If Russia agrees to temporary ceasefire, the next question is how to manage and extend it

After nine hours of talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, officials emerged to announce that Ukraine had agreed to a U.S. proposal for an interim 30-day ceasefire along the sprawling 1,200  kilometre frontline. 

It was hailed as a step toward peace, and an abrupt turn in acrimonious relations between Washington and Kyiv, but getting Russia to agree to the deal, at a time when its military holds battlefield momentum, will be a challenge. 

Making it an enduring peace, is another which experts say will prove exceedingly difficult and could involve thousands of peacekeepers and monitors. 

"For a ceasefire to be durable, the sides will have to hammer out a wide range of technical details," said Walter Kemp, a senior strategy adviser at Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

"But an interim cessation of hostilities could open the way for negotiations to end the war."

As the agreement between the U.S. and Ukraine was announced, Washington confirmed that it had also lifted its suspension of military aid and intelligence sharing for Ukraine. This marked a sharp shift from just a week ago, when the now-notorious confrontation at the White House between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy upended the two countries' long-standing alliance.

But the path to secure a truce remains fragile, fraught and driven by political leverage. 

Kemp says pressure from Washington will now have to be applied to Moscow, in order to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree. 

If he does, the challenge becomes how to implement a ceasefire and make it last. 

If he doesn't, experts say the U.S. may focus on smaller "confidence building" agreements in an effort to build trust between both sides. 

"I think it's more realistic to have some kind of de-escalation measures than a ceasefire," said Kemp. "It doesn't have to be that there's a complete ceasefire," he said. "You can talk and shoot at the same time."

Ukraine had earlier suggested a partial ceasefire, which would include a halt in attacks by sea and by air, but U.S. officials pushed further for a cessation of hostilities along the entire frontline. 

While officials spoke briefly after the talks, they did not elaborate on how a ceasefire, even a temporary one, would be enforced and who would be responsible for monitoring it, and whether thousands of peacekeepers would need to be deployed along a frontline that weaves through heavily mined battlefields. 

Kemp, who is originally from Canada but is now based in Vienna, Austria, has been part of a group of peacekeeping and mediation experts who have been meeting regularly in Geneva since 2022 in an effort to strategize the logistics around a prospective ceasefire agreement and lay the groundwork needed for such a deal.