Ukraine-Russia War: A peace formula will need to balance Russia’s great-power prestige with Ukraine’s sovereignty

Four years on, Moscow has yet to achieve its core wartime objectives of gaining complete control over the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. The conflict has already surpassed the length of the Soviet military campaign against Nazi Germany, making it Russia’s longest in Europe in over a century.

Despite Russian forces controlling the tempo across multiple axes, they have struggled to achieve a breakthrough, as Ukrainian resistance has slowed their advance, with high losses on both sides.

Meanwhile, efforts to find a negotiated settlement have gained momentum, with Russian, Ukrainian and American interlocutors meeting at various levels and formats.

The recent trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi have hinted at a more pragmatic approach, reflected in the participation of high-ranking political and military representatives from Russia and Ukraine, with deliberations on the implementation and modalities of monitoring a ceasefire.

Yet, deep divergences in negotiating positions suggest that any peace without addressing these would be fragile.

State of the battlefield: Russia’s military strategy seeks to exploit Ukraine’s acute manpower shortage by deploying a swarm of troops across fronts in an attempt to spread the Ukrainian defence thin. As a result, Russian forces last year recaptured the Kursk region and opened a new front in Sumy, northeastern Ukraine.

New gains were made in Donetsk with the capture of Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad and Siversk, as well as Huliapole in the Zaporizhzhia region. However, these gains are largely tactical rather than strategic, with Russia controlling only about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.

Domestically, Moscow faces mounting pressure from the high costs of financing the war, high interest rates, tightening sanctions and sustained Ukrainian strikes on energy infrastructure, all of which have resulted in the Russian economy overheating.

Despite severe manpower shortages, war fatigue and reduced overt US support compared to the Joe Biden US presidency, Kyiv has constrained the Russian advance thanks to European partners scaling up military aid. It has intensified strikes on Russian energy and military infrastructure and developed a comparative advantage in limited-arms warfare, particularly through AI-enabled drones and precision-guided tools.

Also, changes in key appointments, including the introduction of a popular wartime figure and Russia hawk Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov, as Zelensky’s chief of staff, have renewed confidence in Ukraine’s negotiating position. Budanov is said to be in close contact with his Western counterparts. Taken together, Ukraine remains far from capitulation despite incremental Russian advances.

Peace talks on shaky ground: Last February, negotiations resumed after the failure of early-2022 talks in Istanbul. They began in a bilateral US-Russia format, with Ukraine brought in later.

By the end of 2025, after multiple rounds of negotiations, a 28-point framework was outlined and later condensed to 20 points by the US and Ukraine (redacting clauses that ran counter to Ukraine’s sovereignty). But Moscow rejected the plan. Core divergences include the warring countries’ irreconcilable positions on territory, security guarantees and ceasefire terms.

Kyiv has vehemently opposed any attempt at salami-slicing its sovereign territory, calling for the restoration of its 1991 borders. But Russia is firm that a ceasefire will be contingent on Ukraine’s withdrawal from Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia; it also wants Crimea recognized as Russian territory.

On security guarantees for Ukraine, it rejects the Western understanding of it and argues that a Russian withdrawal must not enable Kyiv to regroup and launch a counteroffensive. Any peace agreement that does not address these issues is likely to be fragile and vulnerable to fresh escalation.

The way ahead: What’s increasingly evident is that neither the ritualistic expansion of Western sanctions on Russia nor coercive pressure on Ukraine to accept a suboptimal settlement will in itself deliver sustainable peace. The limits of punitive maximalism and forced compromise are now stark. While the latest round of talks has stopped short of a breakthrough, it has kept the diplomatic channel ajar. The granular, technical negotiations that follow are likely to be more consequential.

These discussions could focus on areas where convergence, however modest, is possible: an exchange of prisoners of war, mutual restraint on targeting energy infrastructure, a halt to strikes on densely populated urban centres and the construction of structured pathways to address thorny questions of territory, security guarantees and the sequencing of a ceasefire. Such incrementalism may lack drama, but is often the precondition for strategic stabilization.

At its core, the dilemma is political as much as military. Crafting an arrangement that affords Moscow a face-saving exit, without eviscerating Kyiv’s sovereign agency, is the central balancing act. Reconciling these competing imperatives—great power prestige and national self-determination—will determine whether diplomacy can move from managing conflict to resolving it.

The authors are, respectively, professor of international relations, King’s College London, and vice president for studies at Observer Research Foundation (ORF); and junior fellow, Eurasia, at ORF.