How Russia Could Leverage a Ceasefire Against Ukraine
Photograph Source: Russian Presidential Executive Office – CC BY 4.0
Russian President Vladimir Putin is once again playing a calculated game with the proposed ceasefire deal. Putin’s response has been predictably shrewd. He has not outright rejected the proposal, but his conditions—a Ukrainian renunciation of NATO ambitions and territorial concessions—make any deal rather tricky.
However, one thing is certain. If a ceasefire does materialize, it will not be on terms favorable to Kyiv. Rather, it will serve as a tool for Putin to secure long-term strategic advantages.
The Russian military has suffered significant losses, and a month-long pause could allow the Kremlin to replenish supplies, redeploy troops, and reinforce occupied territories. A ceasefire could serve as a tactical breather rather than a genuine step toward peace. Putin understands that Western support for Ukraine is not infinite. By agreeing to a temporary cessation of hostilities, he can test the resolve of Kyiv’s backers and potentially create fissures in the coalition supporting Ukraine. European nations, fatigued by war and economic strain, may be more inclined to push Ukraine into concessions after a period of reduced conflict.
Russia can also use the ceasefire as a diplomatic weapon. By signaling a willingness to engage in talks while simultaneously setting impossible conditions, Putin could paint himself as the reasonable actor while framing Ukraine and the West as obstructing peace. This would play well in the Global South, where Moscow has already made inroads through energy and security partnerships.
Finally, with Trump unlikely to unconditionally support Ukraine, Putin sees an opportunity to force Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky into a corner. Trump’s approach to Ukraine has been transactional at best. Reports suggest that Trump’s team has been squeezing Zelensky on a potential rare mineral deal, a clear indication that Kyiv cannot expect unwavering support from Washington. The recent pause in military support and intelligence-sharing was also a sign of U.S. fickleness. Without strong American backing, Zelensky may face increasing pressure to make painful compromises.
Although Trump has voiced support for a ceasefire, his dealings with Putin suggest that he is far less interested in extracting serious concessions from Moscow than he is in pressuring Ukraine. During his recent meeting with Zelensky, Trump’s tone was more demanding than supportive. At the same time, Putin has been careful not to alienate Trump.
This puts Zelensky in a precarious position. Ukraine could be forced to negotiate from a weaker stance, particularly on territorial issues. Despite Ukraine’s refusal to formally cede land, a de facto recognition of Russian control over certain regions could become an unavoidable reality. Furthermore, the rare mineral deal that Trump’s allies are pushing has broader implications. If the United States sees strategic economic benefit in working with Ukraine’s mineral sector, but only under certain conditions, then Zelensky’s negotiating power in any ceasefire deal could be further eroded. Putin, always adept at reading geopolitical currents, will see this as an opening to demand even more concessions.
Putin’s long-term vision remains unchanged: he seeks to weaken Ukraine as a sovereign state, drive a wedge between Western allies, and solidify Russia’s geopolitical position. If Moscow ultimately backs a ceasefire deal, it won’t be out of a genuine interest in genuine peace but because it serves Russian interests. A ceasefire with Russian forces still in control of occupied areas will effectively cement Moscow’s hold on those territories, making it harder for Ukraine to reclaim them diplomatically or militarily in the future. The longer the conflict drags on, the more divided the West could become and the less support Ukraine can expect from its allies. If the ceasefire fails due to Russia’s demands, Putin can blame the West for refusing to make peace. This is particularly useful for bolstering Russian narratives internationally, particularly among nations that are ambivalent about the conflict. And if Trump continues to distance himself from Ukraine, other global powers such as China and India may deepen their economic and strategic ties with Russia, further insulating Moscow from Western pressure and sanctions.
The UK’s Kier Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron, and other Western leaders are pushing for a durable peace. Putin’s track record, however, suggests that he is merely buying time for his next move while looking for ways to exploit any fractures in Western resolve. He is playing the long game. The real question is whether the West is prepared to counter him with equal determination over the long term, or whether Ukraine will be left to fend for itself in the face of Russian pressure and shifting U.S. priorities.
This first appeared on FPIF.
Is the West facing a new Munich 1938, when Hitler was appeased? Why the anti-diplomatic narrative is still pervasive – even though it is false.
Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin during the G20 Japan Summit Friday, June 28, 2019, in Osaka, Japan. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
While the US has initiated preliminary negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, there are again warnings in Europe and the US that this could lead into the appeasement trap once again — as it did when Hitler was able to wrap the major powers around his finger.
The Munich Agreement 1938
Critics who strictly reject any diplomacy with Moscow and demand “no compromises” point to the Munich Agreement of 1938 (by which the occupied Czechoslovakian Sudetenland was annexed by Germany) and the attempt by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to appease Hitler by concessions in regards to rearmament and looking the other way at the “Heim-ins-Reich” annexation of Austria. The policy of allowing and negotiating had led to the invasion of Poland and the Second World War a year later.
This mistake must not be made again, it is said. A Vichy-like regime in Ukraine shouldn’t be allowed to unfold. Therefore, Russia has to be defeated militarily in Ukraine and negotiations with Moscow must be avoided in order not to encourage Vladimir Putin’s appetite for power by showing weakness.
Appeasement: A False Comparison
However, the reference to Munich 1938 and the appeasement strategy is wrong and misleading. Of course, the military triumph of German fascism could have been prevented if Great Britain and the United States had intervened forcefully, according to historians (although this is being debated), but they didn’t really had an interest in doing so at the time — Hitler was not yet persona non grata for the major powers, there was even a certain admiration for him.
But the situation in today’s Russia-Ukraine war, despite all the similarities that may exist at first glance, is quite different from that in Europe in the face of Nazi Germany in 1938.
Since 2014, the U.S. and the EU have massively armed Ukraine. They intervened in the conflict (and ultimately contributed to its creation by seeking to integrate Ukraine into NATO), supported a coup d’état and then installed and promoted pro-Western governments (as the leaked phone call of then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland underscores), while a civil war broke out in eastern Ukraine.
The Case of Cuba
The US would never accept something like this on its own border. One just has to look at the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the deployment of Soviet missiles almost led to a nuclear war. Or take the de facto US occupation of the Cuban port of Guantanamo (in the form of a lease forced under military occupation), including an illegal torture prison system.
No one in the West is upset about this or warns against the dangerous strategy of appeasing the US, which has been strangling Cuba with a relentless embargo and occupying part of its territory for decades, despite protests. In this case, as in many others, the international community, including the Europeans, relies on appeals and UN resolutions that Washington ignores.
Don’t Negotiate with War Criminals
Critics of diplomacy repeatedly point out that you shouldn’t negotiate with war criminals. They point to British war leader Winston Churchill, who advocated a hard line. In 1940, he told the British House of Commons: “An appeasement politician is someone who feeds a crocodile in the hope that it will eat him last.”
However, not negotiating with war criminals is an absurd doctrine — and full of double standards. You don’t have to go back to the colonial history of Europe and North America to understand the absurdity.
The history of US imperialism after 1945 will do. All US presidents are war criminals by conventional standards, as are those who have supported their criminal actions. Perhaps the world should therefore no longer talk to or negotiate with Western governments, because that is appeasement and encourages them to continue with their wrongdoings.
Diplomacy as the Best Way to Peace
But negotiating with war criminals is necessary to defuse conflicts and create peace when a military solution is not achievable and only makes things worse, while a compromise, even if it is unjust, can avert a greater evil. This has been and is constantly being done. After all, aggressors are at the center of conflict escalations.
Should the Palestinians no longer talk to the Netanyahu government because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal against whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant? Or should Israel no longer negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas because Hamas militias have attacked Israel?
Diplomacy is the best way to achieve peace, and that has to include the aggressors. So, as Branko Marcetic stresses, the Saudi government, an extremely repressive monarchy that regularly carries out mass executions and waged a brutal war against Yemen for many years, is negotiating about an end to the war there.
Putin Cannot Be Trusted
Finally, it is said that Putin cannot be trusted. But that is not necessary. All peace diplomacy begins with a lack of trust between the warring parties. Therefore, an important part of the talks is to establish appropriate security mechanisms and precautions that make mere trust in the other side unnecessary.
Unfortunately, the world is not perfect and is full of violence. Abstract moral absolutism (black vs. white) does not help here; we have to look carefully at each individual case, assess the history of the conflict and the grievances, and weigh the respective options in terms of their consequences.
The intention to do good (e.g. to eliminate an injustice), but in doing so to cause knowingly additional injustice and suffering, a greater evil and unacceptable risks for humanity, is by no means moral, but ultimately inhumane.
Ethics of Principle vs. Ethics of Responsibility
Russia’s attack on Ukraine is a serious war crime. Moscow has the unequivocal duty to end the war. And Ukraine has the right to defend itself militarily against occupation. So much for the principles.
But whether it is wise and morally justifiable to continue the proxy war on the Russian border with the aim of expelling Russian troops from Ukraine — and if there is no other way, also with NATO troops — and impose a victor’s peace on Moscow (with a copy of the Treaty of Versailles) is another question.
Delivering more and more and heavier weapons, even offering foreign troops, for a victory that is unattainable in the foreseeable future (it is essentially a war that cannot be won), with a lot of destruction involved, but not allowing talks, diplomacy or compromises: in view of the consequences and the alternatives, this is an unacceptable strategy and a recipe for a possible end of the world. However, it is still the prevailing way of thinking in European capitals and can also be found in the U.S. — even though the mindset is changing.
The consequences of escalating the war in Ukraine with the aim of defeating Russia are far-reaching and dramatic. Many experts and peace activists have warned against this course in Europe and the United States (including former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who is not known for appeasement; see his genocidal order as national security adviser during the Vietnam War: “Anything that flies on everything that moves”).
The Fault of the West
Hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, massive destructions, many supply crises in the Global South and a constant escalation of the threat of nuclear war later, we are now in a mess, while the no-appeasement advocates continue to spread perseverance slogans and call in Europe for a historic militarization without a strategic concept, only that the US now wants a deal and London, Paris, Brussels and Berlin are panicking.
The fact is: war is madness, not its end in a viable diplomatic compromise. Russia bears responsibility for the war-related devastation in Ukraine, just as the US bears responsibility for its far worse devastations around the world. That goes without saying.
But the West and the US-led NATO also bear responsibility because they provoked the conflict and blocked every attempt to defuse it or possibly end the war. As long as they do this, they are not neutral observers and peacemakers, but actors who make everything even worse.
The West’s responsibility for the conflict is not a mere opinion, but the assessment of historians and many political intellectuals since the 1990s. One only has to listen to leading representatives of the US diplomatic corps, among them prominent US hardliners who know Russia very well, for example Jack Matlock, ambassador to Russia under Ronald Reagan, Robert Gates, Defense Secretary under Bush II or the CIA chief during the Biden administration, William Burns, who as ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008 cabled warnings to Washington about Moscow’s “red line” in Ukraine.
Ukraine War: So Much for Appeasement
As for the pacification of Ukraine, solutions could have been found early on. The US should never have put Russia under pressure by pushing ahead with NATO expansion into Ukraine and getting involved politically and militarily in the region in the first place.
Since the Russian invasion, a shadow war has been waged against Russia. Ukrainian forces were built up to a bulwark of the West. Today, Ukraine is the largest arms importer in the world.
So the war, supported by Western countries, has been fought in Ukraine against Russian troops for over ten years (including the civil war from 2014), with hundreds of thousands of deaths and injured. Unlike 1938, there has been hardly a sign of appeasement towards Russia, except of Minsk II. It has so far remained “only” a proxy war (i.e. no NATO and US troops fighting against Russians) for obvious reasons: Russia is a nuclear power.
Therefore, the comparison with Hitler and the appeasement policy of 1938 is not only historically relativizing and wrong (as far as the criminality of the Nazi regime, its ambition and its reach of power are concerned), but also ignores what has changed dramatically since 1938: Hitler did not have 5,580 nuclear warheads like Russia today.
Moral Blindness towards the Consequences
The same applies to the US: a Russian escalation in Iraq during the illegal US invasion and occupation would have been madness and an irresponsible risking of nuclear war for the same reason, not to mention the spiraling violence that would have resulted from it.
With each passing year the ongoing war will play into Russia’s hands — even if Ukraine is flooded with even more weapons — as military experts and Ukrainian commanders have been telling us for years. This was also confirmed after Kiev’s stalled spring offensive in 2023, as Ukraine cannot keep up with Russia demographically, economically and militarily, despite historic support from the West.
In the end, Ukraine could even face collapse; this scenario must also be weighed morally. Ultimately, continuing the war means an endless war of attrition with more and more deaths, maiming, general devastation and dangerous instability, which could lead to a (nuclear) world war at any time.
The Key Difference to 1938
This is the fundamental difference to 1938, when a lack of military determination paved the way for a world war, while today a lack of diplomatic resolve is opening the door to military annihilation and a possible world war with a nuclear “game over”.
There were and still are two options in the war in Ukraine: diplomacy or a possible Third World War. This has been hanging over our heads for over three years. The only way out of the misery is negotiations and compromises, with both sides having to be included in the process.
Whether Putin is serious and actually wants a solution (as he repeatedly has asserted) can only be found out by putting him to the test. This has now begun and is to be welcomed, even if Trump is wreaking havoc in other policy areas, pursuing his own geopolitical interests and wants to strengthen US dominance over China.
The Difficult Path to Peace
It will be a very difficult, complex and certainly lengthy process that could fail at any time — both sides must be willing to compromise. Without that, it will not work.
But if the Ukrainian side, supported by the Europeans, continues to boycott negotiations (which the US also did for a long time) by attaching unfulfillable conditions to the talks (Russia must withdraw completely from Ukraine, NATO troops in Ukraine, etc.) and ignoring the military situation, then Putin will probably continue the war because he has the upper hand.
Experts using various approaches and scenarios have developed realistic negotiating terms. There is also the Istanbul Communiqué of April 2022 to build on. None of this seems far-fetched or unattainable (even if ultimately unjust for Ukraine in terms of the territorial issue) if the will for peace appears more important than insisting on the unattainable.
“Betrayal of Ukraine”, New “Yalta Agreement”
We will see how the talks develop. One can only hope that there will be a ceasefire and then, more importantly, real negotiations that can permanently end the fighting through an agreement or at least freeze the conflict.
However, much of the public in Europe and the US remains heated. There is talk of a “betrayal of Ukraine” and a new “Yalta agreement”.
A comparison that is completely exaggerated: back then, at the end of the Second World War, a rigid strategic and ideological line was drawn right through Europe and Germany. A compromise peace in Ukraine will draw a line between a few provinces in eastern Ukraine, far from the western capitals in Europe, as Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecrafts says.
Eastern Ukraine Is Not the Sudetenland
It will be difficult, if the West continues to use Ukraine to weaken Russia, to build a NATO or whatever military bastion on Russia’s border and to ignore Moscow’s interests in finding a solution to conflict and war.
We should finally realize that eastern Ukraine is not the Sudetenland: otherwise, the fight for about 20 percent of Ukraine will keep paving the way for a possible Third World War.
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David Goeßmann is a journalist and author based in Berlin, Germany. He has worked for several media outlets including Spiegel Online, ARD, and ZDF. His articles have appeared on Truthout, Common Dreams, The Progressive, Progressive International, among others. In his books, he analyzes climate policies, global justice, and media bias.
