It’s impossible to make peace with someone who doesn’t want it. But if there is any chance of stopping the killing in Ukraine, this is the path forward.
October 2025
“The war in Ukraine is nowhere near ripe for a negotiated peace agreement or even short-term ceasefire . . . In fact, the conflict is more intractable than ever.”
Thus was the pessimistic assessment I penned in these pages in January 2025 just before the Trump administration took office with a pledge to quickly forge — or force — a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. And while the past ten months have witnessed a flurry of diplomatic initiatives, none have silenced the guns, let alone cemented a durable peace settlement. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who accepted my application of bargaining theories of war termination to the intractable conflict in Ukraine. Recent events suggest that further diplomatic outreach to Russia in the name of peace will do worse than fail; it will likely prolong a war whose casualties are approaching a staggering two-million lives.
In my January essay, I argued that three underlying conditions posed insurmountable obstacles to a quick settlement. First, what Ukraine and Russia are fighting for are known as “indivisible issues” — things not easily sliced and apportioned as part of a peace agreement. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Russia’s war is not about territorial conquest but rather the elimination of Ukraine as an independent and sovereign democratic country. No division of Ukrainian lands would satisfy Vladimir Putin’s maximalist demands to wipe the Ukrainian state and nation from the earth.
Second is the credible-commitment problem. With Russia’s long history of broken agreements and armed aggression against its neighbors, Ukraine would rightly doubt the sincerity of any agreement signed by Putin. Why risk post-settlement demobilization if the risk of reinvasion is so high?
The third barrier to settlement stems from disagreements about the likely outcome of the war. States will continue to fight as long as they believe they have a better chance of achieving their war aims by fighting than by negotiating. Assumptions and expectations about the capabilities and resolve of your adversary obscure the path to peace. Russia’s grinding gains in the Donbas over the last year have been minimal and come at a staggering cost in human life. But this slow forward progress — and the perception of weakening Western resolve — have convinced Putin that he will prevail in the long run.
The More Things Change . . .
Despite President Trump’s seemingly genuine desire to end the war in Ukraine, his efforts have not succeeded for the simple reason that the fundamental barriers have not budged at all. In his public statements, Putin’s maximalist conditions for peace remain unchanged since he first invaded Ukraine: international recognition of Russia’s unilateral annexation of the four Ukrainian oblasts in September 2022; regime change in Kyiv; limitations on Ukraine’s armed forces; no Ukrainian membership in foreign military alliances and no foreign military presence in Ukraine; and the institution of Russian as an official language of Ukraine. Nor has anything made Putin alter his cost-benefit analysis of continuing the war. He believes he is winning and that he can sustain the fight long enough to break Ukrainian capabilities and Western resolve. So why settle now?
Although the underlying dynamics are unchanged, recent activity on the battlefield and beyond paint a picture that is anything but static. Certain diplomatic activities — however well intended — have counterproductively reinforced some of the barriers to peace, while other developments in the military realm offer glimmers of hope that Putin’s calculus could eventually be changed. But it won’t be quick or easy.
The first few months of 2025 suggested a White House strategy of applying pressure on Ukraine while leveraging Trump and Putin’s historically warm personal relations to coax the latter to the bargaining table. This approach of applying “sticks” to Ukraine, including the temporary halting of weapons deliveries and suspension of intelligence sharing while engaging publicly with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, contrasted with the “carrots” offered to Moscow through multiple presidential phone calls and visits to Moscow by presidential envoy Steve Witkoff.
Although Zelensky learned his lesson from the disastrous and acrimonious Oval Office meeting of February 28 and took pains to endorse multiple ceasefire proposals publicly while thanking Trump profusely, no such goodwill was forthcoming from Moscow. By summer, Trump increasingly expressed his frustration at Putin’s intransigence, guessing correctly that he was being strung along by a Kremlin uninterested in peace. Meanwhile, private interventions by First Lady Melania Trump, who reportedly would inform her husband of new Russian attacks on civilians after his phone calls with Putin, may have helped push Trump toward a more muscular approach to Moscow.
Late summer witnessed an extraordinary burst of activity, as bipartisan support in Congress for severe new penalties (up to 500 percent tariffs) and Trump’s own rising anger over Putin’s manipulations prompted the U.S. president to threaten in July to impose 100 percent “secondary tariffs” on China and India for continuing to buy the oil funding Russia’s war. Backed by this ultimatum, Witkoff traveled to Moscow on August 6 to convince the Kremlin to negotiate peace.
Just a week later, Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin at the Alaska summit, the first meeting between Russian and American presidents since before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s first trip to the United States in a decade. Of course, the summit failed to achieve concrete results, producing little more than photo ops and an expressed willingness to “keep talking.”
Nor did a hastily arranged summit in Washington three days later with Zelensky and the heads of several European NATO members accomplish any more. As evidence of Putin’s disinterest to negotiate a diplomatic end to the war, he rejected Trump and Zelensky’s proposal to hold a trilateral summit and launched one of the war’s largest aerial attacks against Kyiv within two weeks of the Alaska summit. The 598 drones, two hypersonic missiles, nine ballistic missiles, and 20 cruise missiles that killed 21 civilians, including four children, that night should have extinguished any doubts about Putin’s true and unchanged bloody intentions. And by then, the United States had whittled down its threatened 500 percent tariffs on Russia’s oil purchasers to just 25 percent, applied to India alone (on top of an unrelated 25 percent tariff Trump slapped on New Delhi at the same time).
By early October, even the Russian Foreign Ministry declared that momentum from the Alaska summit was “exhausted.” With so little to show for its efforts, the Trump administration appeared to accept that the time to rely on carrots had long passed. Adopting a far more coercive stance, Washington has publicly weighed sending tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, along with permission to use them for long-range strikes on Russian targets up to 1,500 miles away. Considering confirmed reports that the United States has provided critical intelligence to enable Ukraine’s devastating attacks on Russian oil refineries and other energy facilities, one might think that Putin had finally overplayed his hand and would suffer the consequences of his duplicity with Trump.
But events appear to have intervened again. Trump’s Gaza ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas may inadvertently provide Putin with a new opportunity to extend his diplomatic shell game. While speaking to the Israeli Knesset on October 13, Trump said, “First we have to get Russia done. We gotta get that one done. If you don’t mind, Steve [Witkoff], let’s focus on Russia first.” Indeed, planning is now underway for a late October summit between Trump and Putin in Budapest, hosted by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Russia’s staunchest supporter in Europe.
Will Trump reach for the carrot again? If he does, Putin will be encouraged to engage in more rounds of deception and dithering delays. A negotiating strategy of alternating carrots and sticks might work on a leader who is genuinely looking for a diplomatic exit from war.
But Vladimir Putin is no such leader — nothing in his behavior since Trump initiated his diplomatic outreach suggests that Putin finds it necessary to accept anything but total victory. There is no reason to think carrots will now alter his thinking. Worse, Putin may interpret them as a sign of Western strategic incoherence that reinforces his belief in the weak resolve of Ukraine’s allies. Another outstretched hand simply grants Putin more time and confidence to wage a war he still thinks he can win.
Drop the Carrots
If incentives are doomed to fail, how do we get Putin to change his strategic calculus? How can we alter his beliefs about the capabilities and resolve of Ukraine and its allies, forcing him to accept that a perpetual war is unsustainable? Such a strategy would skip the carrots and move straight to the sticks. It would target Russian weaknesses, impose maximum pressure on Moscow in multiple domains, and shore up vulnerabilities in the Western coalition’s will to counter Putin’s imperial ambitions.
Ukraine has already shown the way forward. Kyiv’s increasing attacks on Russian oil infrastructure — targeting pipelines, refineries, oil depots, and export terminals — have imposed mounting costs on Russia since this summer. Up to 40 percent of Russia’s oil-refining capacity has been affected, leading to steeply rising gasoline prices and shortages in many regions and forcing Moscow to import refined fuel from Belarus and China. Given the Kremlin’s dependence on energy sales, with 25 percent of the government’s revenue dependent on oil and gas, a long-term Ukrainian strategy could have wide-ranging consequences for Russia’s military logistics, fiscal stability, and social stability as fuel shortages begin to hit ordinary Russians where it hurts.
Increased Western military support for Ukraine’s strikes against Russian energy infrastructure, expanded intelligence support, provision of long-range tomahawk missiles, and a greenlight to use these weapons against long-range energy targets should form the backbone of any “big stick” strategy against Putin. After all, Putin’s expectations about “the likely outcome of future rounds of fighting” need not be restricted to the battlefield. Imposing ever increasing economic pain on Russia can — if sustained over time — alter his cost-benefit analysis of continued war, especially if his military is making negligible advances on the front lines. To this end, increased supplies of defensive weaponry to Ukraine (especially Patriot missile batteries) will help minimize the “benefits” that Russia is able to accrue amid mounting battlefield costs.
Just as important, these measures would send Putin an important signal about Western resolve. By imposing real penalties with decisive action, the West can show Russia that it is ready to get serious about ending the war and won’t be fooled by Putin’s usual delaying tactics. Only once Russia accepts — and implements — concrete steps toward peace should any pressure on Putin be relieved.
In truth, even an unflinching strategy of intense and mounting pain is unlikely to divert Putin from his singular obsession to crush Ukraine in his imperial embrace. I remain doubtful that there will ever be a signing ceremony for a Russian-Ukrainian ceasefire agreement, let alone a long-term peace agreement. But at least a tougher, uncompromising strategy will severely degrade Russia’s capacity to wage war, enhance Ukrainian survival, and more likely produce the battlefield stalemate necessary to force a frozen conflict.
If President Trump wants to maximize his chances of delivering on his promise to stop the killing in Ukraine, he would do well to recall the words of an admired predecessor with a twist: Walk loudly and carry a bigger stick. Sometimes that’s the only path to peace.
Robert Person is a nonresident Senior Fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. The views here are his own.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: SERGEY BOBYLEV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
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