Efforts to halt the war in Ukraine, now approaching its fourth year, have all failed. The Trump administration is now reported to have joined Russia in drafting a new plan to end the conflict, but it would require Kyiv to cede territory and reduce the size of its army — terms Ukraine has long declared unacceptable.
As things stand, Ukraine is battered but continues to hold Russia to incremental advances. President Vladimir Putin has adapted Russia’s economy to the war and is intractable in his determination to neutralize Ukraine and secure it in Russia’s orbit.
What will it take to finally put an end to this war?
It is unclear where the new deal is headed. Here is what seven experts in the United States, Europe and Russia think needs to be done. The breadth of their imperatives — ranging from a greater commitment to diplomacy to more weapons support to Ukraine and the need to reassess NATO — offer a window into the hard work ahead.
A cease-fire is the first step
Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, Bulgaria
Wars end when one side wins or both sides lose hope of victory. We have reached neither moment in Ukraine. Russia holds a strategic advantage on the battlefield, but it is far from winning; its economy has been seriously weakened, but it is far from collapse. All we can realistically hope for in 2026 is a cease-fire, not a comprehensive peace deal.
Mr. Putin will agree to a cease-fire only if it serves his war objectives: to destabilize President Volodymyr Zelensky’s power in Ukraine, trigger internal strife and deepen divisions within the Western alliance. Ukraine is exhausted and seeks a pause in the fighting, but it will accept a cease-fire only if it strengthens its ties with the United States and the European Union and does not provoke domestic backlash.
A cease-fire in 2026 is conceivable if Moscow believes that ending hostilities would help bring President Trump to its side, and if Kyiv believes that a pause would give it time and Western support to rearm and consolidate. For both parties, such an agreement would be a tactical maneuver rather than a step toward lasting peace. Still, once a cease-fire is in place, it could prove more durable than either side expects. So the end of the war may well come as an unintended consequence.
A real negotiation process
Samuel Charap, a distinguished chair in Russia and Eurasia policy and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation
Mr. Trump has rightly turned international attention to ending the Russia-Ukraine war and taken important steps to open channels of communication at the highest levels. A key piece of the puzzle is still missing, however: a real negotiation process.
The diplomacy we have seen thus far has been episodic, unstructured and highly public. But the negotiation processes that successfully resolved past armed conflicts of similar intensity were continuous, structured and largely confidential. Such talks, involving empowered representatives of the belligerents and their key external supporters as well as experienced mediators, are required to identify trade-offs, understand the space for compromise and, crucially, test the proposition that the other side is willing to commit to peace. Real negotiations offer the only way for embittered enemies to gain the modicum of confidence in one another’s intentions needed for them to give peace a chance.
In the short term, negotiations should be targeted at breaking the current deadlock on sequencing. Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Trump and European leaders are calling for an immediate halt to hostilities to allow talks to proceed in peaceful conditions. Mr. Putin believes that continuing the fighting provides him needed leverage and thus insists on a political settlement up front. Sanctions on Russian oil companies or even providing Ukraine with long-range missiles like Tomahawks are unlikely to persuade him to give up that position.
Negotiators should aim to unlock a cease-fire by pursuing a framework agreement: a concise document that sets out the principles and parameters of a future negotiated settlement. It would foster confidence and a shared understanding of the key elements of an eventual fully fledged peace deal — enough to convince Mr. Putin to end the fighting.
A final settlement will take many months, if not years, of structured negotiations to conclude. But with a framework agreement and a concurrent cease-fire, those talks would proceed without the death and destruction that now extends from the battlefields of the Donbas to Ukraine’s major cities.
Security guarantees for Ukraine
Pavlo Klimkin, Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs from June 2014 to August 2019
A plan for ending Russia’s aggression against Ukraine cannot be the project of a limited group of politicians and diplomats. This war is not about Russia’s “security” or territorial claims; it’s about Ukraine’s identity and sovereignty. Russia’s goal is to deny the first by claiming Ukraine is really part of Russia and to limit the second by putting restrictions on Ukraine’s military and its orientation.
In fact, at the time the conflict began in 2014 — when Russia annexed Crimea and began supporting separatists in the Donbas — Ukraine explicitly banned membership in any military bloc. But that meant nothing to Russia. To Russia, Ukraine can exist only as part of the Russian realm and Russian mythology.
To allow Russia to achieve its goal would not only leave the West looking weak, but barely credible to itself and the world. Its credibility rests on the boldness and effectiveness of Western security guarantees for Ukraine. Anything short of that will not produce a sustainable or durable peace — for Europe or for Russia.
Guaranteeing Ukraine’s security would also be a security guarantee for Russia, since a Ukraine integrated into the West would not pose a threat to anyone — except perhaps to Russia’s myths.
Russia does need a new vision and mythology, but that’s for the Russians to shape. Every nation has a right to define its own identity and sovereignty and, if need be, as in Ukraine today, to fight for it. Peace in Ukraine is not possible without difficult decisions by everyone involved. But that takes strength.
Weapons, not just sanctions
Angela Stent, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
Despite the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to get Mr. Putin to the negotiating table, nothing has changed in the past 10 months, except for increasingly brutal Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets and energy infrastructure. Mr. Putin is impervious to both Mr. Trump’s flattery and his veiled threats.
How, then, can the United States get Mr. Putin to change his calculus? The recent sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil are a good start. The E.U. has also imposed more sanctions on Rosneft and Gazprom Neft. Though more may still be needed, together they convey the message that the United States and its allies mean business as the Russian economy faces a looming recession and gasoline shortages are spreading.
But sanctions are not enough. Ukraine needs to be able to purchase more weapons to convince Mr. Putin that he will not win on the battlefield. The E.U. should resolve its members’ remaining reservations about using Russian frozen assets to provide Ukraine with a 140 billion euro loan to purchase those weapons. Likewise, the United States should allow Ukraine to buy its Tomahawk missiles.
A cease-fire along the current line of contact would be only the beginning of a long and challenging path to end the war. Ukraine will need credible security guarantees to deter Russia from re-invading in a few years. Even if the Europeans were able to provide a stabilization force, without U.S. backup, that force would be constrained in what it can do.
The first step to ending the fighting is a cease-fire. But without robust support from the West to deter Putin from resuming the war, his determination to subordinate Ukraine will remain.
A maximum pressure campaign
Alina Polyakova, head of the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington
On Oct. 10, 2022, a Russian missile hit a park in central Kyiv, leaving a massive crater in the middle of a playground. Russian missile strikes were already frequent then, about eight months into the “big war,” as Ukrainians call Russia’s invasion. But that attack, on Taras Shevchenko Park, felt deeply personal to me; as a child growing up in Kyiv, I spent many days on that playground. Yet within 24 hours, the crater was being filled in and children had returned.
This remarkable resilience has defined Ukraine’s fight for survival for almost four years, despite all the early predictions of Ukraine’s inevitable defeat. But it has also made Ukraine a victim of its own success, reducing the sense of urgency in Europe and the United States to help. In the meantime, Russia’s military and economy have adapted to the war. Ending the war now, rather than two years ago, when Russia’s military was fumbling and the economy was far more vulnerable to pressure, is far more difficult.
Ending the war today will require a maximum pressure campaign on Russia to force Mr. Putin to the negotiation table, coupled with an effective defense and deterrence plan led by Europeans. That includes supplying long-range missiles to strike Russia’s energy sector, implementing the sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, and discouraging countries that supply Russia’s military. But Europe must also start detaining Russia’s “shadow fleet” of tankers that export Russian oil, tapping frozen Russian funds to assist Ukraine and increasing its own defense spending.
Ukraine, of course, will have to make concessions, likely territorial ones. But getting any cease-fire deal out of Russia will depend on how much pressure Ukraine’s allies are willing to exert, from all directions.
End Western expansionism
Sergey Karaganov, director of the faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics and a former adviser to Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin
This war dates to the 1990s, when the Americans, supported by many Europeans, decided to expand NATO. I tried at the time to warn colleagues in the United States and Europe, then still friendly, that this would lead to war. Unfortunately, Russia, then weak and still trusting Western partners, agreed in 1997 to sign the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which set the stage for further expansion of the alliance. Hostility and Russophobia began to rise anew in Europe and even the United States.
Today, Russia’s military forces are advancing and winning tactically, but people continue to die. We could achieve a cease-fire, stopping the fighting somewhere along the current front or, more likely, further to the west, but the war will not really end until the core problem — the aggressive expansion of the Western military-political alliance — is resolved, and Ukraine is fully demilitarized and neutral.
If not, the war will restart sooner or later. And then it could assume a nuclear character. We can “win” the war in Europe if we find there is no other way, but that would be a pyrrhic and moral failure. So I pray that we can shake some sense into European elites.
Prepare for a new cold war
Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
Full-scale war is a ruinously expensive, disruptive experience for most societies, and both Russia and Ukraine are showing the strain. The Kremlin’s czar needn’t worry (yet) about street protests or challenges from his inner circle. But, for all Mr. Putin’s rhetorical bravado, bad economic news points to vulnerability he can’t simply ignore. Exploiting it promptly — with better weapons, more aggressive targeting, better enforced sanctions — is the only way Kyiv and its allies can make Mr. Putin’s vulnerability a potential tipping point.
All this is urgent because pressures on Ukraine are also increasing. Its economic outlook is even more desperate than Russia’s, and it faces an adversary planning to pound its cities all winter, until darkness, cold and misery shred the nation’s unity. Six months from now, Mr. Putin’s victory claims may not seem quite as fraudulent as they do today.
To keep the peace when the fighting finally stops, Ukraine’s backers have so far focused too narrowly on “security guarantees,” as though some solemn verbal formula could offer reliable protection against Russian threats down the road. What kept the peace during the Cold War — and make no mistake, a new version of the Cold War surely lies ahead — was not NATO’s treaty pledge that an attack on one was an attack on all. The line between Europe’s two halves held for decades because cooperation among Western allies stayed strong, sustained by a network of political, economic, military, social, even cultural relationships and institutions.
These relationships kept the Cold War peaceful. They helped Western societies succeed while Soviet satellites slowly failed. To protect Ukraine in the decades ahead, some version of that same cooperative network must take hold from the moment a cease-fire is declared. Creating it, not just talking about it, is Western leaders’ true task. No single document, no parliamentary vote, no alliance honor roll, no deployment of peacekeepers can substitute. The terms of an armistice must not block such relationships. If they flourish, Ukraine will succeed — and the peace will last.
Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.
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