kushner said, remains the territorial one, and it is "to a certain extent determined by what is happening on the battlefield, where the situation is fairly dynamic".

That is a diplomatic way of saying the negotiating table follows the front line, not the other way round. Whoever holds more land at the moment of signing gets to keep it. Every month of delay is a new balance of forces.

According to the Ukrainian agency Unian, Kushner assessed that the peace agreement is practically fully worked out, but that a "shared vision between the parties" has not yet been reached. A shared vision - on territory. Russia insists on Donbas, Kyiv refuses to abandon the territories it still holds.

The Balkans recognise this sentence

"Everything else is agreed, only the border remains" - that is a sentence this region has heard in several languages and across several decades. It usually comes near the end of negotiations in which someone has already lost, and the mediator is trying to package that as a compromise.

What is new here is who is saying it. It is not a Kremlin statement, but the son-in-law of the American president, speaking from a stage in Kyiv. And while Washington looks for a "creative solution", the only party for whom the proposed arithmetic is final is the one that has to withdraw.