The crisis in Ukraine has stirred ancient suspicions of Russia in the west, and barely rational cold war passions on both sides. Western policy has become a mere knee-jerk escalation of sanctions. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, seems equally bereft of ideas.

Both sides need something more active, more imaginative, that tackles the central issue: how is Ukraine’s unity, prosperity, security, its openness to the outside world, to be combined with what Russia insists are its essential interests? The answers lie not in force, but in the despised arts of diplomacy: the patient search for an outcome that gives everyone what they need, if not everything they want.

The crisis has deep roots. But Putin is immediately responsible for the present mess. He did not have to annex Crimea or fan the flames of protest in eastern Ukraine. A Malaysian airliner was downed on his watch. However. he has not yet achieved his objective: a neutral Ukraine that takes proper account of Russia’s wishes. And he has conjured up a storm of indignant opposition, ruining his chances of commanding the international respect to which he once aspired.

Western policy has hardly been a shining success either. Hopes that Ukraine would join the western project as a member of the EU and Nato have been dashed. Our so-called policy now has three parts. First, to breathe life back into Nato and give comfort to its eastern members who fear they will be next on Russia’s hit list; second, to force Putin through sanctions to change his policies or perhaps to encourage his cronies to oust him; and, third, to turn Ukraine into the stable, prosperous and united country it has never yet been.

Sitting on our hands until Putin throws in the sponge hardly deserves the name of policy. His Ukrainian adventure has made him even more popular at home, not least because Russians believe that for two decades western behaviour has been arrogant, meddlesome and disdainful of Russia’s legitimate interests.

There is every sign that he intends to go on backing the rebels with military assistance. But most Russians do not want him to go further, and send his army into Ukraine. Some influential people in Moscow are worried about where all this might end. If Putin is driven into a corner he will not simply emerge with his hands up. Nor is there any reason to think that his successor would be better.

So what do we do? We might start by thinking where we want to end up: with a Ukraine that is reasonably at peace with itself and its neighbours. For the foreseeable future, membership of Nato is off the agenda. Crimea will remain Russian. But first there is a ceasefire to be brokered. Then there are things to be covered by an immediate settlement: mutually beneficial trade links between Ukraine and its neighbours, including the EU and Russia; a major effort to stabilise the economy; better guarantees for the rights of Russian speakers, perhaps involving some devolution that nevertheless preserves the integrity of the Ukrainian state; and an end to outsiders meddling in Ukraine’s affairs.

The knotty problem of neutrality might be met with a constitutional arrangement binding Ukraine to remain unaligned unless two-thirds of its people vote for change.

Popular support for Nato membership among Ukrainians has never been near that figure: a change would have to await an evolution in opinion, and no doubt in the demographic balance between Ukrainians who look towards Russia and those who look west. Something similar was central to the Good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland: the idea that it would not become part of the Irish Republic unless a majority of its people so decided. Russians looking for a way out might accept such a proposal; and it should be sufficient for western hawks, too.

Barack Obama, US president, seems to understand this: he has inevitably been accused of weakness by those who prefer a return to the comfortable antagonisms of the past. John Kerry, his secretary of state, and Angela Merkel, German chancellor, have been discreetly at work, though it is unclear how far the Russians still regard them as valid interlocutors.

Plenty of old-fashioned mechanisms are available. A neutral intermediary could be appointed: someone with the record of Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president and Nobel Peace prizewinner who brokered a deal in 1999 to end the Kosovo war; or Lakhdar Brahimi, who was UN special envoy to Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Proximity talks” would enable the Russians and the Ukrainians to negotiate with a buffer between them. The main thing is to put the effort into higher gear before the violence spins out of control.

Some excitable commentators have suggested that the Ukraine crisis has echoes of 1914, and that we are stumbling towards a European war. That is unlikely. And there are more hopeful parallels to be drawn. In 1870, Germany tore Alsace-Lorraine from France. After two world wars, France regained Alsace and took the German Saarland as well. Now Alsace is a secure part of the French Republic. Saarland voted to return to Germany in 1955 — a precedent, perhaps, for Crimea, but unlikely for many years to come until passions have cooled. Old enemies can come together, and territorial disputes can be settled without war. But it takes time, and a lot of hard diplomacy.

— Financial Times

Rodric Braithwaite was British ambassador to Moscow between 1988 and 1992.