Twice over the past month, Russian President Vladimir Putin has floated the idea of peace negotiations. This suggests he believes the time is ripe to try to force Kyiv to negotiate with the help of Ukraine’s Western allies.
Putin’s ceasefire proposal, announced two days before last month’s Ukraine Peace Summit in Switzerland, was designed to deflect attention away from Kyiv’s diplomatic initiative.
He named his conditions for suspending the fighting as Ukraine’s complete withdrawal from Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhia regions – not all of which are currently occupied by Russian forces – and Ukraine’s abandonment of its ambition to join NATO.
It is no coincidence that Putin has made these statements in the run up to the NATO summit and as campaigning for the US presidential election begins. Two and a half years into the war, his forces have made relatively meagre gains and a decisive breakthrough on the battlefield is unlikely – provided that Western countries continue their support to Kyiv. Meanwhile, Finland and Sweden have joined the alliance and NATO countries are increasing defence spending and stepping up investment in defence production.
By offering peace talks Putin hopes to exert maximum pressure to prevent Ukrainian NATO membership and exploit uncertainty among Kyiv’s allies, particularly the US and Germany. But there may be another reason he is acting now: his uncertain prospects in the event of a second Trump presidency.
The proposals
At last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Kazakhstan, Putin once again brought up peace talks, referring to draft agreements, supposedly agreed with Ukraine shortly after the full-scale invasion, that could have ended the conflict – saying they were still on the table.
Reportedly, these would have given Ukraine security guarantees in return for permanent neutrality – but Ukraine’s standing army would be limited in size and smaller than in February 2022. Russia would have no veto on Ukraine’s EU membership. There would be a 10–15-year window for both sides to resolve the status of Crimea, with the issue of borders left to Putin and Zelensky to resolve. In other words, Russia intended to cement its territorial gains.
It is not clear how the security arrangements were supposed to work since, according to one authoritative account, the Russian side would only accept guarantees that Moscow could veto.
These efforts apparently failed after Russian forces were forced to retreat from around Kyiv. In Putin’s telling, Russia withdrew from the area as a gesture to facilitate the signing of a peace agreement.
The truth is, his invasion force was unable to take the Ukrainian capital, and he was no longer in a position to force a settlement. The horrific evidence of Russian crimes at Bucha scuppered any prospect for further negotiations.
Since then, Ukraine’s Western allies have ensured that Ukraine can keep fighting. With only the minimum of support, Ukrainian forces have continued to inflict serious damage on the Russian war machine, destroying over 3000 tanks, equivalent to its entire active inventory before the war. Without a navy, Ukraine has also destroyed a quarter of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
To cope, Putin has had to dramatically increase military expenditure, introducing labour shortages and the risk of high inflation and low growth.
Limited access to Western technology is also constraining the Russian economy, despite workarounds to reduce the effect of sanctions. The effects will only increase over time as machinery wears out or becomes obsolete.
Ukraine’s resilience means that Putin can only see prospects for a slow and painful path to victory. That is hardly an attractive scenario for him, creating increasing, unpredictable pressures at home and contributing externally to an impression of Russian weakness.
In this situation, an obvious opportunity is to appeal to the leaderships of the US and Germany, Ukraine’s biggest backers, by dangling the carrot of peace talks. Both governments are worried about the risk of escalation. Both are largely committed to the idea of a negotiated compromise rather than Ukrainian victory.
Putin can already expect outright support for his proposals from NATO members Hungary and Slovakia, whose leaders have objected to arming Ukraine at all. Viktor Orban’s visit to Moscow last week was a blatant example of how one NATO and EU member state believes it can adopt its own line on Ukraine without deference to its allies.
His visit also reflects the growing influence of far right parties in other European countries, some of whom (like the AfD party in Germany and RN party in France) have similar positions on Ukraine. They are an obvious tool Moscow can use to chip away at Western solidarity and heap pressure on Ukraine to negotiate.
A second Trump presidency
However, there is another reason driving Putin’s peace proposals. He has good reason to be nervous about a second Trump presidency.
A Trump victory would likely see a rapid deterioration of US–China relations. That would bring the possibility of Russia being caught in the crossfire, as an ally of Beijing. This would present a particularly dangerous situation for Putin: Trump might believe he could damage Chinese interests by increasing pressure on Russia.
Despite Trump’s professed admiration for Putin and his leadership style, his presidential term did not bring the rewards that Moscow had hoped for. Putin has no reason to believe that the results of a second Trump presidency would be any different.
Trump has positioned himself as the strongman under whose leadership Russia would not have dared to invade Ukraine. It would scarcely be in his interest to show weakness towards Putin.