Why the Ukraine war is so hard to end

At the height of the Iraq war, bloggers coined the term “Friedman unit^[1]” in reference to the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s habit of claiming that the next six months would be critical in determining the outcome of the conflict.

Everything has sped up quite a bit in our post-Twitter era, so perhaps it’s appropriate that the Ukraine war equivalent — the Trump unit — is only two weeks. President Donald Trump said last month he would give Russian President Vladimir Putin a “couple of weeks” to take serious steps toward ending the war before he imposed new penalties on Russia. “I’ll know in two weeks what I’m going to do,” he told CNN^[2]. Trump has previously given Putin two more weeks^[3] in April, May, and July^[4]. (This is not the only issue^[5] that Trump has promised to resolve in a fortnight.)

Trump had promised to end the war within 24 hours of taking office, and eight months later, there appear to be two constants: Trump’s frustration that Putin might be “tapping me along^[6]” as he continues to launch attacks on Ukrainian cities, and his seemingly unshakeable faith that Putin is serious about making peace — in which case, a resolution to the war may be just around the corner.

“I think [Putin] wants to make a deal for me, you understand, as crazy as it sounds,” he told French President Emanuel Macron^[7] in a hot mic moment at the White House on August 18. Two weeks later, he declared himself “very disappointed^[8]” in Putin.

None of this is to say that talks with Russia are pointless; even the most fleeting chance of a negotiated outcome should be explored. But the unfortunate fact is that there’s a high likelihood this war will continue for quite some time.

Where are each nation’s red lines?

The biggest change in the war since Trump took office is that the two sides are talking. US officials have been holding direct talks with their Russian counterparts over Ukraine^[9] since February, a reversal of the Joe Biden-era mantra that there would be no talks “about Ukraine without Ukraine.” Russia and Ukraine have also held their first direct talks since the first weeks of the war^[10], agreeing to several prisoner swaps, but making little progress toward a ceasefire.

There’s been some softening of the Ukrainian position. It was once an article of faith in Kyiv that it would not agree to an end to the war until Russian troops were expelled from all of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. But now, Ukrainian leaders are pushing for a ceasefire that would leave a significant portion of its territory under Russian occupation, with hopes it could be regained later. Battlefield realities probably would have dictated this shift no matter who was in the White House, but Trump’s desire for a quick end to the war, and Ukraine’s need to keep him mollified, probably hastened it.

As for Russia, while even Putin may accept now that his military is unlikely to topple Ukraine’s government entirely, it’s not at all clear that he’s backed down on demands that would essentially turn Ukraine into a subservient satellite state. Moscow has demanded that Ukraine not only give up territory^[11] currently under Russian control but that it cede additional territory that Russia has claimed but not yet conquered. Other recently reported demands include international recognition of Russia’s territorial claims^[12], Ukraine’s political neutrality, and restrictions on its military and the international military aid it receives. These might just be maximalist negotiating positions, but some Russian observers say there are red lines Putin is unlikely ever to budge on.

“The unfortunate reality is that we haven’t really learned very much [about Russia’s willingness to compromise], and that we’re basically in the same position that we were prior to the flurry of diplomacy, and maybe even slightly worse off,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic Security Program and the Center for a New American Security.

Since Trump’s Alaska summit with Putin^[13] and his meeting in Washington^[14] with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Europe’s leaders, much of the discussion in European capitals has been around future security guarantees for Ukraine, including what are reportedly “pretty precise plans^[15]” for post-conflict troop deployments to back up those guarantees. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have said the US would provide some backing for these guarantees, though not “boots on the ground^[16].”

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has stressed, however, that Russia wants to be part of the discussions over security guarantees^[17], that it wants its ally China as one of the guarantors, and that there must be no foreign troops deployed to Ukraine. As such, all the discussions in Washington, Kyiv, and European capitals over what form these guarantees will take are still a bit theoretical.

“The whole question about foreign soldiers on Ukrainian soil, it’s just absolutely a no-go for the Kremlin,” said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist and analyst based in the United Kingdom at the Center for European Policy Analysis. Putin “would fight until the last soldier against it.”

Putin has repeatedly said that the “root causes^[18]” of the conflict need to be addressed, by which he means NATO expansion and the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s Russian-backed government^[19], which he describes as a Western-backed “coup d’état^[20].” This is, in other words, about much more than “land swapping^[21].”

Soldatov says the stakes of this conflict for Russian leaders who saw the breakup of the Soviet Union in the years following the Cold War as a period of humiliating defeat for Russia, should not be underestimated.

“They believe that this is an existential war, and not just with Ukraine, but with the West as well,” he said. “In this kind of war, you can either win or you lose, and if you lose, it’s disastrous for Russia.”

All that being said, Russia is more than willing to continue to participate in negotiations, if only because Trump has been repeatedly unwilling to impose any serious consequences on Russia so long as it is nominally involved in the peace process.

“Putin thinks he has solved the Trump problem,” John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine now at the Atlantic Council, told Vox. “Trump has allowed his red lines to be crossed without taking any steps.”

Does Putin have a breaking point?

If Putin doesn’t actually want to make a deal just to do Trump a solid, could he be coerced through more pressure?

In recent days, the administration has touted its tariffs on India (White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called them “sanctions,” a fairly incendiary term in New Delhi^[22]) as evidence that the US is getting serious about dialing up the pressure. The road to peace runs, at least partly, right through New Delhi,” said Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro^[23].

This is an odd stance: It’s true that India now buys a significant amount of oil from Russia, but China buys even more^[24], and the administration has been notably quieter about that. In any event, the tariffs seem to have pushed India closer to China^[25] rather than away from Russia.

There’s little bilateral trade to speak of between the US and Russia, so Trump’s preferred pressure tactic — tariffs — isn’t well-suited for pressuring Putin. Experts say there are additional steps the US could take, such as cracking down more on the “shadow fleet” of oil tankers^[26] transporting Russian crude around the world in violation of wWestern restrictions, or seizing Russia’s frozen sovereign assets^[27].

Trump has also suggested removing restrictions on Ukraine’s long-range strikes^[28] into Russia, which are having an impact on Russia’s domestic energy supply^[29]. He has called Biden incompetent for not allowing Ukraine to “fight back,” which is notably not what he was saying at the time^[30].

But Samuel Charap, a former State Department staffer now at the RAND Corporation, is skeptical of calls to dial up the pressure.

“The bottom line is that there is not a plausible pain threshold that we could cross that would make Putin fundamentally alter his approach to Ukraine,” he said.

What could presumably give Ukraine as much if not more leverage than any new weapons system or capability or sanctions program, is simply confidence that American assistance will continue. There have been some brief pauses in weapons deliveries to Ukraine^[31] as well as intelligence sharing since Trump took office, and it was recently reported that the Pentagon has been blocking Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles^[32].

For the time being, so long as Europe pays for the weapons^[33], and so long as a Nobel-worthy peace deal looms, Trump seems inclined not to abandon Ukraine entirely. (His vice president may be a different story^[34].) But there’s no guarantee that Trump won’t have a change of heart, and that alone is incentive for Russia to keep up the fight.

“I do think, from the Russian perspective, that there’s still maybe some hope that Trump is going to grow frustrated with this process and walk away,” said Kendall-Taylor of the Center for a New American Security.

Even if talks lead to peace, it’s going to take a while

RAND’s Charap, who has been a leading proponent of negotiations since the early days of the war, says we’re still not far enough along into the process to know if there’s a chance for a negotiated settlement. He points out that it took hundreds of meetings to negotiate the armistice that ended the Korean War, and 22 months to negotiate the Good Friday Accords in Northern Ireland. Though Trump has put great emphasis on holding a three-way summit between himself, Putin, and Zelenskyy, the details of these agreements tend to be hammered out over months in much less high profile meetings by much lower level officials. (Trump’s staff cuts have thinned^[35] out the ranks^[36] of Russia experts at the State Department, National Security Council, and CIA.)

“We’ve seen that Russia is willing to talk,” Charap said. “Whether or not they’re willing to end the war on terms that are acceptable to that Ukraine can live with — we’ve yet to fully test that proposition.” Testing that proposition, he emphasizes, will take time and patience.

But how much time does Ukraine have?

Russia continues to make steady gains on the battlefield^[37], albeit at a grindingly slow pace with shockingly high casualty rates. The unfortunate fact, though, is that Russia simply has more people and materiel to throw into the fight and — North Korea’s soldiers and munitions notwithstanding — is less concerned about international support. The Alaska summit followed by this past week’s shindig in Beijing^[38] showed that international efforts to isolate Putin are breaking down. Despite efforts to ramp up production in the US and Europe, Russia is still producing far more ammunition^[39] than its Western rivals, which — despite the justified attention^[40] given to high-tech drones — is still the key variable for a long, drawn-out war of attrition like this one. Even as the talks have drawn on, Russia has only intensified its efforts to gain ground on the battlefield and inflict damage on Ukrainian cities.

Past examples also suggest Putin may have time on his side. One widely cited study published in 1998 examining wars between democracies and autocracies^[41] in the 19th and 20th centuries found that once conflicts reached the 18-month mark, the “advantage in fighting passes to the autocratic state.” Why? States where leaders are less beholden to public opinion, less concerned about casualties, and more able to turn their entire domestic economy into a war machine tend to have the advantage^[42].

This war passed that point 24 months ago. While Putin may eventually cut a deal, in all likelihood, he’s far from finished.