What peace agreement for Ukraine would Putin be willing to sign?

MoscowThe territorial dispute clouds the peace negotiations over Ukraine, now suspended due to the conflict in the Middle East. Although the recognition of the occupied regions as Russian is important for Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin's ambitions involve the Belarusianization of Kyiv, that is, its political subordination. Moscow wants a meek and friendly neighbor that poses no threat in itself to Russia, nor as a vanguard of hypothetical Western aggression. However, the Russian president missed the opportunity to depose Volodymyr Zelensky at the start of the war, and after four years of daily bombings, the advent of a pro-Russian government in Ukraine seems like a fantasy or a bad joke.

Despite this, Putin has been pressuring for some time for the Ukrainian president to call elections and has even managed to get Donald Trump to adopt this narrative. Holding elections in a country at war, with martial law in effect and thousands of men at the front, would not be at all the preferred option for Ukrainians, but the Kremlin insists that a new president must be elected before a ceasefire, with the unfounded excuse that Zelensky is not legitimized to sign a peace agreement. The truth, however, is that this way Russia keeps the option of resuming hostilities open if it does not like the people's democratic expression.

Therefore, Moscow wants to demand that the ban on pro-Russian parties, outlawed in Ukraine shortly after the 2022 invasion, be lifted, and that nationalist forces be prohibited, a demand so broad that it is problematic in itself. Furthermore, the Kremlin has already hinted that it would try to challenge the results of an election, arguing that Kyiv, in its eagerness to manipulate the popular will, prevents Ukrainian citizens in Russian territory from voting.

This is a paradox of Russian expansionism: the occupation of the majority pro-Russian regions has led to a significant reduction in the pool of voters for Kremlin-friendly options. Moreover, forced Russification in these areas has forced the population to renounce their Ukrainian passports. Therefore, it is very uncertain how Russia could try to use these citizens to interfere in the elections. What is likely is that, without the possibility of supporting a pro-Russian candidate due to the strong anti-Russian sentiment in Ukrainian society, Moscow would fuel general discontent with the political class after four years of war.

The UN's trap

Another of the formulas that Putin himself has proposed is the establishment of a transitional government in Ukraine supervised by the United Nations. Although the UN has already rejected it, as analyst Aleksander Baunov writes in the Russian opposition newspaper Meduza, the Russian president is trying to include the international body in the equation, on the one hand, to "create an aura of legitimacy" and, on the other, because as a member of the Security Council it can exercise veto power at any time.

With this move, Russia seeks to establish itself as a kind of guarantor of Ukraine's security (the famous security guarantees) and to become "a sword of punishment" over Ukrainian society which, if the right circumstances arise, will grant it the right to armed intervention and future annexations. Baunov compares it to the case of Cyprus in 1974, in which one of the guarantors, Turkey, took advantage of a coup d'état to annex a third of the island. The justification for this future aggression would again be the lack of protection for the Russian language, for the Ukrainian branch of the Russian Orthodox Church, or the closure of pro-Russian media outlets, issues that Putin wants to enshrine in a peace agreement. That is, history would repeat itself.

Geopolitical experts from the orbit of the Russian government, such as Fyodor Lukyanov, also point out that this international solution for Kyiv should be accompanied by a pact that would reconfigure European order and security. In this way, Russia, in one fell swoop, would neutralize and disarm Ukraine, the largest army on the continent, and rebalance forces with NATO. "For the Kremlin, the war is existential. It is not just about taking control of cities and towns, but about a confrontation with the West taking place on Ukrainian territory," points out Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Eurasia Center.

Putin not only does not accept a peace agreement because Zelensky does not want to cede Donbas, but because he sees the fulfillment of his ambitions as very distant. Military pressure, moreover, confers upon him a bargaining power that, in the event of a ceasefire, he would immediately lose. Therefore, continuing the war is the best card for the Kremlin in the eyes of its elite, and it will not stop as long as it does not ensure that it can cast its shadow over a defenseless Ukraine and that a cowed Europe does not dare to cast a shadow over Russia.