What are Putin’s Ultimate Demands for Peace in Ukraine? - The New Yorker

For all the turns in U.S. policy during the nearly four years of the war in Ukraine—from Joe Biden’s “as long as it takes” to Donald Trump’s “you don’t have the cards”—the fundamental nature of the conflict has remained remarkably stable. Russia has insisted on limiting, if not negating, Ukraine’s sovereignty, and Vladimir Putin has long believed that he is just around the corner from convincing Ukraine’s Western backers that this is the only sensible outcome. Ukraine, meanwhile, has held out for security guarantees from the West, so that any end to the fighting would be durable, and not merely a pause that leaves the country in a perpetual state of vulnerability, awaiting the next invasion.

To date, the requirements of each side have been anathema to the other. Since Trump’s reëlection, delegations have gathered in Washington, Kyiv, Paris, and Riyadh, but the old logic held. The war ground on. Putin continued to believe that Russia could squelch Ukraine’s will to fight and eventually the West would tire of serving as a backstop; Zelensky was ready for compromise but not capitulation.

Earlier this month, reports emerged of a twenty-eight-point peace plan shepherded into existence by Trump’s envoy and old friend Steve Witkoff. The plan called for Ukraine to withdraw entirely from the Donbas, parts of which it still controls; to unequivocally give up the prospect of joining NATO; and for NATO to agree not to send troops there. Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund, and Yuri Ushakov, a top foreign-policy aide to Putin, were reportedly heavily involved in negotiating the proposal. Bloomberg published a leaked phone call between them, in which Dmitriev says, “We’ll just make this paper from our position,” and, even if White House officials don’t copy it exactly, “at least it’ll be as close to it as possible.” According to another recording obtained by Bloomberg, Witkoff, in turn, offered advice to Ushakov, telling him that Putin should compliment Trump for ending the war in Gaza and say that he respects that the U.S. President is “a man of peace.”

The initiative felt slapdash, and open to divergent interpretations. Many of the thornier details that would need to be hashed out for lasting peace were left unaddressed. The proposal called for Trump to chair a “Peace Council”—modelled after the agreement that ended the war in Gaza in September—but how would such a council function once Trump left office? Or how would the U.S. insure, for example, that Russia was duly enacting educational programs that foster “understanding and tolerance of different cultures”? But, somehow, these ambiguities also seemed to upset the status quo. Soon, the largest question hovering over the document was: Could it actually lead to peace?

The Kremlin is cautious: it views the original twenty-eight points as an opening gambit, a basis from which it could push its advantage. “No document has come as close to a full accounting of Russian interests and priorities,” a source in Moscow foreign-policy circles told me. “But it’s also clear these points can be edited, be rethought, or disappear—or new ones can be added.”

Indeed, on November 24th, Ukrainian officials announced that, after meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other U.S. officials, in Geneva, they had come up with their own, nineteen-point plan. In the new draft, Zelensky said, “many of the right elements have been taken into account.”

The next day, Trump announced that Witkoff would travel to Moscow, and Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army, would fly to Kyiv. “There are only a few remaining points of disagreement,” Trump said. But, heading into the Thanksgiving holiday, there are now essentially two proposals: a Witkoff plan and a Rubio plan. One suits Russia, the other Ukraine. The war’s essential logic has again revealed itself: Moscow won’t accept what Kyiv can stomach.

Throughout Trump’s second term, officials in Kyiv have appeared more willing to make concessions than many observers realize. The country’s situation on the battlefield, while not catastrophic, is unfavorable. Ukraine lacks sufficient numbers of combat-ready infantry, and its drones are not able to fully defend against the Russian onslaught. Russia, though its advances have come at enormous cost to its forces, has achieved an operational momentum that Ukraine has struggled to halt. The situation in the southern front, around Zaporizhzhia, has become as worrying as that in the east, where the battle for the city of Pokrovsk has attracted the most attention. Members of the Ukrainian military are questioning the competency of the top command and the ability of their forces to hold the line. According to Balazs Jarabik, a former European diplomat with extensive connections in Kyiv, security officials have told him that “Armageddon is coming.”

Meanwhile, a corruption scandal unfolded in Kyiv earlier this month in which several top officials, including a longtime Zelensky confidant with interests in the energy and drone sectors, were implicated in a hundred-million-dollar kickback scheme. NABU, an independent anticorruption body that Zelensky had tried but failed to bring under his authority this summer, released a series of incriminating surveillance tapes. In the videos, a suspect complains that his back hurts from carrying so many bags of cash; another says it’s not worth spending the money to protect electrical substations from Russian attack—an infuriating statement in a winter of rolling blackouts. “The scandal shook the state to the core,” Jarabik said. “Everyone was wondering, Who else is on these tapes?” Zelensky, even if not directly involved, was left politically wounded.

The country’s fiscal crisis has also become too acute to ignore. According to estimates by the European Commission, over the next two years Ukraine will need more than a hundred and thirty billion euros to fill holes in its budget. With Trump in the White House, that money is not likely coming from the U.S. In theory, the problem could be solved by an E.U. proposal, which would reportedly provide Ukraine with a hundred and forty billion euros from an even larger sum of frozen Russian assets that are being held in Europe. However, that effort has stalled, and the sums may never reach Ukraine; Belgium, the home of Euroclear, one of the continent’s chief securities depositories, is wary of taking on the sole legal responsibility for the maneuver.

The Kremlin is keenly aware of the pressures that Zelensky and the Ukrainian state are under. If anything, Putin has consistently overestimated this factor. “He thinks for him to get what he wants he just needs to push a bit more,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told me. “He will squeeze every last drop. Trump will twist Ukraine’s arm or the country will be weakened to the point that it has no choice.”

That’s not to say that Russia is entirely without its own reasons to consider a deal. Oil prices are down. U.S. sanctions imposed in October on Rosneft and Lukoil, two of Russia’s largest oil companies, have eaten into the Kremlin’s most important revenue stream—this month, income from oil-and-gas sales was down about a quarter from a year ago. Importers in India and China, the two most important markets for Russian oil, have scaled down or even cancelled their purchases. Meanwhile, Ukraine has stepped up its campaign of drone strikes on refining and processing facilities inside Russia. As for the military effort, enlistment numbers fell to a two-year low this summer. Some Russian regions, facing local budget crunches, have cut the large signing bonuses they were handing out to new recruits.

Putin’s wager may well be that, however difficult things look for Russia, they are far worse for Ukraine. Convincing him to agree to a peace plan, the Moscow foreign-policy source said, would require not only an assurance that Russia’s priorities would be honored but that they could be fully realized. “The question is how any of this could be transformed into an agreement that will be legally binding,” the source said. Putin won’t be satisfied with anything less than an ironclad, generations-long resolution to what the source called the “Ukrainian question.”

Consider, for example, a central Russian demand: an assurance that Ukraine will not join NATO. How possible, or durable, would that commitment be? The original Witkoff plan dictates that Ukraine should repeal the article in its constitution that calls for NATO membership. Even if Zelensky managed to push through such a change, the Moscow foreign-policy source said, “Ukraine changed its constitution once”—the NATO language was added in 2019—“so why couldn’t they change it again, and again?”

Perhaps NATO itself could take Ukrainian membership off the table. But will all NATO members, including Poland and the Baltic states, which have long feared that they could become the next targets of Russian aggression, agree to such a move? Or maybe the U.S. takes responsibility, and issues a public, indefinite veto on Ukrainian membership. But, from Moscow’s vantage point, Trump is merely a temporary political phenomenon. “We all remember Biden’s policies toward Ukraine and how quick everything he had said ceased to mean anything,” the source said. “So, in three years, Trump himself is gone and who knows?” Putin, like a character in a Greek tragedy, is left chasing a certainty he can never reach.

Stanovaya, at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, repeated a maxim that she has been telling me since the start of Russia’s invasion. The war has gone on far longer than Putin envisioned, and he doesn’t welcome its indefinite continuation as a goal in itself. “It’s not that Putin wants war,” Stanovaya said. “He’d be happy to negotiate. He’s been trying to signal this to Trump all along.” It just has to be entirely on his terms. “Utterly maximalist, as they’re often called,” Stanovaya said. “Or, as Putin thinks of them, basic and self-evident.”♦

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