Foreign Affairs
Putin Will Turn a Cease-Fire Into a Weapon
A New Use for Russia’s Old Playbook in Ukraine
Michael Kimmage and Hanna Notte
July 14, 2026
2026-07-07T092220Z_1724691447_RC2V8MA1F72L_RTRMADP_3_UKRAINE-CRISIS-ATTACK-KYIV-AFTERMATH.JPG
A residential building heavily damaged by a Russian strike, Kyiv, Ukraine, July 2026
Alina Smutko / Reuters
MICHAEL KIMMAGE is Director of the Kennan Institute and the author of Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability.
HANNA NOTTE is Director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. She is the author of the forthcoming book We Shall Outlast Them: Putin’s Global Campaign to Defeat the West.
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To recall the last negotiated peace with Russia is to tell a depressing tale. Russia invaded Ukraine in March 2014, annexing Crimea and then moving regular and irregular forces into the Donbas, in the country’s east. After months of war and intense interference in domestic Ukrainian affairs, Moscow signed a series of cease-fire agreements in the Belarusian capital of Minsk in September 2014 and February 2015. Russia retained and militarized the territory it had taken in Ukraine. The Minsk agreements did not solve any core problems, but Europe and the United States were able to live with them—until February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Minsk process reveals how Putin has often mixed conventional diplomacy with thuggery. Although he has assembled a formidable war machine, Putin aspires to the role of European statesman, as Joseph Stalin did before him and as various Russian tsars did before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Putin sees diplomacy as war by other means, and he used past negotiations over Ukraine to distract and to keep European countries off balance. He hoped to foment political breakdown in Kyiv, a loss of interest on Europe’s part, and a transatlantic relationship sundered by populism. When the desired results of the Minsk agreements did not materialize, Putin once again resorted to war.
Were Putin to eventually consent to a full or partial cease-fire, his strategy would likely be similar to what it was a decade ago. So far, the Russian leader has stubbornly refused to stop fighting until Ukraine makes substantial concessions: he has insisted that Russia seeks a comprehensive settlement and not a mere suspension of hostilities. But if Putin does agree to a truce, he will approach it as a roundabout way of reaching war aims that cannot be achieved on the battlefield. He would exploit an incomplete peace to incite political instability in Ukraine and prod pro-Russian factions in Europe into advocating business as usual with Moscow. He would hope that by allowing U.S. President Donald Trump to take credit for the cease-fire, he could widen the fissures between the United States and Europe. If Putin found the consequences of his overture disappointing, he could return to battle at any moment, having risked only the breather a cease-fire might afford Ukraine. U.S. and European officials should proceed with great caution in the laudable aim of war termination. A mere halt to the fighting in Ukraine would have little chance of ending the broader conflict. Barring a fundamental change in Putin’s calculus, it may just mark a transition to the next phase of the war.
DEAD END
Russia’s political project for Ukraine has failed spectacularly. The Kremlin never mounted the coercive power necessary to transform Ukraine into a vassal, which would have required a complete takeover and long-term occupation. In 2022, Russia invaded a large country—one with a population of over 35 million—with a mere 150,000 soldiers. Its intent at the time was to expose the Ukrainian government as feeble and illegitimate, inspire uprisings among pro-Russian constituencies, and compel the rest of Ukraine to accept a government friendly to Moscow. Four years of brutal war have done the opposite, ensuring a Ukraine hostile to Russia for years, if not generations, to come. Having expended massive amounts of manpower and materiel, Putin has no clear path to military victory. After all his effort, he has maneuvered himself into a dead end.
To rescue his fortunes, Putin has options for escalation, although each comes with severe limitations and risks. He could take advantage of Russia’s huge population (some 143 million people) by ordering a major mobilization. But judging by the exodus of Russians amid the partial mobilization in the fall of 2022, such a call-up would be deeply unpopular, especially in Russia’s large cities. Putin, the history buff, cannot have forgotten that a war-weary population egged on by angry soldiers toppled the tsarist government in February 1917. With his own eyes, Putin saw how an unwon war in Afghanistan weakened the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, even if he has sponsored an official rewriting of this war as a heroic venture. In short, Putin cannot ignore the domestic political constraints that stand between him and the waging of a total war.
The Russian president could try to bomb Ukraine into surrender. Exploiting Ukraine’s shortages of Patriot interceptor munitions, Russia could further increase its ballistic missile attacks on Ukrainian cities in the coming months and into the winter. Inflicting mass misery to gain the upper hand is a risky bet. It could harden Ukrainians in their resistance to Russia, as it did after Russian soldiers committed countless war crimes in the first few weeks of the 2022 invasion. The same goes for the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, which would antagonize China and India, countries that have thrown Russia an economic lifeline. Putin could expand strikes into Ukraine’s “strategic hinterland,” targeting defense infrastructure in European countries that support Ukraine, such as Poland or the Baltic states. Yet such actions would be perilous for Russia because of a possible military response from Europe and even the United States. Putin, who is often risk averse, would think twice before inviting that outcome.
While Putin weighs his options, his lack of battlefield success coupled with the economic and social burdens of waging war have begun to reverberate in Russia. Small points of disagreement about Putin’s forever war are appearing among experts, influencers, and the rest of Russian society. Average Russians have so far acquiesced to the “special military operation” being conducted next door, but Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign has brought the war closer to home. The Kremlin’s tightening control over the Internet is generating unease in Russia. Should the war’s ugly status quo persist, domestic discontent will only grow. Such irritants hardly put his hold on power in danger, but Putin is too canny a politician to ignore them. In this war, he has often claimed that victory is around the corner, that “there is not a single place where Russian troops are not advancing.” These lies are beginning to catch up with Putin. He will not give up on his war aims, but he may agree to change tack. Should a comprehensive settlement remain elusive, he may eventually regard a cease-fire, or the appearance of one, as preferable to fighting on.
MAKING AND BREAKING BONDS
In entering a cease-fire, Putin would not have his sights set only on Ukraine. He sees Russia as a global power, and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine spoke to his sweeping ambition. He hopes to shape Russia’s “near abroad,” the countries on its borders, as he has done in Belarus; Putin keeps Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on a tight leash. Building a network of compliant neighbors is Putin’s path to restoring Russia as a major European power. Had Putin subjugated Ukraine, Russia would have sought to negotiate the continent’s future security architecture with the United States, aspiring to a parity of sorts with Washington. Thus, Moscow would have emerged as a privileged pole in the international system. Together with China, Russia could steward the decline of the West by substantiating and promoting a multipolar world.
Over the course of the war, Moscow has capably cultivated bonds with non-Western partners. Cut off from Europe and heavily sanctioned, Russia has expanded its economic outlets in the east and south. Diplomatically isolated from Western capitals, Moscow has deepened its involvement in the BRICS—a bloc named for its first five members, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—and other forums. Outside of Europe and a handful of other places, Russia is still regarded as a worthwhile trading partner and an important geopolitical actor. Although it seeks and finds openings for influence around the world, it has recently struggled to capitalize on them. The war against Ukraine has consumed most of Russia’s bandwidth. Since 2022, Moscow’s position has eroded in the Middle East, with the loss of such clients as Syria’s longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad, and in the South Caucasus, where the United States has outpaced Russia diplomatically. In the Sahel, Russia’s security promises are under scrutiny. Its military presence has proved too small and ineffective to end the insurgent threat in Mali.
In Russia’s objectives vis-à-vis the United States, Putin has been making some progress. One of the aims of his 2022 invasion of Ukraine was to press the United States to reduce its military presence around Russia. At first that plan seemed to backfire, when the war brought Finland and Sweden into NATO, but since Trump’s return to the White House, the transatlantic relationship has been disintegrating. NATO’s Article 5 provision, committing the allies to collective defense, now has a credibility problem. The Trump administration no longer cares about underwriting European security, and it has announced plans to withdraw military assets from Europe sooner than Europe will be ready to replace them, undermining the continent’s capacity for self-defense. These changes, which may reflect Trump’s mercurial character, will likely have staying power beyond his time in office. For Putin, U.S. distancing from Europe is a gift. He will do what he can to ensure it continues.
While the United States is doing less to deter Russia in Europe, Europe is doing much more to bolster Ukraine. In 2026, Putin’s core problem is not Washington. It is Europe. The Kremlin traditionally mocked Europe as a disorganized mass of decadent, postnational states eager to do Washington’s bidding, but it is dawning on Moscow that this image of Europe is a caricature. Europe has stepped in to offset Trump’s withdrawal of support for Ukraine. The continent has begun emancipating itself from the United States by investing more in its own defense, including in long-range strike assets capable of hitting Russian territory. Europe remains steadfast in its refusal to negotiate with Russia at Ukraine’s expense. In Putin’s quest to dominate Ukraine, Europe is the primary non-Ukrainian obstacle standing in his way.
GIVE IN, NOT UP
Putin would agree to a cease-fire only if it advanced his original war aims. The specific terms of such a deal may be less consequential than the Russian leader’s plans for the period thereafter. Putin would surely pair support for a cease-fire with a call for elections in Ukraine. In such elections, Russia would use subversion to muddy the process, manipulate the information space, and promote narratives of corruption about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his political allies. Any kind of disorder could be magnified and broadcast in Europe as a reason for excluding Ukraine from European political, legal, and security institutions. Russia assumes that Europe’s commitment to Ukraine will remain solid when war is raging but will dissipate in the absence of visible violence, creating an opportunity to isolate Ukraine from Europe and thwart its EU accession talks.
Russia could offer endless, circular, embarrassing negotiations over the terms of the so-called peace. It might try to sideline Baltic and other eastern European states whenever possible and to encourage more compliant Europeans to legitimize Russia’s military presence in the territory occupied at the time of the cease-fire. Russia did exactly this in 2014 and 2015. It constantly asked for recognition of the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics—territories in eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed paramilitaries—and for tacit recognition of Russian-occupied Crimea. Although that approach came up short in Luhansk and Donetsk, it worked in Crimea, which eventually became a nonissue for Europe and the United States.
Putin would agree to a cease-fire only if it advanced his original war aims.
A parallel cease-fire objective would be to accentuate the current divisions between the United States and Europe. Putin could highlight Trump’s role as the leader who helped bring the war to an end—the man of peace in Europe. The Kremlin may even time this flattery operation to coincide with the U.S. midterm elections in November, which might boost the fortunes of Trump-backed Republicans and diminish prospects for a return to more pro-European, pro-NATO, and pro-Ukrainian policies in Washington. In the wake of a cease-fire, Russia could also offer overt or covert support to parties in Europe that might recommend normalization.
By agreeing to a cease-fire without giving up on the objectives behind the war, Putin could win a reprieve with the Russian population, and he could redirect at least some resources to shoring up Russia’s position in Africa, the Middle East, and the South Caucasus. In doing so, he might appear to heed the warnings of Russian elites who argue that Ukraine is merely one arena for Russia’s broader confrontation with the West and that throwing everything into a futile war is imprudent. A cease-fire would also allow Putin to jump at whatever opportunities the abrupt change might generate in Ukraine, Europe, or the United States. Most of all, he would be looking for political disarray in Kyiv, as he has been since 2015.
Officials in Ukraine, Europe, and the United States contemplating negotiations with Russia must think beyond a cease-fire. Should Ukraine cement a deal with Russia, something that Kyiv has understandably been pursuing, a sustainable end to the conflict will be possible only with a genuinely redefined calculus in Russia. Kyiv and its partners would need to compel Moscow to abandon its will to dominate Ukraine, an improbable development as long as Putin remains in the Kremlin. The proper response to Putin’s studied intransigence in 2026—as it should have been back in 2014 and 2015, when his ruthlessness was underestimated—is to help Ukraine attain long-term security and independence. If the fighting does stop, rather than congratulating themselves, Ukraine, Europe, and the United States should stay focused on Putin’s will to divide and conquer. It might well be the reason Russia entertains a cease-fire in the first place.
Topics & Regions: Russia Ukraine Geopolitics Security Defense & Military Strategy & Conflict War & Military Strategy War in Ukraine Vladimir Putin
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