Is this the day Ukraine’s crisis ends?

Could this be the day that a deal finally ends the crisis in Ukraine before it descends into a full-blown civil war?

The sun is out on Maidan. Spring seems to have come early and I’ve already seen two female protesters with baseball bats – and plastic flowers pinned to their helmets.

The area controlled by the protesters in the heart of Kiev has doubled since the shooting started. There are tens of thousands of people on the streets, an eclectic coalition of Ukrainian society.

The fur-clad babushka, the businessman with the ill-fitting helmet, the pensioner who’s written a speech condemning the president that no-one apart from his wife will ever get to read but who also feels that his voice must be heard.

And then, of course, there are the hard men of protest, dressed in combat fatigues, wearing balaclavas through which bloodshot, feverish eyes signal that they are in no mood to compromise.

So the big question today is whether the trio of opposition leaders who have been riding the wave of protest while sometimes looking as if it might drown them, can sell a compromise to a square that is in no mood for it.

I spoke to the Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski – an old friend from university, as it happens – who told me, waving a few pages of A4 paper clad in a plastic folder: “This is the agreement. It is not perfect. It is inevitably a compromise, but it is the best they can hope to get.”

I asked him what the consequences would be if the people rejected it. “I dread to think,” he said in his flawless English, and stormed out of the hotel lobby to meet President Yanukovych one last time.

Next few hours for #ukraine are decisive. Polish Foreign Minister tells me

— Matt Frei (@mattfrei) February 21, 2014

At the almost unbelievably beautiful St Michael’s cathedral, with its Lego-coloured walls and its playful golden onion domes, the monastic silence of the past has been replaced by the bustle and determination of the revolution.

Everywhere you look, volunteers are ferrying in boxes of medicine, syringes and bandages. Inside the cathedral the wailing litany of the priest competes with the clatter of surgical implements, as doctors have turned the country’s most prominent church into a field hospital.

Elena, an English teacher from eastern Ukraine, is dressed in white surgical garb. She knows nothing of medicine and is not about to practice it on anyone. But she is an English teacher with an excellent bedside manner and a colourful turn of phrase.

“I hate this agreement. I don’t trust it. It just allows the president to buy more time. He is a leech on the body of Ukraine. He is a cockroach.”

So we can expect Maidan to greet the agreement that might just end this crisis with a shoulder shrug or worse. The question for me – and one that has so far not been answered – is: what did the EU foreign ministers offer the president that made him consider the deal?

I suspect that money was involved. Why else would the Ukrainian government suddenly announce that they don’t need the two billion euro bond issue offered by the Russians, that was due to arrive on Monday?

Follow Matt Frei on Twitter