As Russian and Ukrainian delegations descended on Istanbul on Friday in an attempt to end the three-year war in Ukraine, the contrast between the two parties in the conflict couldn’t be starker. One seemed assured, methodical – clear about its goals. The other, scattered and uncertain.
Russia’s position on the contours of a potential settlement has long been clear – aside from its calculated ambiguity on territorial matters, which it maintains as leverage. Moscow continues to push for a return to the Istanbul agreements, derailed – as we now know – by the UK and US in the spring of 2022. At the same time, it demands to retain the territories it has occupied since then – and possibly more, though how much more remains deliberately undefined.
The position of the pro-Ukrainian coalition, by contrast, is chaotic. The United States has adopted an almost neutral stance, while Ukraine and its European allies are working to prevent Washington from pressuring Kyiv into what they view as a premature and unjust peace.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that the Trump administration is open to any mechanism that could bring an end to the conflict. Meanwhile, Ukraine and its European partners are insisting on a 30-day ceasefire as a precondition for entering peace talks.
Just before the Istanbul negotiations began, Ukraine declared that its delegation would not discuss anything with the Russians until a ceasefire was agreed upon. European countries supported that demand, with threats of severe sanctions they claimed they were prepared to impose. Whether Ukraine would ultimately drop this demand remained the key point of uncertainty as direct talks commenced in Istanbul on Friday afternoon.
When the negotiators emerged from the venue and faced the press, they left that question unanswered. The two parties agreed to continue the talks, but ceasefire remains on the table – perhaps as a face-saving measure that would keep Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on board. The Russians are extremely unlikely to agree to any ceasefire until they see a clear path to the final deal.
But the goal of this ceasefire game was all too transparent – especially to its intended audience: Donald Trump’s administration. A ceasefire clearly works against Russia, whose main leverage in the negotiations is the slow but steady advance of its troops along the 1,000+ km front line.
The Ukrainian and European demand was designed to be rejected. Its real purpose is to derail the talks, pit Trump against Putin, and revive the longstanding strategy of trying to defeat Russia through a combination of enhanced military support for Ukraine and new economic sanctions on Moscow.
This strategy isn’t new – and it has already cost Ukraine dearly over the past three years: Vast territory and critical infrastructure have been lost, hundreds of thousands killed, and 6.9 million people, mostly women and children, have left the country – likely for good.
In response to what it sees as manipulation, Russia sent a delegation of lower-than-expected political stature, but including top-level military and diplomatic experts capable of discussing all technical aspects of a possible deal. The message: Moscow is ready for substantive negotiations – if they move beyond performative ultimatums.
Russia’s position on the contours of a settlement hasn’t shifted since the previous Istanbul talks in spring 2022, when it insisted on a neutral Ukraine with a cap on the size of its military.
The only difference now is territory. Under the 2022 Istanbul framework, Russia would have withdrawn to the lines of contact as they existed before the full-scale invasion. Now, it claims the territory seized since then – and maintains strategic ambiguity over the parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia still under Ukrainian control, using them as bargaining chips.
Since the full invasion began, Moscow has viewed territorial occupation as a form of punishment for what it sees as Ukraine’s intransigence. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova put it bluntly on Thursday: “Ukrainian territory shrinks every time Ukraine rejects negotiations.”
But territory is not the Kremlin’s main objective in Ukraine. Its central goal is to draw a hard red line against further Western military expansion near its borders – hence its demands to restore Ukraine’s neutral status and reduce the size of its armed forces to a bare minimum. Moscow, however, is open to the idea of Ukraine joining the EU – not least because that prospect remains highly unlikely, as countries like Poland and others in Eastern Europe see Ukraine’s agricultural sector as a threat to their economic stability.
Given the current battlefield situation, the war can only end on Russian terms – harsh and unjust as they may appear. The daily gains of Russian troops and Ukraine’s slow territorial losses underscore this point. Every delay in peace talks results in a smaller Ukraine. Putin is acting like a political racketeer – much like those who ran St Petersburg during his formative political years: The longer you resist, the more you pay.
But a deal on these terms would be extremely difficult to sell – to Ukrainians and to Europeans, who have also endured significant economic fallout from sanctions on Russia. The inevitable question arises: What, then, did Ukrainians fight and die for over the past three years? They could have secured a far better deal under the Minsk agreements in 2015 – or even the failed Istanbul deal in 2022.
What kept Ukraine in the fight was the illusion – cultivated by the military-industrial complex and psychological operations on social media – that a nuclear power like Russia could be decisively defeated.
The fear of being exposed as a major contributor to Ukraine’s suffering – alongside Russia – is what now drives European politicians to keep digging a deeper hole for Ukraine and its leadership, rather than admit (or quietly reframe) defeat in a war that, as President Trump rightly states, should never have happened in the first place.
But nearly all the cards are now on the table. Illusions are being discarded one by one. The idea, floated by France and the UK, of deploying NATO troops in Ukraine has been all but shelved – it would escalate the conflict from a proxy war to a direct NATO-Russia clash. Meanwhile, the EU is preparing to reduce duty-free trade quotas on Ukrainian imports, which had helped sustain Ukraine’s economy for the past three years. This is a telling sign that Brussels no longer sees continued war as a realistic path forward.
One of the last-ditch efforts to shift the course of events is under way in the Baltic Sea, where Nordic and Baltic states are attempting to open a second front in the Ukraine war by targeting the so-called Russian “shadow fleet”—oil tankers that help Moscow circumvent Western sanctions.
But the most recent attempt to board one such vessel ended with a Russian fighter jet violating Estonian airspace – a clear warning of what could come next.
The West is not prepared for a confrontation with Russia – let alone the nuclear conflict that would almost certainly follow. But there is no shortage of alternative, win-win strategies. Ukraine stands to gain the most from peace – once it is firmly established. The real losers would be the political class and security elites who invested so heavily in illusory outcomes.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
