Well, it turns out that the Paris summit between Macron and Putin didn't lead to any breakthroughs, although Putin supposedly claimed that he would not further escalate the situation. However, Putin has been claiming all along that he had no intention of invading and that Ukraine was behaving provocatively. So I don't see a change of tone there. Putin has lied before about his actions in Ukraine, so his word has no value.
Ironically, Putin claims that the only way to make progress is through the
Minsk Protocol, which was initially violated by his Donetsk proxies and then renegotiated. Poroshenko signed it, but it had requirements that turned out to be quite impossible--for example, passing laws that the president had no power to enact by decree. Nevertheless, it was the only way to establish a ceasefire. Peskov has ironically claimed that Ukraine should honor a commitment made by a previous president. Reporters apparently did not think to ask him why Putin did not honor the commitment made by Yeltsin in the Budapest Memo. I remember that Barbos took the position that Russia never made any binding commitment, so I suppose that Ukraine has the same excuse here.
The most interesting thing to come out of the Macron-Putin summit is that Putin's well-known misogyny and contempt for Ukraine's sovereign status came out clearly. Of Ukraine, he said that "she" should just "endure it"--a veiled reference to raping a woman. IOW, if she's going to be raped, she should just resolve to take it. Doubtless, he felt that this was an amusing way of expressing what he intended for Ukraine.
See:
Putin's use of crude language reveals a lot about his worldview
