Will Putin escalate in Ukraine? Western fears have shaped the conflict

This being the case, Western and Ukrainian interests are fundamentally misaligned, as the eminent American diplomat Richard N. Haass, who is apparently running back-channel talks with Russia, recently observed in Foreign Affairs. For Haass, “instead of clinging to an infeasible definition of victory, Washington must grapple with the grim reality of the war and come to terms with a more plausible outcome.” To do so, the United States government — and here Haass means the outgoing Biden Administration, seen as more sympathetic to Ukrainian interests than its replacement — “must take the uncomfortable step of pushing Kyiv to negotiate with the Kremlin — and lay out a clear sense of how it should do so”. Yet the Haass plan, which revolves around an armistice on the current front lines and accepts Ukraine’s de facto loss of its territory currently occupied by Russia, may no longer be in America’s power to achieve.

Instead, the unfortunate dawning prospect may be that Ukraine will suffer both for its early success and for Biden’s earlier disinclination to push the country towards peace talks. When the 2022 invasion began, the United States worked on the planning assumption that Russia’s swift victory was more or less inevitable. The spirited Ukrainian defence, and the Russian failures of planning and capability that saw the initially fast-tempo advance bogged down and then forced to retreat from vast areas of the country, came as a surprise, forcing all parties to improvise plans for a longer and more costly war than anyone expected. Two major opportunities for a negotiated solution, at the war’s very beginning and then following the dramatic Kharkiv counteroffensive, were rejected by Kyiv, the latter against the Pentagon’s advice and the former in circumstances which historians will debate for many decades to come. Yet the war’s initial successes, and the promises of unlimited Western support, now seem distant. In allowing the Zelensky Administration to commit itself to maximalist terms of victory, the Biden Administration’s apparent support for Ukraine may have delivered a worse outcome for the country than pressure to have accepted a negotiated solution, even involving loss of territory, years ago.

As a Kyiv official recently told the I newspaper, “If we’re going to be forced into accepting where we were around two years ago, then it may have been better to have agreed this in 2022 and we would have saved so many lives on both sides.” Yet it is surely optimistic to assume that, following years of gruelling and costly warfare, Russia’s terms now will be as amenable for Kyiv as those which Ukrainian negotiators once toasted with champagne. While Russian officials suggest the 2022 negotiations may be a workable starting point for talks, the war’s dynamics have slowly shifted against Ukraine so starkly that Putin may hold out for a more decisive conclusion.

Outnumbered and outgunned, Ukraine’s exhausted defenders are falling back across the eastern front, losing vital strongpoints they successfully held for years. While Russia is now advancing at the fastest pace since the war’s opening days, it is testament to the dogged Ukrainian defence that the invading troops are not moving faster still. Ukraine has so far staved off a collapse on the Donbas front, though Ukrainian commanders on the ground fear that the slow retreat may not be tenable for many more months. But should the Ukrainian defensive line collapse before peace negotiations begin, the war’s outcome will be far worse for Kyiv than even the most painful concessions mooted in 2022. As the RUSI analyst Jack Watling observes, one plausible scenario for Ukraine is an analogue to the Brest-Litovsk negotiations of 1918, where the losing side’s attempt to renegotiate unwelcome concessions is met by increased military pressure from the victor to enforce compliance. Indeed, given this scenario, even the advent of peace negotiations may not bring an end to the current escalatory spiral, but instead heighten it for the duration of talks, pressuring Ukraine by threatening its Western backers. If the current phase of the war is a tense and anxious one, the road to peace may be yet more fraught.

Seeking to shore up its negotiating position, Ukraine has attempted to circumvent the worrying battlefield trends through bold surprise attacks, across the Dnieper at Krynky or into Russian territory near Bryansk. Yet these diversionary attacks have proved costly, and ultimately counterproductive. The Krynky operation, apparently planned by British defence officials, was a costly disaster, and has now been abandoned to no gain. The Bryansk incursion, while significantly more successful in seizing both territory and appreciative Western headlines, has ultimately failed on its own terms, as Putin declined the temptation to withdraw troops from the war’s pivotal Donbas front. Instead, the redeployment of Ukraine’s best-equipped brigades to a sideshow weakened its own defensive capacity in the theatre in which the war’s outcome will be decided. With 40% of the seized Russian territory now lost, the primary effect of the Bryansk operation has been to accelerate the escalatory spiral for no meaningful strategic gain.

As a direct result of the incursion, Russia has brought in North Korean troops; while to defend Ukraine’s shrinking toehold, the long-delayed British and French permission to use long-range airborne missiles in Russian territory led directly to Putin’s demonstrative use of experimental, nuclear-capable missiles as a direct warning to the West. Fears of an immediate direct conflict with Russia are, for now, overstated. The risks of escalation run both ways, and Russia’s advance warning to the United States of its missile launch proves that de-escalatory lines of communication remain open. In any case, there is little incentive for Putin to cross the Rubicon before seeing what can be extracted from Trump. But this phase of the war is a genuinely uncomfortable one, whose passing will be met with relief in Western capitals. As it stands, continuation of the current strategy presents greater risk, in terms of escalatory potential, than it does the reward of meaningful bargaining chips in negotiations which are still yet to begin.

Instead, the Trump Administration will enter the White House with the aspiration to wind the war down as quickly as possible. That the Zelensky Administration now publicly welcomes the new approach signifies that Ukraine has been caught in a trap partly of its own making. Being forced into peace negotiations it cannot avoid, whose painful concessions it can later blame on Western disengagement or malfeasance, instead presents an escape route of sorts for Kyiv. Certainly, the fact that most Ukrainians now support peace talks helps Zelensky’s new dose of realism. Yet nearly three years into the war, it is difficult to see what leverage Trump holds to persuade Russia to urgently enter talks. The most realistic bargaining chip available to Ukraine remains abandoning further risky offensive gambits and making its remaining territory too costly for Russia to comfortably seize. The Biden Administration’s last-minute delivery of antipersonnel mines, perhaps more militarily useful than the more-publicised ATACMS missiles, highlights the heightened, if belated, emphasis on defence. Yet all the weapons deliveries so far have only delayed rather than averted the current trajectory of the war, while Ukraine’s greatest strategic deficit, its dwindling reserves of manpower, is not in the West’s power to resolve. From what we know of the new administration’s thinking, as expressed by J.D. Vance on the campaign trail, the Trump peace plan more or less accords with that proposed by Haass. But much now depends on whether Putin, scenting victory, will be content to exit the war with what he already holds.

Absent a miraculous feat of Trumpian diplomacy, to favourably conclude the war now, Ukraine requires some deus ex machina hard to conceive; yet to achieve victory, Russia merely needs to pursue its current winning strategy to its full conclusion, costly and painful though that will be. For nearly three years, the prospect of peace negotiations with Russia was presented by Ukraine’s most strident Western backers as a defeatist concession to Putin. Now that urgent talks to end the war are American and Ukrainian policy, the risk is that it may not immediately be in Washington’s power to initiate them, let alone direct them towards Kyiv’s advantage. The United States and Ukraine now just want the war to end, while Russia retains an incentive, tempered only by Putin’s unknowable appetite for risk, to pursue a wider victory. Ukraine’s closest European allies, including Britain, find themselves uncomfortably caught between these opposing visions. Trump’s self-image as a historic deal-maker has long been a subject of right-thinking mockery: for Ukraine’s sake, and our own, we must hope the coming months will reveal it to have a sturdy basis in fact.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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