Anatol Lieven is the director of the Eurasia Program and the Andrew Bacevich chair in American Diplomatic History at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the War Studies Department of King’s College London.
Mark Episkopos is a research fellow in the Quincy Institute’s Eurasia Program. He is also an Adjunct Professor of History at Marymount University and was formerly the National Security Reporter at The National Interest.
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Several sticking points remain on territory, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, and security guarantees.
Territory: Both sides attach great symbolic value to Donetsk, which, together with neighboring Luhansk, forms the eastern Donbass region where the conflict between Ukraine and Russian–backed separatists began in 2014. The last remaining territorial issue dividing the two sides is the Russian demand that Ukraine relinquish the 20 percent of Donetsk that Russia claims and Ukraine still controls. Because of the immense destruction and loss of life that stems from 10 years of fighting over this region, it is politically and psychologically challenging for the respective sides to negotiate on the compromise arrangements being offered by the White House.
Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant: Russian forces control the plant, which generated about one-quarter of Ukraine’s electricity before the war. Ukraine seeks to push Russia out of the nuclear power plant as part of a peace deal, with Zelensky pushing for a joint management scheme between Ukraine and the U.S. This is a red line for Moscow, which will likely reject any arrangement that excludes it from the plant’s postwar management.
Security guarantees: Though Zelensky understands and largely accepts the security guarantees being offered by the White House and a coalition of willing Western states, part of Ukraine’s negotiation strategy is to signal agreement while holding out for better terms on the margins. Zelensky seeks to make the binding assurances taken on by guarantor states as robust as possible. European proposals to station a European military force in Ukraine as a postwar security guarantee are a red line for Russia and, if seriously pursued, could derail negotiations.
Yes. The White House has made substantial progress in narrowing the negotiating gap between Russia and Ukraine over territory. For example, the White House has proposed demilitarizing contested areas of Eastern Ukraine and turning them into “special economic zones,” thereby reframing concerns about sovereignty and territorial integrity in a way that makes the deal easier for both sides to swallow. There is technical work left to do, particularly in working with Moscow to review the proposal’s finer points, but both sides have demonstrated a willingness to negotiate within this compromise framework. A key question is who would provide security in these zones.
On security guarantees, Ukraine is understandably driving a hard bargain to secure the best deal possible. But, considering the difficult trajectory of this war, there is only so much room to offer Kyiv better terms before the whole package becomes unacceptable to Moscow. The White House is rightly sensitive to Russian red lines, such as a Western military force within Ukraine, and is maneuvering around them. In addition, it would be unrealistic to offer security guarantees that commit the U.S. to taking steps the Biden administration was unwilling to take in previous years of the conflict, such as direct military intervention by U.S. troops.
To be acceptable to the Ukrainians, a peace settlement will have to include Ukraine’s right to receive weapons and training from NATO, and some form of binding guarantee that in the event of future Russian aggression, Ukraine will receive greatly increased support from the West. Ukraine’s right to join the European Union must also be explicitly included.
To be acceptable to the Russians, a peace settlement will need to include some kind of formal and permanent bar on Ukraine joining NATO, and on Western combat troops being deployed to Ukraine. There will also need to be some sort of guarantees for the linguistic and cultural rights of Russian–speaking citizens of Ukraine (with a reciprocal guarantee by Moscow of the rights of Ukrainians in Russia). Most Western economic and political sanctions against Russia would be suspended, with a “snap-back” proviso that they will automatically resume if Russia restarts the war.
On the question of control of the part of the Donbas still held by Ukraine, the most likely outcome will be a ceasefire along the existing front line, along with the disarmament of this territory, which will remain under Ukrainian sovereignty and administration. This assumes that Russia remains incapable of capturing this territory. Both sides will have to guarantee they will not attempt to change the ceasefire line and acquire more territory by force.
Ideally (and as an incentive to Russia to drop its territorial demand), the peace settlement will include measures to reduce military confrontation in Europe and lay the foundations of a new European security architecture.
No. The Russian army has suffered enormously in this war, with total casualties probably exceeding one million men. Virtually the entire force with which Russia began the war has been destroyed. Russia apparently began the war with the intent of subjugating Ukraine to Russia; instead, the result of a peace treaty would be an independent and Western–aligned Ukraine with a very substantial independent military force and external security guarantees. After years of talking up the Russian threat to Europe, Finnish President Alexander Stubb has now said that Europe can defend itself without America, because Ukraine has restricted Russia’s advances since 2022 to barely 1 percent more territory and imposed huge casualties on Russia.
Given the tremendous advantages that contemporary military technology provides for defense, it is entirely within NATO’s capacity to help the Ukrainians build defenses strong enough to deter the Russians.
Russian threats and “hybrid” actions against the West since 2022 have been an outgrowth of the war in Ukraine. Indeed, the intention of these threats has been to deter NATO from intervening directly in Ukraine.
Finally, what is the alternative? All serious military analysts, including the Ukrainians themselves, now agree that Ukraine cannot reconquer its lost territories on the battlefield. The alternative to a peace settlement is therefore indefinite war, with the risk that an exhausted and heavily outnumbered Ukrainian army may eventually collapse, leading to much greater Russian gains.
Yes. This agreement would leave four-fifths of Ukraine (including all its core ethnic territories) as an independent state, with the recognized right to join the European Union. Russia would play no role in the administration of Ukraine. And for the reasons set out above, the West would be in a position to help Ukraine build defenses that are formidable enough to deter future Russian aggression.
If Russia were to conclude that no compromise peace with Ukraine is attainable, it would accelerate air strikes on a wide range of Ukrainian targets and increase the number of soldiers it has deployed to the front lines. It would decide in the course of a stepped-up offensive where the de facto border between Russia and a rump Ukraine will be drawn — ranging anywhere from full control over the territories it has officially annexed to complete conquest of Ukraine’s coastline — and then unilaterally declare an end to its military action.
Russia could not conquer all of Ukraine and would not try, as this would require an occupation army many times the size of the entire Russian military and would almost certainly encounter sustained Ukrainian guerrilla attacks. But it would ensure that unoccupied Ukrainian territory could not be reconstructed by wielding an ever-present threat to bomb reconstruction projects. This would ensure that few of the millions of Ukrainians who fled the country ever return, effectively close the door on Ukraine’s NATO and EU membership, and make it likely that Ukraine would become a dysfunctional and unstable rump state, radiating instability into broader Europe.
A fuller version of this article was published by The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft on 29 January 2026 and is reprinted with the kind permission of Anatol Lieven
