Russian President Vladimir Putin has given a cagey initial response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s cease-fire proposal, backing the idea in principle but listing a series of additional demands that make any meaningful progress unlikely. Officials in Kyiv will be hoping that Putin’s reluctance to embrace the U.S. cease-fire initiative will help convince their American counterparts that the Kremlin dictator is not genuinely interested in ending the war.
Many in Ukraine have been alarmed by recent US suggestions that Russia is ready for serious peace talks, and have pointed to the Kremlin’s consistently tough negotiating stance as evidence of Putin’s determination to continue the fight. They argue that the current debate about possible compromises and territorial concessions reflects a fundamentally flawed understanding of the maximalist motives behind Russia’s invasion.
Ukrainians feel they have a much more realistic view of Russia’s true intentions. They are convinced that Putin will never be satisfied with limited territorial gains, because he is not really fighting for land in Ukraine. Instead, he is waging war against the very existence of a separate Ukrainian state and nation. This chilling goal undermines the whole concept of a compromise peace. Simply put, there can be no meaningful middle ground between Russian genocide and Ukrainian national survival.
The Trump White House is not the first to underestimate the scale of Putin’s imperial ambitions in Ukraine. The previous Biden administration repeatedly declared Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “strategic failure,” pointing to the extremely high price the Kremlin paid in terms of military losses and economic damage. This practical assessment of the invasion assumes that Putin is guided and constrained by the same logic as his Western contemporaries. But this is not the case.
While democratic leaders must worry about approval ratings and economic performance, Putin has eliminated virtually every possible source of domestic opposition and can focus on securing his place in Russian history. From his first years in power, he has made no secret of the fact that he views the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy and the post-Cold War world order as an injustice. Crucially, Ukraine has become the embodiment of both these grievances. Putin is adamant that he cannot hope to achieve his historic mission to reverse the 1991 verdict and restore the Russian empire without first destroying Ukrainian independence.
Putin’s obsession with Ukraine has become increasingly clear over the past two decades, as his campaign to subjugate the country has escalated from political meddling to military intervention. In 2004, his attempts to rig Ukraine’s presidential election and install a Kremlin-friendly candidate backfired disastrously and helped spark the Orange Revolution. A decade later, he responded to another Ukrainian pro-democracy revolution by seizing Crimea and invading eastern Ukraine.
In the years since Russia’s military aggression began, it has become increasingly clear that the limited 2014 invasion has not produced the desired result of a pro-Russian Ukraine. On the contrary, Russia’s attack has only strengthened Ukraine’s commitment to the West and its aspirations for a Euro-Atlantic future. Rather than acknowledge the counterproductive consequences of his military campaign, Putin has decided to up the ante even further by launching the largest invasion of Europe since World War II.
Over the past three years, Putin has become increasingly vocal about his intentions to erase Ukraine entirely. He has declared the occupied Ukrainian regions “Russian forever” and compared his invasion to the imperial conquests of Russian ruler Peter the Great in the 18th century. Vicious anti-Ukrainian rhetoric has become so normalized in Russian state media that UN officials believe it may amount to “incitement to genocide.” Meanwhile, in the areas of Ukraine under Kremlin control, Russia has systematically suppressed all traces of Ukrainian statehood and national identity.
Despite the horror and trauma of the Russian invasion, Ukrainians have so far refused to back down. This defiance is a personal humiliation for Putin. It directly undermines his carefully crafted strongman persona and makes a complete mockery of his insistence that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.” Instead of securing his place among the most celebrated rulers in Russian history, Putin now risks being remembered as the man who lost Ukraine.
The loss of Ukraine is Putin’s worst nightmare. Ever since he witnessed the collapse of Soviet power as a young KGB officer in East Germany, he has been haunted by visions of people-power movements toppling empires. This helps explain his increasingly fierce resistance to the robust and often unruly democratic culture that has taken root in post-Soviet Ukraine. Since the Orange Revolution of 2004, he has viewed the consolidation of Ukrainian democracy as an existential threat to his authoritarian regime and a potential catalyst for the next stage of Russia’s retreat from empire.
Putin knows that an invasion of Ukraine will define his entire reign and decide the future fate of the Russian Federation. While he may be willing to discuss a strategic pause in hostilities if the terms of a ceasefire are favorable to Moscow, he will never accept the existence of a separate and truly independent Ukrainian state on Russia’s border. This does not mean that the current U.S.-led peace efforts are entirely useless, but it is vital to recognize that freezing the conflict along the current front lines will not be enough to end the war.
For decades, Western leaders have made the mistake of viewing Putin through the prism of their own political pragmatism, while underestimating the importance of his revisionist imperial ideology. After three years of total war in the heart of Europe, there is no longer any justification for such dreams. Putin has staked everything on the destruction of Ukraine and is confident that the tribunal of history will judge him favorably. Unless he is stopped by the overwhelming might of the collective West, he will continue to wage war on Ukraine until he achieves his chilling goal.
Nikolai Beleskov is a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst at the Ukrainian public organization “Come Back Alive.” The opinions expressed in this article are the personal position of the author and do not reflect the opinions or views of NISS or “Come Back Alive.”
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