There is new optimism as Ukraine signals support for a narrowed, 19-point peace framework following weekend talks with the United States. Still, Russia is unlikely to accept any agreement that actually secures Ukraine’s future.
The battlefield remains key. Ukrainian units are fatigued to a degree that officials no longer bother to hide it from reporters. Front-line units have been operating with minimal rotation, thin reserves, and other mobilization difficulties as Russia intensifies pressure at the front. Moscow is aware that Kyiv is negotiating, at least in part, out of exhaustion.
Ukraine is also bleeding morale. Daily life in Ukraine means being woken up by midnight air-raid sirens and the buzz of incoming drones. Power cuts can last hours. Beneath that physical strain runs a bigger issue: many Ukrainian men are trying to avoid military service, and corruption has grown around the fees paid to be removed from draft lists. By contrast, Russia has managed to sustain the war without declaring a full mobilization. The Kremlin continues to rely on its hybrid recruitment machine, which includes regional levies, prison conscripts, and contract soldiers pressured by debt or poverty to generate manpower.
The Russian population is similarly insulated from the conflict in a way that Ukraine’s is not. Russians don’t stay awake because of the alerts of barrage missiles heading their way. They aren’t dragged into basements during electricity blackouts. They simply go about their lives. Their army may be dying in southeastern Ukraine, but they are not. And as long as the war remains something that happens to someone else, somewhere else, the Kremlin has no internal reason to alter strategy. No costs at home mean freedom to continue in Ukraine. Western sanctions haven’t altered this calculation.
We need to understand this dynamic as we consider why Moscow accepted peace talks in the first place. Russia took this approach in the hope that Washington might decide Ukraine’s long-term security is ultimately not a key concern. For the Kremlin, that is the hinge on which the entire negotiating process turns. As long as there was a chance that the Trump administration would avoid locking itself into Ukraine’s defense architecture, preferring a looser set of assurances, Moscow had an incentive to keep talking.
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Hence, why everything now depends on the strength of any security guarantees for Ukraine. If the revised framework produces malleable assurances with no real force to back them up, then Moscow will agree to it. Soft guarantees and ambiguity give the Kremlin room to maneuver: to consolidate its hold over the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine, to wait out Western attention, and then to launch a new attack with a much better prepared, larger force. Such an agreement would not end the conflict, only delay its recommencement.
In turn, any firm, enforceable security guarantee will be unacceptable to Russia. Moscow went to war to dominate Ukraine, to destroy its sovereignty, and to reassert Russian power across the region. Anything that prevents another attempt at this objective would defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategic purpose.