The second day of Ukraine–Russia talks in Geneva, Switzerland, ended after just two hours Wednesday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Moscow of trying to “drag out” negotiations. Russia’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky called the discussions “difficult, but businesslike.” The White House said “meaningful progress” had been made. Another round of talks, officials assured, would follow.
The problem?
The outcome of the next talks will be the same as the outcome of these talks. Moscow is simply trying to run out the clock on President Donald Trump’s patience.
U.S. diplomacy, rooted in a results-oriented tradition, tends to treat talks as a mechanism to solve problems and close a deal. Russian diplomacy, shaped by Soviet-era practice, operates with far greater comfort around ambiguity and indefinite outcomes. But the basic reason that Moscow came to the table at all is to reduce the U.S. commitment to Ukraine. The Kremlin’s primary objective in these talks is to prevent Washington from firmly siding with Kyiv. A settlement will only be acceptable to Russia if it conveys a signal that the United States will abandon Ukraine’s security architecture. As long as these talks continue, Moscow can point to the process itself as a reason for Washington to hold back further military support for Kyiv or punitive actions against Russia. From President Vladimir Putin’s perspective, talks cost nothing but buy time. Time for Russian forces to grind slowly forward, for Ukraine’s exhausted front-line units to thin, for Ukraine’s population to tire, for Western attention to drift.
Russia is banking on Ukraine’s fatigue.
The Kremlin has sustained its war through regional conscription levies, contract soldiers pressured by debt or poverty, and prison recruits. This feeds manpower into a grinding campaign. It allows a tolerance for casualties that no democratic government could sustain. Russian cities remain untouched. The Russian people basically keep on living as they did before the war. As long as the war stays elsewhere, the Kremlin faces little internal pressure to compromise. In contrast, Ukraine is negotiating from a place of exhaustion.
For Putin, however, the war has to end with something that looks like a win.
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Russia launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022 with the stated goal of subjugating Ukraine entirely. Three years and hundreds of thousands of casualties later, regaining territory that Russian forces already held before the invasion does not come close to meeting that bar. To justify the scale of what this war has cost, Putin needs an outcome that shows Ukraine broken as a country: demilitarized, denied the security alliances it has sought, and pulled back under Russian influence. Anything short of that is not a victory he can present to his own country or to the world. That is why any realistic peace deal, one that leaves Ukraine sovereign, will be treated by Moscow as a pause rather than a conclusion.
If the talks produce vague Western commitments backed by weak enforcement mechanisms, Moscow will accept them. Soft guarantees offer the Kremlin time and economic room to consolidate its territorial gains, wait out Western attention, and then exert future military pressure on Kyiv. But any enforceable guarantee, one with real teeth and real backing, faces certain rejection for the same reason.