A lot will depend on the extent to which Russia and Ukraine are willing to make concessions on or across the main issue areas and the extent to which they and the presumptive security guarantors are willing and able to deliver on any deal that might ultimately shape up.
Ukraine has no good options if Russia refuses to accept anything less than its own peace terms, and there are challenges to making neutrality a viable option to end the war.
Differentiating between Belarus and Russia and carefully calibrating policies towards both countries should be among the priorities for western policy makers.
The coming days and weeks will tell how serious all the players in and around Ukraine are about contributing to resolving this ever-more dangerous crisis and whether Kiev, Moscow, Brussels and Washington can rise above their own short-term and increasingly narrow interests and agendas and prevent the unnecessary bloodshed that further escalation would inevitably bring with it.
The Ukraine crisis may thus yet turn out as an event with consequences as momentous as the end of the Cold War or 9/11.
A new status quo in the post-Soviet space is obviously in the making, and it has a distinctively Russian flavour to it.
Rather than simply buying into our own rhetoric of a norms- and values-based international society, we must be prepared to back up such rhetoric with credible policies to protect these norms and values and abide by them ourselves.
The Ukrainian government has announced that it will mount a full-scale military operation to regain control of the east of the country and has set a deadline of 6am on Monday morning for occupied government buildings to be evacuated by armed protesters. An emergency session of the United Nations Security Council late on Sunday night failed to calm a situation that has significantly deteriorated over the past few days.
All hope is not lost for Ukraine quite yet, but the window of opportunity for local crisis management is rapidly closing.