Putin’s war without end

The 24th February marks the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Neither side has been able to land a knockout blow. Donald Trump is back in the White House and promising to begin negotiations with Vladimir Putin to end the war. What should we expect in 2025 and beyond?

To understand how the war might end, a good place to start is why it began—putting aside Putin’s propaganda about Ukraine being run by Nazis, or having bioweapons labs, and so on. 

This war is about how Putin and the people around him see the world and Russia’s place in it. To know what Putin is thinking, we must listen to what he is saying, but here there are two major problems. The first is the role of lying in Russian statecraft, at both the tactical and strategic levels—the latter being what I have called the “intercontinental ballistic whopper”. The second is much bigger. It is that we often don’t want to accept deeply unattractive facts or their consequences. We need to believe that Putin’s worldview can somehow be made to fit with ours and a compromise reached. It can’t.

The reasons go back past Putin’s decision in 2014 to annex Crimea and stir up a war in the Donbas, back past the Orange Revolution of 2004 and Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003, and on to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and what followed—the formative experiences for Putin and those around him closest to power. The consequences of that time are still playing out across the former USSR, often in battles between violent, corrupt authoritarianism and aspirations to something more like European liberal democracy. For western observers, Ukraine’s Orange and Maidan revolutions of 2004 and 2014, which ejected pro-Russian governments, are what happens when an incumbent regime loses control or legitimacy. For the Kremlin, they are what happens when hostile forces–invariably externally backed—overthrow a Moscow-friendly regime and replace it with one more to their liking.   

This last bit is crucial—in this view, Ukraine is not a country or a society, but a project of the United States and its allies to weaken Russia. There is no room for Ukrainians themselves to have agency. This is about Great Power rivalry. And it’s specifically about the resentment of Putin and the people around him about how the Cold War ended.

In the run-up to February 2022, the Kremlin produced two draft treaties, which it demanded the United States and Nato sign. They sought to limit the US military footprint in Europe and to roll back Nato’s borders to where they stood in 1997. The documents outlined unnegotiable positions: more a howl of rage than an invitation to talk. 

What struck me then was how much this looked like an attempt to codify the catalogue of resentments set out in Putin’s February 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, which remains one of the best quick ways to understand his worldview. It is a polemic against the post-Cold War “unipolar” world of US unilateralism: the “almost uncontained hyper-use of force—military force—in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts… [The US] has overstepped its national borders in every way.” Putin’s key message is that US unilateralism must and will be constrained.

Over a decade later, in March 2018, shortly before the Russian presidential elections, Putin used his televised state of the nation address to unveil new strategic weapons systems. His words were illustrated by graphics of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) raining down on Florida—a none too subtle message to Donald Trump. 

“I want to tell all those who have fuelled the arms race over the last 15 years, sought to win unilateral advantages over Russia, introduced unlawful sanctions aimed at containing our country's development: Everything that you wanted to impede with your policies has already happened… You have failed to contain Russia.”

Putin said Russia warned it would take such measures in 2004, after the US had withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 2002. But: “No one listened to us then. So listen to us now.” Coincidentally, a few days after Putin’s speech, Russian military intelligence operatives painted Novichok nerve agent on Sergei Skripal’s door handle in Salisbury.

This illustrates how tight the link is in Putin’s mind between Russia’s security and stopping Ukraine from becoming a democratic, western-facing country. To understand that linkage, we need to understand what kind of country he understands Russia to be, and the threats Putin believes it faces.

First, for Putin sovereignty is the core value. Only Great Powers have full sovereignty, meaning full control of their destiny. Russia, the US and China are Great Powers. Lesser powers have limited or compromised sovereignty. The UK, France and Germany are essentially satellites of US power. Second, Russia is a lonely power. It does not do alliances; it does spheres of interest. Russia believes the US thinks the same way. 

Third, the 1945 victors made the rules and created the facts on the ground, such as Soviet domination of central and Eastern Europe, and the P5 veto for China, Russia, the US, France and Britain in the UN Security Council. But Russia thinks that the US and its allies spent the years after the Soviet collapse attacking these entitlements: encroaching on Russia’s rightful sphere of interest in eastern Europe, bypassing the Security Council (eg over Iraq and Libya), shaping the rules-based international order in the west’s interests, and attacking Russia’s prestige.  

Fourth, Russia does not value rules or institutions in themselves, but as geopolitical tools. The Kremlin is prepared to break rules, or institutions, if they do not serve Russia’s purposes. It believes the United States does the same. This reflects how Russia works domestically: compromised institutions, selectively enforced rules, informal networks and “understandings”. 

This worldview underpins some consistent traits in how Putin’s Russia behaves:

• Russia makes its own sovereign decisions and is not accountable to others. 
• Self-harm or lose-lose are acceptable as long as the other side loses more, or loses something that Putin considers worth the cost.
• Russia is not interested in the global commons. Russian officials talk  about the “indivisibility of security” but this does not mean that all countries have equal rights to security. As Putin commented: “the weak get beaten”.
• Moral arguments are viewed with cynicism. Putin believes that western leaders are no better.
• Putin also believes the west is in secular decline. In a June 2019 interview with the Financial Times, he stated that “the liberal idea has outlived its purpose” and become “obsolete”. Looking at recent developments in the US and western Europe, it is unlikely his opinion will change.

The longer-term weakness of Putin’s statecraft is that Russia is a declining power. It has a modestly sized economy dependent on commodities and is structurally unable to grow. Russia is poorly placed to benefit from the knowledge-based industries of the 21st century and the war in Ukraine has made things much worse.

Above all, Russia will in due course face a serious internal challenge, of a kind it has not had for 25 years: how to accomplish a stable transfer of power when Putin leaves office. This has a direct bearing on Russia’s war aims. In democracies, power changes hands routinely. In authoritarian systems, there is no expectation that power will transfer and no means to do so consensually. Internal stability is indistinguishable from incumbency.

To resolve the conflict, we need to return to what Putin’s war is about. It’s an imperialist project; it’s about winding back the post-Cold War security order in Europe; and resetting the terms of Great Power rivalry with the US. At heart it is about Russia itself. That is why we should have realistic expectations about the prospects for a negotiated settlement of the conflict. There is no evidence that any of Putin’s fundamental objectives have changed and plenty of evidence that they haven’t—in Putin’s recent public statements and those of his lieutenants.

Putin’s worldview will not change, and we should assume that he will be in power until he dies. His successor is highly likely to be someone from his close circle with a similar outlook. The key question then is whether they will begin Russia’s long road back from violent authoritarianism, and what we can do to incentivise that. 

For Ukraine, the implied threat is that if it doesn’t negotiate or accept a peace Trump agrees with Putin, the US president will cut off military support. For Putin, it is the opposite: the open threat (see Trump’s 22nd January Truth Social post within hours of his inauguration) is that Russia’s choice is between making a deal or a full-court press of sanctions and other coercive measures, with the implied threat of much greater US support for Ukraine. 

It’s a commonplace that “All wars end with a negotiation”. That’s not quite right: some drag on for decades, but otherwise there are two options. The first is that one side capitulates (unlikely in this case). The alternative is some kind of negotiated cessation of hostilities, which is very different from resolving the underlying conflict. The first happens because both sides have more to lose than gain from continuing to fight. The risk here is one or both sides use the pause to reload, and resume fighting when they are better placed. 

This is invariably the Russian playbook. Even if there is a ceasefire, we should expect Russia to continue to use a broad spectrum of coercive measures, testing the threshold between warfare and other forms of coercion short of war.  

What would a negotiation be about? First, we should put aside any illusions: Ukraine cannot buy peace by conceding land. The conflict is not only about territory, though control of territory will be crucial in any endgame. More likely, a ceasefire would involve both Kyiv and Moscow accepting an unsatisfactory situation which locks in continued conflict and a high probability of future war.

The key issues are whether Ukraine is to survive as a sovereign state on a path towards European democracy; and whether there will be adequate Ukrainian, US and European security arrangements to enable that despite Russia’s implacable opposition. 

This helps us summarise what each actor would seek from a negotiation.

What Ukraine wants from the United States, Nato, the west:

• Iron-clad security guarantees: protection under Nato Article V or, at the very least, guaranteed access to the means to defend itself.
• Financial and reconstruction assistance.
• Help in making the transition to European democracy.

What Putin wants from Ukraine:

• Ukraine demilitarised to the point that its sovereignty is fatally compromised.
• A Moscow-friendly government in Kyiv. The Kremlin will play dirty and long to achieve this—see Georgia.
• Russia will probably demand changes to Ukraine’s constitutional order, eg guaranteeing the rights of Russian speakers. This has nothing to do with the rights of individuals and everything to do with compromising Ukraine as a functioning state. 

What Putin wants from Trump:

• Face to face talks to demonstrate that ultimately, it is only the leaders of Great Powers who determine what happens in matters of peace and war.
• No Ukrainian membership of Nato, ever—which Trump seems willing to accede to
• No US or Nato forces in Ukraine.
• At least de facto recognition of Russian annexations of Crimea and the four regions of Ukraine claimed by Russia.
• At least tacit recognition of a Russian sphere of privileged interests in eastern Europe.
• Rollback of the US commitment to Euro-Atlantic security, ultimately to the point where Russia is the dominant military power in Europe.
• Easing of sanctions.
• To strike a heavy blow to US global prestige, whatever the outcome.

Putin’s demands are a definitive rupture with the west, because it’s about his view of Russia as an autocratic, free-standing Great Power unconstrained by others.

The west’s interests lie in containing the risks of Russia becoming the dominant military power in Europe. To achieve that, we need to keep the United States bound into Euro-Atlantic security. What Trump wants, beyond the credit for having ended the war, is hard to say at present. The timescale has changed from ending the war in 24 hours, to a slightly more realistic six months. There may be a dawning realisation that this is a hard conflict even to manage, let alone resolve, and that a quick and flawed agreement would very likely damage his reputation as a deal-maker. Unforced errors that hand over Ukraine to Putin would also weaken his position in a trial of strength with China and damage the traditional alliances with Europe and the west that the United States needs to protect its global interests—though looking at the past few weeks, it’s hard to conclude that Trump is interested in strengthening those alliances.

What happens is also of profound importance for the revisionist powers (primarily China, Iran, North Korea) that have backed Russia to a degree; and for the non-western “global majority”. This is about the emerging international order: who has power, how is it wielded, how is it constrained, how to achieve a balance between cooperation where interests align and conflict where they don’t.

Putin is not interested in talking to Zelensky, the Europeans or the UK. His ambition, and quite possibly Trump’s, would be to cut all but Russia and the United States out of the discussions, on the basis that Great Powers decide among themselves and impose their preferences on everyone else. 

In reality, multiple negotiations would be happening more or less in parallel between the US and Russia; between Ukraine and Russia (but in a format that reflects Putin’s view that Ukraine is an artificial construct and that Zelensky will have to accept a fait accompli); between Ukraine, the United States, and Kyiv’s other western supporters; within Ukraine itself, about what compromises are acceptable; and, in a different way, within Russia—about the outcome of the “Special Military Operation” and, eventually, what that means for life after Putin.

The Kremlin will threaten, bluster, obfuscate and lie, play for time and use it ruthlessly to strengthen its position. Its playbook should by now be well known:

• Demand a price for even talking. 
• Delegitimise your opponent. The Kremlin has already said it will only deal with Zelensky’s successor. 
• Create a problem and demand that opponents pay a price to solve it.
• Pocket any concessions without offering anything in return, plus selective reciprocity: what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is up for negotiation. If necessary, just cheat or renege. 
• A disinformation barrage to build pressure from US and European public opinion for a settlement on Russia’s terms.

If there is a deal only a fool would expect Putin to keep his promises. A ceasefire agreement would be the beginning of the next phase of the underlying conflict: simply reverse Clausewitz’s maxim that war is the continuation of politics by other means.

Putin is seeking a scenario where Ukraine, starved of resources and support, facing a deteriorating military outlook and maybe pressure from its allies, negotiates from a position of weakness. It’s imperative to avoid that situation.

But how sustainable is Russia’s position? Can it be made to deteriorate to the extent that Putin has to negotiate or risk losing ground in the war, domestically and internationally?

Russia is making incremental gains on the battlefield—at enormous human cost to itself but also to Ukraine. Although it’s getting harder for Russia to generate men and materiel, there is no realistic scenario in 2025 in which Russia becomes unable to do so at scale. Helping Ukraine defend itself, through access to better warfighting capabilities and preserving the lives of Ukrainian soldiers, will remain crucial both on the battlefield and to the outcome of a negotiation.

Russia is cannibalising its economy, with serious long-term consequences, but there is no obvious reason to think it will collapse in 2025, forcing Putin’s hand. Our assumption for this year must be that Russia can maintain a war economy for as long as Putin chooses to take economic pain in the expectation of military and geopolitical gain. But clearly, an ever-tightening sanctions regime is critical to narrowing down his military and political options.

The most important factor of all is clarity of thinking and purpose in western capitals—above all in Washington—that what happens in Ukraine is a first-order interest for the United States and its allies and that we act accordingly. And that this position is understood in Moscow.

A ceasefire on the right terms is almost certainly better than the alternatives and may be achievable. But none of the war’s underlying causes would be solved, and they cannot be resolved while Putin is in power. The risks to UK, European, US and global security are formidable and demand a serious, long-term approach that looks beyond achieving a ceasefire and addresses the fundamental dangers that Putin’s Russia will continue to present.