Some wars end in victory. Others conclude with a negotiated peace. But no war in history has ever ended with justice. As the endgame of Putin’s war on Ukraine approaches, it is becoming clear that the final settlement Kyiv will be asked to accept will be both painful and extremely unjust.

In Washington in late August, US President Donald Trump was caught on a hot mic telling visiting European leaders that ‘I think Putin wants to make a deal. You understand? As crazy as it sounds!’. Trump is correct that Putin wants to make a deal to end the war. But he is wrong to say that it’s crazy. What Trump does not seem to have understood is that Putin remains laser-focused on ending the war on his own terms. In practice, this means sticking to most if not all of the war aims with which he began his invasion. 

The atmospherics of Trump’s August meeting with Europe’s leaders, plus Keir Starmer and Volodymyr Zelensky, were positive. All agreed that a step had been taken towards peace, and all welcomed Trump’s initiative in opening talks with the Kremlin – though they themselves had shunned Putin for three years. But, in truth, the path to a negotiated peace winds through thickets of thorny detail inhabited by devils by the dozen. It’s worth taking a detailed look at what Putin is likely to demand of Ukraine and its allies, and examine which of them Zelensky can plausibly accept and which are out of the question. 

Trump, perhaps understandably given his career in real estate, seems to believe that Putin’s core demand is Ukrainian territory. That’s mistaken. In truth, as France’s President Emmanuel Macron remarked in Washington, what Putin really wants is Ukraine’s political subjugation. That’s what Putin was referring to when he said after his meeting with Trump in Alaska that ‘we need to eliminate all the primary root causes of the conflict’. That is a clear reference to Putin’s familiar historical thesis that Ukraine is an invented country that has been used for centuries by Russia’s enemies as a base from which to attack Moscow – and, in his view, remains so today.

Nonetheless, the Russian President’s perhaps most egregious demand does indeed concern land. In September 2022, with great pomp and fanfare, the Kremlin formally rewrote the Russian Constitution to include four new Ukrainian provinces – Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk (Crimea was previously incorporated in March 2014). But, despite years of fighting and hundreds of thousands of casualties, Russian forces do not control any of these provinces in their entirety. At his summit with Trump in Anchorage, Alaska, Putin reportedly demanded that Kyiv surrender control of the third of Donetsk and a small sliver of Luhansk provinces that he has so far failed to take. In exchange, Putin proposed to withdraw from the small chunks of Sumy and Kharkiv provinces that he occupies, and also drop his claim on the remainder of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. This highly unequal exchange was what Trump described as a ‘land swap’. In fact, it is a surrender of real land that Ukraine has defended at huge cost in exchange for virtual land that is Russian only in Putin’s imagination.

Surrendering the heavily defended ‘fortress cities’ of Kramatorsk, Sloviansk and Kostyantynivka would mean the loss of Ukraine’s main bulwark against further Russian advance into the heartlands of the middle Dnieper. Trump has reportedly agreed that surrendering the one third of Donetsk province that Russia does not yet control is a reasonable price for Kyiv to pay for peace; such a withdrawal would be politically and militarily impossible for Zelensky.

Another territorial demand that will be equally impossible for Zelensky to accede to is Putin’s insistence that Kyiv formally recognise its lost territories as part of Russia. Trump is reportedly in favour of forcing Kyiv to de jure recognise Crimea as Russian, while leaving the rest of occupied Ukraine in a legal limbo. Such a formal concession would require a change in Ukraine’s constitution, and a referendum – which will be a political humiliation and likely to cause serious civil unrest inside Ukraine.

The Kremlin’s other demands of Ukraine fall into two broad categories that Putin routinely describes as ‘demilitarisation’ and ‘denazification’.

‘Demilitarisation’ as demanded by the Russian negotiators during abortive talks in Istanbul in April 2022 includes limits on the number of troops in the Ukrainian army and on the kind of heavy weaponry they can use. It’s also a reference to Moscow’s demand that Ukraine formally renounce the possibility of joining NATO and codify that commitment in its constitution. It was these two conditions that were the principal dealbreakers in Istanbul.

Ukraine’s potential membership of NATO is one of the most misinterpreted elements of the road to war. In Bucharest in 2008, US President George Bush favoured giving Ukraine and Georgia a roadmap towards accession to NATO, while France and Germany were adamantly opposed. The result was a fateful compromise where NATO did not open any formal accession process. But an official communique stated that both Ukraine and Georgia were on the ‘path’ to membership in the future. This fudge ended up being the worst of all worlds, feeding Kremlin paranoia to the extent that, soon after, Russia invaded and occupied two breakaway regions of Georgia. In the wake of the Maidan Revolution that unseated Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, one of the major considerations that drove Putin and his top advisers to go ahead and occupy Crimea was the fear that a pro-Western administration in Kyiv would hand the port of Sevastopol over to NATO.

Despite the vehemence of Russian objections, the actual chances of Ukraine joining the organisation have always been essentially nil. NATO’s charter precludes any state with disputed borders from joining, which rules out Ukraine (and did so even before 2014 because of another open dispute with Transnistria on the western border). Accession of new members must be unanimous – and again the chances of NATO members Turkey, Hungary, Slovakia and Greece agreeing are also nil.

Since gaining its independence from the USSR in 1991, Ukraine has in fact twice been constitutionally and legally a neutral, non-aligned country. President Petro Poroshenko scrapped the last neutrality law in 2015 in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, and stepped up diplomatic efforts to join NATO. In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion, giving up NATO membership as an aspiration was one of the earliest concessions made by Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul in April 2022. But the formal step of having such an assurance written into Ukraine’s constitution at Russia’s behest proved a demand too far.

‘Denazification’ encompasses a larger and more nebulous set of Russian demands. The Kremlin has, absurdly, claimed that the Zelensky government is dominated by Nazis and presents its war on Ukraine as a battle against fascism. In reality, Zelensky and his Servant of the People party were elected in 2019 on a platform of reconciliation with Moscow. While there has been a strong element of ultra-nationalism in Ukrainian society, the current parliament, or Rada, has just one far-right member out of 400.

For the purposes of Russian diplomacy and propaganda, ‘nazi’ is, translated, essentially synonymous with ‘anti-Russian’. One of Putin’s key war aims is to try to reverse Ukraine’s legal and political ‘Russophobia’. The great irony is that, before the invasion, the Zelensky government was strongly sympathetic to the rights of Russian speakers and Zelensky (himself a Russian speaker) spoke of scrapping discriminatory language laws that restricted the use of Russian in universities, government offices and schools. After the Russian invasion, however, Zelensky instead presided over a general crackdown on the public use of Russian and the destruction of monuments to Soviet soldiers (albeit Ukrainian ones), Russian writers (even those born in Ukraine) and Russian rulers such as Catherine II. Now, after three years of attacking Ukrainian cities and terrorising the population, Putin will try to enforce policies that Zelensky would have been likely to introduce himself if it hadn’t been for Russia’s aggression – for instance to enshrine Russian as one of the two official state languages of Ukraine and granting Russian-speaking regions the right to their own education and examinations.

Another ‘denazification’ demand of Moscow’s is the restoration of the properties of the wing of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – which remains loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate – that have been confiscated after accusations that the church is being used as a front organisation by Russian intelligence. The rights of the ‘suppressed’ Russian church are a major grievance for religious-minded MAGA supporters.

Putin would also have Kyiv restore Russian-language radio and TV stations and newspapers banned either for being pro-Moscow, for being owned by Moscow-adjacent oligarchs such as Viktor Medvedchuk, or for falling foul of laws banning broadcasting in Russian. He is also likely to release the assets of individuals sanctioned since 2014 by Ukrainian presidential decree for the crime of being pro-Russian. There have been at least 2,600 named targets of this extra-judicial procedure, including many prominent businesspeople – though one senior source in Ukraine’s Presidential administration estimates that the full tally could be up to 5,000.

Which of this long shopping-list of humiliating demands will be the one that derails the peace process remains to be seen. The bottom line is that many of the concessions that Putin demands are neither politically nor practically possible for Zelensky, or any other Ukrainian leader, to make.

Take, for instance, the surrender of Donetsk. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have died defending the positions that the Kremlin demands. It’s likely that Ukrainian troops would refuse orders to withdraw even if Zelensky were to attempt to make them. And Ukraine’s ultranationalists would be literally up in arms over such a betrayal, making Ukraine instantly ungovernable. Already, in October 2019, an initiative by Zelensky to hold a referendum on Donbas’ political future was derailed after mass protests by ultranationalists – and the founder of the Azov Battalion (now Division) Andrii Biletskyi personally threatened Zelensky with ‘another Maidan’ unless he abandoned the referendum plans. Neither Zelensky nor his successor are likely to survive the armed wrath of legions of angry, heavily armed, well-organised and politically vocal veterans groups such as Azov.

In addition to this multi-layered sandwich of humiliations that the Kremlin would like to impose on Kyiv, Putin has demands of the West, too. As well as a constitutional guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO, in the months leading up to the 2022 invasion Kremlin negotiators also demanded formal commitments from the West that there will be no further expansion. One such commitment would be NATO formally rescinding the 2008 Bucharest Summit declaration, as well as a possible update of the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty that limited the numbers of heavy weapons and troops NATO and Russia were allowed to deploy close to their borders. In the dying days of the Cold War, the CFE was considered a milestone of detente. Today, it would be considered by frontline NATO countries such as the Baltics as an abandonment of their defence. ‘The goal Putin has here is not just about Ukraine’, said Marco Rubio, now Trump’s Secretary Of State, back in 2015. ‘It’s about completely reorganising the post-Cold War order… He wants to force NATO to fall apart. In fact, he’s questioned why we even need NATO anymore.’

It is becoming clear that the principal practical guarantee of Ukrainian security will be to arm Kyiv with offensive missile capacity capable of crippling the Russian economy in case of future attack, and to provide an Iron Dome-like network of air defences. Ukraine’s recent offer of $100 billion in Europe-provided funds to buy US arms concerns a massive purchase of Patriot batteries – at over a billion dollars each – plus a vast fleet of offensive and defensive drones.

Ukraine has suggested that this be paid for by confiscating the approximately €260 Russian sovereign funds held in Europe. Russia, naturally, has been equally vehement that they are protected by the international legal principle of sovereign immunity. Many European central banks fear the consequences of withdrawal of funds by other sovereign wealth funds – among them China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – if that principle is broken.

Finally, Russia also demands that sanctions be lifted, including those affecting air traffic and the oil trade, as the price of peace. With many Western companies still operating in Russia and many more, especially in Germany and the US, keen to resume operations, this will be an easy concession for the US to make. Europe, which has always taken a harder line on punishing Russia, may find selling a full U-turn on sanctions politically more challenging. But, ultimately, if Washington removes restrictions on trade with Russia it will be almost impossible for Europe to resist the tide.

It has taken Trump’s forceful intervention to put an end to an era of magical thinking by Ukraine’s Western allies, many of whom until recently continued to speak of putting Putin on trial, of recapturing lost Ukrainian lands, and of supporting Ukraine until victory. The bitter reality is that neither the US nor Europe have been willing to pay the economic price of properly sanctioning Russian energy exports, and Europe has remitted far more money to Moscow in payment for energy than they have given to aid Kyiv.

The final phase of the war will, in the absence of any serious economic or military strategy to force Putin’s hand, be largely conducted on the Kremlin’s terms. Yet Putin has not succeeded in subjugating Ukraine on the battlefield. The challenge for Ukraine and for its allies is to ensure that he does not succeed in doing so at the negotiating table.