Why agreeing a lasting peace will be hard for Ukraine and Russia. BBC News Russian talks to officials close to early negotiations.
By Elizaveta Fokht, Svyatoslav Khomenko, Sergei Goryashko, Olga Ivshina.
*Vladimir Putin visits Kursk region on March 12th.*©Kremlin handout/Getty Images
A breakthrough in talks between Ukraine and the United States suggested a glimmer of hope that a path towards the end of war could be found: Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire on all fronts, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that the ball was now in Russia’s court.
Yesterday, while calling the idea of a truce “correct”, Putin said there remained “questions to be discussed” that would “eliminate the initial reasons for this crisis”: in effect, playing Rubio’s ball firmly into Donald Trump’s court.
His envoy Stephen Witkoff, who met Putin in the Kremlin last night, will have plenty to add when he lands in Washington. “Hopefully Russia will do the right thing,” Trump said in the meantime.
But will it? We spoke to people close to the negotiation tables where feelers are being put out, and asked where any incentive to start a process towards lasting peace might be found.
Would a truce suit Ukraine?
To some extent, it would: a week and a half after the catastrophic meeting between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump, Kyiv appears to have restored productive dialogue with Washington. By agreeing to the 30-day ceasefire, Ukraine also secured the resumption of vitally important American military supplies and intelligence sharing.
The agreements have also helped Kyiv dismantle the narrative that Ukraine did not wish to end the war – a talking point repeatedly pushed by the Kremlin, and repeated in the White House recently.
On the other hand, agreeing to a ceasefire along the whole front line marks a cardinal departure from principles Kyiv had held firmly to during the first two years of the war: namely, that there could be no truce until Russia withdrew its soldiers back across Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders.
Kyiv’s argument to date had been that any pause in the fighting would merely allow Moscow to regroup and prepare a new assault. Hence the Ukrainian delegation proposed only an aerial and marine ceasefire at the Jeddah talks.
The negotiating table in Jeddah at which the 30-day ceasefire proposal was worked out. ©Getty Images
In addition, the matter of security guarantees – a hedge against Russia being tempted to renew the offensive – has yet to be addressed. Pressure from the US leadership compelled Kyiv to concede ground here as well: Washington declared that any discussion of security guarantees could only begin if a ceasefire was established.
Volodymyr Zelensky has made no secret of the fact that he does not believe Vladimir Putin is interested in ending the war.
"But we are not going to play along with the narratives that Russia is spreading around the world, which claim we do not desire an end to the war. We won’t do that...,” Zelensky said in explaining why he had acceded to the approach taken by Washington.
“I take this very seriously. For me, the most important thing is to end the war, and I want the US president to see that".
So now that Ukraine has publicly agreed to a truce, the job for American diplomats was to lever Russia into signing up to it, too. The ball remains in motion.
Would a truce suit Russia?
Putin’s response to the ceasefire proposal was intentionally opaque. He was careful not to reject the idea out of hand, but the list of ‘buts’ he went on to elaborate showed little sign of willingness to order a cessation of hostilities in the near future.
However Putin has himself in the past proposed the idea of a temporary ceasefire – both times at Christmas. Kyiv never took the suggestion seriously, for similar reasons to the Russian president himself, who said back inlate December "If we stop for a week, it means giving the enemy time to dig in at these positions, to rest and receive the supplies of equipment and ammunition they need."
A BBC source close to the Kremlin said the Russian authorities believe that in the current conditions, an unconditional ceasefire would primarily benefit Kyiv. Russia is suffering heavy losses, but still advancing in the Donbas and Kursk region.
If the war stops without concessions from Kyiv, our source elaborated, Putin would probably have to startup hostilities again to get what he wants – and that would only reinforce the idea among Ukraine’s allies that Russia cannot be trusted.
Still, there are obvious risks in rejecting the idea of ceasefire outright. Not least, it might complicate Russia’s recently warming relations with the US since the return to power of Donald Trump.
Putin’s most senior foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, slapped down the ceasefire proposal early yesterday, but seemed to carefully row back his criticism later, telling Russian television that it had a “hasty character” but could be adapted.
Sending ambiguous signals is almost certainly an intentional negotiating tactic by Moscow. The key variable may be how they are perceived by Trump – his self-regard and tendency to unpredictable outbursts risk seeing him respond in ways the Kremlin had not bargained for.
Putin’s demands for the end of war haven’t changed. ©Getty Images
Putinset out his main conditions for a truce in June last year. Among them, the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the whole of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions (including those areas Russia does not occupy); the renunciation of Ukraine’s aspirations to NATO membership; and the lifting of sanctions on Russia.
Yesterday, he flagged up further obstacles to laying down arms, such as alleged war crimes by Ukrainian troops in Kursk region, and the question of how any ceasefire would be organised in general.
To a certain extent, Putin will be setting up demands he is happy to take off the table if talks get underway in earnest. But one of his longstanding complaints was reinstated by the second main outcome of the negotiations in Jeddah: the resumption of arms supplies and intelligence sharing by the US, which Putin has repeatedly blamed for prolonging the fighting.
Is there a plan for what comes next?
Both Russia and Ukraine say they want a full resolution of the war, and not just a brief pause in the fighting. So what is stopping them from working towards a broader peace agreement?
The BBC source close to the Kremlin makes the point that in the absence of direct dialogue between Moscow and Kyiv, or even dialogue mediated by the US or Europe, neither warring side has set eyes on concrete proposals for a settlement from the other.
“You have to draft documents. It takes time. Security guarantees for Ukraine? You need to sit down at the table with the Ukrainians and discuss it, and try to understand Putin’s ‘red lines.’ Neutral status for Ukraine? That also means you have to sit at a table and talk,” the source explained.
“But for now, there is no plan. Not from anyone: neither the Americans, nor the Europeans, and not from the Ukrainians, nor from the Russians.”
The source went on to say that theoretically Russia could work up such a proposal through a special representative appointed by Putin. “The Americans appointed [Keith] Kellogg. Putin could appoint someone as well. These people could start talking about things.”
But there is no active discussion of anything like this in the Kremlin right now, the source said. Nor has Ukraine appointed a special representative to such talks.
After the meeting in Riyadh between the US and Russia, Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov said Russia may form a team to work with the Americans. This too has yet to happen.
Russian-American talks in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in mid-February. ©Getty Images
The Europeans have also failed to come up with a clear plan. There have been several emergency summits recently, with the most significant in London. But according to a European diplomat familiar with the talks, Ukraine’s allies are struggling to reach agreement even among themselves, especially on the question of security guarantees.
French President Macron this week merely called for a start to discussions on the matter: he did not offer anything by way of concrete steps.
So for all the dramatic changes in rhetoric, not least from Washington, far less has changed in reality; and the war continues. A former NATO representative in Moscow, John Lough, makes the point that current talks are no more than preliminary, to set the stage for further talks:
“First of all, when Trump talks about ‘peace’, he means a ceasefire. These issues are way too complex to be settled in short order. It just cannot be done quickly,” Lough said.
A ceasefire might give an idea of what a long-term settlement might call for. But talks towards lasting peace will take far longer.
"Because this war and the reasons for it are so complicated, because it's been going on for three years and so much damage has been done, and there are issues of reparations, of the frozen assets,” Lough explained. “All this stuff is going to take months, if not years, to sort out.”
Security guarantees for Ukraine and possible concessions from Russia
A prime example of the distance between the two sides is the debate about deploying peacekeepers to Ukraine. Europe is deeply divided on the issue, though France and the UK are vocally in favour, and Denmark and Australia have suggested they could theoretically join such a mission.
Russia has made very clear that it opposes any foreign military presence in Ukraine – which is one reason it is so hard to reach consensus in Europe. A European diplomat we spoke to who is familiar with the exchanges at the London summit said there was little wider enthusiasm for putting boots on the ground.
The UK leadership may have hoped that other countries would pick up its idea of sending peacekeepers, the source suggested, but it failed to land because many countries in Europe are currently facing difficult political circumstances at home.
“Few are willing to take drastic steps in this situation,” the diplomat said, adding that some EU countries are concerned that the price of sending troops to Ukraine could be "political collapse or chaos."
European leaders are keen to claim a role in achieving peace, but cannot agree among themselves what that might mean on the ground. ©Getty Images
If some agreement among a number of countries is reached, the next question would be whether the US would offer security guarantees to the peacekeeping force itself.
Donald Trump has declared that American troops would never be sent to Ukraine; Macron reportedly failed to secure a promise of support from Washington; and Keir Starmer has said that without US backing no such mission would even be thinkable.
There then remain the blunt objections of Russia to NATO troops anywhere near its borders: "We do not see a place for compromise. This discussion is being conducted with an openly hostile objective," said the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov a few days ago.
Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, considers such a force a non-starter for exactly this reason: Russia will ask "What is the purpose of the force? To support Ukrainians? So it's not a peacekeeping force," he says.
So is there any meaning to these discussions about sending soldiers to Ukraine? Perhaps not, according to John Lough:
“I think it’s all for show. Because they know, at the end of the day, that Trump isn't going to back this. So it's something of an empty threat,” he said. Everyone, Putin included, knows it, Lough says.
“The only European presence you could have would be some sort of monitoring mission. A bit like the OSCE arrangement that we had in Donbas after the Minsk agreements. But you're not going to get anything beyond that.”
Ukrainian troops on the frontline. ©Getty Images
Alexander Gabuev, at the Carnegie Moscow Centre in Berlin, raises the idea of Chinese troops at the front line, possibly under a UN mandate. Neither party to the war would want to damage relations with China, and Xi Jinping would take his prestige, and the success of such a mission, very personally.
"The compromise wouldn’t fully satisfy either side, but they could live with it," Gabuev suggested.
Samuel Charap thinks a workable guarantee might be similar to the agreement in 1975 that brought peace between Israel and Egypt and allowed for ‘corrective actions’ by the US if the truce was violated by Cairo.
The individual close to the Kremlin whom we spoke to said Putin would prefer an arrangement of this sort to the option of armed Europeans on the ground in Ukraine. The source added that similar guarantees for Kyiv were on the table in the talks between Russia and Ukraine in the spring of 2022.
The problem then, however, was that the countries Ukraine wanted as guarantors were not keen on signing up to a possible armed confrontation with Russia. It is not obvious that their position has changed in three years of intense warfare.
Volodymyr Zelensky, during his recent trip to London, said the best guarantee for his country would be a strong army. John Lough, the former NATO representative in Moscow, concurs: strengthening Ukraine’s armed forces and establishing defence lines would be the most meaningful deterrent to renewed hostilities by Russia.
But while European leaders have pledged continued military support for Kyiv regardless of what the Trump administration decides to do, the Kremlin may decide that this, too, is unacceptable. At the start of the full-scale invasion, after all, one of the stated aims was a massive reduction in the size of Ukraine’s army, if not the country’s total ‘demilitarisation’.
What compromises Russia might be willing to consider remains an open question – almost certainly left intentionally opaque. In a recent televised meeting with military families, Putin promised that Russia “will not give up” in Ukraine. Yet he will be alert to any state of affairs he can bring into being that might credibly be declared victorious.
Read this story in Russianhere.
English version edited by Chris Booth.