Seven Reasons Putin Doesn’t Want to End the War in Ukraine
You might think Russian President Vladimir Putin would be eager to reach a peace deal in Ukraine. The casualties of the war he started have reached an estimated 700,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded. He continues to lose as many as 1,000 soldiers a day, while barely gaining any territory. His economy is headed for stagflation, and the prices of key consumer staples are through the roof.
Yet, instead of pocketing the giveaways, accepting a ceasefire and moving on to what could become a win, if not yet a triumph, Putin is stalling. Trump envoy Stephen Witkoff held a third meeting with Putin on Friday which ended with as little progress as his previous two. And two days later, Russia exhibited its continued defiance of Trump’s bid for peace with a deadly attack during Palm Sunday church services that killed dozens of worshippers.
The glaring disconnect between so many quid proffers by the White House and zero quo by Putin may have finally caught Trump’s eye. When, as a condition for a ceasefire in the Black Sea basin, which Ukrainian drones had largely cleared of Russian warships and secured unimpeded merchant navigation, Putin demanded stripping Ukraine of sovereignty by making it a ward of the UN, Trump finally lashed out with a threat of secondary sanctions on Russian oil. And on Friday after Witkoff’s failed meeting, he posted a frustrated message: “Russia has to get moving. Too many people ere [sic] DYING, thousands a week, in a terrible and senseless war.”
The truth that has so far eluded Trump and his administration is that Putin doesn’t really have an interest in negotiating a peace with Ukraine. The Trump administration’s inability to see this plain fact in large part is due to the same three blind spots that plague virtually all U.S. presidents vis-à-vis Russia: an ignorance of the country; an unbound confidence in their personal gift of persuasion; and an inability to appreciate the ideological and political imperatives that drive authoritarian regimes. In all three areas, Donald Trump appears to have surpassed his White House predecessors.
Here are seven reasons why Putin is stonewalling.
1. The war provides a rationale for Putin’s dictatorship.
There is no better international context for a dictatorship than war. As the architect of the Cold War containment of the Soviet Union, George Kennan, once put it, “Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because it provided the only excuse for the dictatorship without which they don’t know how to rule.”
When incomes and economic growth slowed in Putin’s third term as president (2012-2018), Putin switched the foundation of his regime legitimacy to militarized patriotism. This manifested first in the invasion and occupation of Crimea in 2014, and later in the decision to invade Ukraine. Putin still needs Russia to be beset by enemies, or there is no reason for the militarized patriotism and the growing repression that drives his regime.
2. Putin likes the trappings of militarism.
Putin personally revels in Stalin’s title of Supreme Commander in Chief, as he struts in fatigues and pins medals on soldiers. The war’s end would deprive him of such symbolic props for the Defender of the Motherland image he cherishes.
3. Russia’s economy is dependent on the war.
Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, the Russian economy has been restructured to support the war and transitioning to a peacetime economy is unlikely to be painless. Consumers have already suffered: Year-on-year increases in the prices of such staples as bread, chicken and macaroni are in double digits while potatoes cost twice as much as they did before the war. The country’s GDP is projected to grow only at between 1.4 and 1.6 percent this year, and with the Central Bank’s interest rate at 21 percent there is little hope of a speedy recovery.
Daily privations suddenly loom larger when they can no longer be justified as wartime sacrifices. Voina vsyo spishet, says a Russian proverb: “War will write off everything.”
4. Ending wartime bonuses and other perks could cause social unrest.
Putting an end to expectations society has grown accustomed to is a notoriously difficult task for any regime. Ending sign-up bonuses, soldiers’ wages, and payouts to the families of the killed servicemen, which all are orders of magnitude larger than the average national income and which have lifted out of poverty some of Russia’s destitute areas, is certain to cause discontent. Hundreds of thousands of war veterans, many embittered, steeped in the horrors and savagery of Stalin’s World War II ways, which Putin fully mirrored in Ukraine, would also expect privileges and upward mobility. Meanwhile the increase in veteran-perpetrated crimes has already become a problem the Kremlin is concerned about, and it could get worse with fewer benefits.
The same would go for civilians, many of whom are employed in the defense sector. Accustomed to fat salaries, prestige and job security in Russia’s swollen military-industrial complex, hundreds of thousands of workers will hardly welcome a return to their meager peacetime jobs — assuming they can still find them in the shrunken civilian sector.
5. Change is destabilizing in authoritarian regimes.
Any sharp policy change, even objectively for the better, is a risk for political leaders. This is especially true in authoritarian regimes, at once seemingly impervious to outside pressures and dangerously lacking flexibility.
6. Putin is an opportunist and a risk taker.
Every new concession prompts more, and more brazen, ultimatums from Putin. The more Trump offers as inducement, the more Putin is likely to hold out for more. It’s (Putin’s) art of the deal.
7. Putin needs victory, not peace.
The most important cause of Putin’s dithering is that for him peace is not a priority. Victory is. The only thing that can overcome the instability of an end to war is a victory that looks shining enough to help the Kremlin counterbalance post-war problems and the memory of the killed and maimed — without resorting to armed repression to deal with social discontent. In wars, combatants begin to negotiate when they are convinced that they can do better at the negotiation table than on the battlefield. “Better” for Putin almost certainly means nothing short of Ukraine’s capitulation. Inducements and rhetorical threats have fallen short of disabusing him of that hope.
The bottom line is that Putin doesn’t yet have a good enough reason to agree to end the war.
What will change his mind? The carrots Trump has been offering must be replaced with sticks — effective and consistent policies designed to make the cost of waging war higher than the cost of peace. Implementing secondary sanctions on the importers of Russian oil, as Trump recently proposed, would be one such measure. Closing loopholes in the sanctioning of Russia’s energy sector by including Russia’s top oil company Rosneft and the largest LNG producer Novatek would be another step in the right direction, along with ending Europe’s imports of Russian LNG. Closing the sanctions loophole on principal banks, such as Rosselkhozbank and the Austrian-owned Raiffeisenbank, would also help concentrate Putin’s mind. It goes without saying that stopping the yoyo-ing of U.S. military aid to Ukraine and instead increasing it massively would make an impression.
Trump and his negotiators must understand that at the moment, Putin intends to go to any so-called peace talks only to codify a Ukrainian surrender. He will procrastinate until he is confident of meeting this objective. There are no shortcuts to persuading him otherwise — except for making the cost of his dithering increasingly painful.