With Ukraine’s counteroffensive moving slower than many desire or expected, a new explosion of op-eds from American and European commentators has called for negotiations to end the war. This one in The Hill– “The war is not yet over, but Ukraine has already lost” – is typical. The focus of most of these recommendations is on what President Zelenskiy needs to do to end the war, or what President Biden needs to do to pressure Zelenskiy to end the war.  The most popular idea is to trade land for peace, or land for peace and Nato membership as a senior Nato official suggested a few days ago (he later retracted his proposal). Ultimately, as these commentators claim, it is Zelenskiy who needs to give up Ukrainian territory – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia – to persuade Putin to end his invasion.

Of course, a land-for-peace swap would have devastating consequences for the international system of norms and rules that leaders established at the end of World War II – one without empires and imperial conquest. Decolonisation was one of the greatest achievements of the post-World War II order. Ending – or to be more precise, dramatically reducing – annexation was the second outstanding success of this new international system. While Palestinians and Cypriots will rightly remind us that pockets of illegal annexation and unjust occupation have occurred since 1945, great powers have mostly stopped annexing neighboring territories after 1945. Throughout the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union did not colonise other countries or annex territory.  It was Putin who restarted this pre-1945 practice again, first in Georgia in 2008, then in Ukraine in 2014, and now again in 2022.  (Russia’s de facto occupation of Transnistria in Moldova in 1992 could be added to this list.)  To date, only a handful of countries – all dictatorships – have recognized Putin’s actions as legitimate. Widespread acquiescence to colonisation and annexation will have negative implications for dozens of countries all over the world where borders remain disputed. We must not return to that anarchic, Hobbesian world where imperial might makes right. 

Moreover, a land-for-peace swap does not require Putin to give up anything other than stopping the war. Why is there no mention of reparations from these Western pundits? Or at least some kind of payment for stolen territory and destroyed cities? Russia consistently attacks non-combatants – do we really want to reward such barbaric use of force and terrorism with complete appeasement and capitulation? A deal that does not require Putin to give up anything is a bad deal.

But even if Zelenskiy was compelled to contemplate this horrific scenario, with whom would he negotiate such a deal? In recommending a land-for-peace swap, Western pundits forget to elaborate on how specifically one would convince Putin to accept such a deal. To date, there is no evidence that Putin is prepared to negotiate now.  

In 2022, Putin’s army failed to achieve all its war objectives.  Russia failed to overthrow Zelenskiy and his government, “unite” the Slavic nation, and stop Nato expansion.  Russia also lost the Battle of Kyiv, Battle of Kharkiv, and Battle of Kherson, and gave up over 50 percent of the territory it originally conquered. So, in 2023, Putin narrowed his war aims to focus on conquering and occupying the four regions of Ukraine that he annexed on paper last autumn.  As his press secretary Dmitry Peskov reminded us just two weeks ago, “We just want to control all those lands that are now written in our Constitution as ours”. Some Kremlin propagandists still push for expanded war aims to include the complete liquidation of Ukraine as a country and Ukrainians as a people, fuelling doubt whether Putin could ever be appeased by acquiring more land. Allowing Putin to annex Crimea in 2014 did stop him from invading Ukraine again in 2022. But right now, Putin seems focused on trying to annex these four territories and will not stop fighting until he has exhausted his capacities for trying to achieve this land grab. Pundits pressuring Zelenskiy to negotiate seem to forget this inconvenient fact.  

Moreover, war-time leaders tend to negotiate when they are losing or when there is a stalemate on the battlefield. From Putin’s point of view, neither of those conditions are present today. Putin thinks he is winning; in his view, his army is successfully preventing the advancement of the Ukrainian counter-offensive and has a good enough hold over the territories conquered last year. Why would he negotiate now?

Putin also believes that time is on his side, particularly when it comes to U.S. support for the war. Obviously, Putin is waiting for the outcome of the U.S. 2024 presidential election. If Mr. Trump is reelected, Putin has reason to believe that he could strike a much better deal on Ukraine. So why would he enter negotiations now?

Putin – not Zelenskiy or Biden—is the central decision-maker regarding the end of this war. He could end it tomorrow. He could pull his forces out of Ukraine, declare victory, and tell his people that he preemptively stopped the planned Nato invasion of Russia in Ukraine and saved ethnic Russians in Ukraine from genocide. Of course, he won’t do that, but he could. And a good percentage of Russians would believe him. Or Putin could also announce his desire for a ceasefire tomorrow. No one inside Russia would oppose him from doing so. So instead of sketching scenarios about what Zelenskiy and Biden need to do, pundits should focus their proposals on Putin and how to compel him to negotiate. Saying “give peace a chance” without articulating a strategy to force or convince Putin to agree to peace is not realism. It is naivety.

Michael McFaul is a professor at Stamford, advisor to the Ukrainian government and the former US ambassador to Russia.

This comment first appeared in his substack here. Subscribe to his substack here.