In case there was any doubt about which country — Russia or Ukraine — was the obstacle to peace, the Kremlin dispelled it this week with its response to the 30-day ceasefire plan pushed by the Trump administration. Ukrainian representatives unconditionally agreed on Tuesday to the ceasefire during a meeting with U.S. envoys in Saudi Arabia. But on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin turned down the U.S. overture — even if he did so in language designed not to offend President Donald Trump.
“The idea in itself is the right one, and we certainly support it, but there are issues that we need to discuss”, Putin said diplomatically. He proceeded to make clear that he would object to any ceasefire that allows Ukraine to “use those 30 days to continue forced mobilization, get weapons supplies and prepare its mobilized units”. Putin did not offer to impose a 30-day moratorium on Russia’s military preparations — only on Ukraine’s.
Putin might be cracking the door for a short ceasefire — perhaps if the United States offers to cut off support to Ukraine again — but he is making clear that he is no mood to make any concessions for peace.
This is no surprise, given that Russia launched an unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Putin can stop his aggression at any time. But he has chosen to keep going for more than three years despite the steep losses suffered by his own forces. (Russia has lost at least 95,000 soldiers dead and nearly 4,000 tanks, according to some estimates.)
Yet Trump has appeared confused about who the culprit in this conflict is. He has, preposterously, blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the conflict, and given Putin credit for wanting “to end the war” while complaining, “I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine”.
Given Trump’s bizarre, pro-Putin outlook, I’m doubtful that anything can open his eyes to the reality of the war. But if anything can, it might be a Russian rejection of his temporary ceasefire plan.
Putin has gambled everything on winning in Ukraine, and he is not about to stop now — not when, after seven months, Russian and North Korean troops finally appear close to expelling Ukrainian forces from the Kursk province of southern Russia. On Wednesday, Putin even made a rare appearance near the front in Kursk wearing a military uniform. He is getting ready to take a victory lap in Kursk, even while the Russian offensive in the Donetsk region of Ukraine appears to have stalled.
By all indications, Russian objectives remain as maximalist as they were in the early days of the invasion in 2022 when Russian troops marched on Kyiv. The Post has obtained a document prepared by a Russian think tank close to Putin’s Federal Security Service (FSB) that lays out Russia’s demands in negotiations with the United States.
This document makes clear that the Kremlin won’t be satisfied with merely getting to keep for the foreseeable future the roughly 20 percent of Ukraine that its forces have occupied. Zelensky has signaled he would be willing to make some short-term territorial compromises but that Ukraine will never recognize Russian annexation of its territory. Yet the Russian document demands international recognition of Russian sovereignty over the four Ukrainian provinces that Putin has annexed, even without fully occupying any of them.
The document goes even further by demanding “buffer zones” in Ukraine’s northeast along the border with Russia and in southern Ukraine near Crimea, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. The latter demand would probably make Odessa — a major city that is also Ukraine’s gateway to the Black Sea — indefensible.
Zelensky has been willing to concede that Ukraine might not receive NATO membership anytime soon; he has said he is willing to accept security assurances, such as the presence of Western peacekeepers to police a ceasefire, that fall short of the alliance’s Article 5 collective-security guarantee. But the FSB-linked document dismisses any foreign peacekeeping presence as “absolutely unnecessary” and even says that any U.S. weapons for Ukraine’s military are “absolutely unacceptable”.
Also unacceptable, in the Kremlin’s estimation, would be for Ukraine to keep a million-strong army capable of defending its territory against Russian aggression. In early peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, held in 2022, the Kremlin demanded that Ukraine reduce its armed forces to just 50,000 soldiers and accept sharp restrictions on the kind of weapons they could field. There is no indication today that the Kremlin is budging from that demand.
The Russian document doesn’t stop with the demilitarization of Ukraine. It also includes a demand for regime change: “In reality, the current Kyiv regime cannot be changed from inside the country”, the document states. “Its complete dismantling is needed”.
So, goodbye to the democratically elected government headed by Zelensky, who has the approval of 67 percent of Ukrainians surveyed in a recent poll. Putin is clearly bent on reinstalling a Kremlin puppet in Kyiv to replace Viktor Yanukovych, whose ouster in Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity led Putin to annex Crimea and to launch a proxy war in eastern Ukraine.
The FSB-linked document is entirely consistent with what Putin said on Thursday: that any peace plan must “solve the root causes” of the war. In Putin’s view, of course, the root cause is Ukraine’s attempts to assert its independence from Russian domination.
Putin does not want an armistice agreement similar to the one that froze the front lines in the Korean War in 1953 — and which allowed South Korea to eventually flourish as a wealthy, pro-Western democracy.
Putin appears to be looking for his own version of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which imposed a victor’s peace on Germany after it had lost World War I. In fact, the Russian demand in 2022 for Ukraine’s military to be limited to 50,000 soldiers is even more restrictive than the limits placed on Germany’s army in 1919. (It was allowed to have 100,000 soldiers.) It is possible Putin will budge, but only if he sees that there is no way for him to achieve his objectives by force.
Until now, everything the Trump administration has been doing — from temporarily cutting off weapons shipments and intelligence sharing for Ukraine, to stopping offensive cyberoperations against Russia — has only served to convince Putin that he should keep his war of aggression going. Let us hope that the Kremlin’s failure to embrace Trump’s ceasefire plan will finally show the president that making concessions to Putin will not bring peace. Only by ratcheting up U.S. support for Ukraine can Trump finally make good on his promise to end the war.
Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller “Reagan: His Life and Legend", which was named one of the 10 best books of 2024 by the New York Times.