Putin believes the West is done with Ukraine
The immediate US aim is, fancifully, a Christmas ceasefire to buy time for what could one day (think Christmas 2026) be presented as a negotiated framework peace agreement, vague on detail. The Russian aim is either to co-opt Trump throughout this process or drag their feet until he loses interest – and declare the captured Ukrainian lands to be Russia’s birthright.
Only then, with a Cyrillic “Peace in Our Time” document in hand, is Putin’s full strategy likely to unfold, a triple whammy that goes beyond turning Ukraine from a modern state into a subservient province.
First, Putin wants to reinvent the western borderlands to Russia as a zone of political permacrisis. That is the most straightforward way of deterring NATO from expanding its influence. Russian interference in the recent Moldovan elections showed the direction of travel. The bombing campaign against Ukrainian civilians is supposed not just to sap support for Volodymyr Zelensky but also to deter any other neighbour from treading a similar path.
Second, Moscow wants to call a halt to the rearmament of Europe. Even a rotten peace deal with Putin will generate electoral backlash in the West against higher defence spending. Hard-right parties across the continent mimic left-wing arguments by claiming that a military-industrial complex has seized control of European polities.
Money that could be used to build more prisons, better border controls and create more efficient national health systems is being diverted, these critics will argue, towards air defence missiles for ungrateful and corrupt foreign powers to shield themselves from a Russia that strives merely for a peaceful neighbourhood. The Kremlin need only simulate a peace process to create this kind of backlash.
Finally, Putin seems convinced he must use the war (and a promised end to it) as a way of redefining the West. Trump’s indifference to many European issues, and an increasing focus on the challenges posed by China, has done part of the work for him. But there is already a new east-west fault line inside NATO. There are those allies closest to the Russian border who are convinced they will be next in line after the war is declared over in Ukraine. Countries like Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, once part of the Soviet Union, and former Warsaw Pact states like Poland have muscled up their defence spending and as a result are targets for Russian sabotage missions and cyberattacks.
In the west of the West these problems still seem remote. Spain is spending a bit more on defence but will struggle to reach 2 per cent of GDP by next year. Ireland is an avowed neutral, not a NATO member, but it has a key part to play in the defence of transatlantic data cables that run through its territory. Its defence budget is the smallest in the EU, barely a quarter of 1 per cent of GDP; it has no dedicated intelligence agency and is thus poorly positioned to monitor Russian infiltration.
And only four out of its eight naval vessels are in service. For an island nation, the backdoor into Europe, that’s terrifyingly negligent.
Many European countries have a similarly strong pacifist tradition on the left but have tried, like Germany (which wants to create the strongest conventional army in the EU over the next decade) to crank into action to address the Russian menace.
Recent polls show most people in Germany, France and Poland support reintroducing some form of mandatory military service. But Putin’s calculation seems to be that the gaps in threat perception within Europe are so wide that it is enough for him to talk peace (while continuing to fight in Ukraine) to make extra defence commitments seem like an expensive luxury for westerners.
That will be one of the fault lines of 2026, if Putin has his way: wealthier western states ready to continue funding and arming an anti-Russian force despite growing resistance (and scepticism about Ukrainian leadership) from hard-right parties and, in some countries, the public at large.
Putin is counting on being able to replenish his own troops for another year of combat but in the West he smells only the emergence of a post-warrior cohort, tired of the social limbo that comes with a long war. The West has had enough, he reckons, and is looking for an exit.
But the actual narrative is not so much about western compassion fatigue or Kyiv’s financial hole, it’s about Russia not knowing how to win the war it began, its repeated failures on the battlefield. Putin is trying to drag out the peace process in a way that exposes the fissures in the West rather than his own shortcomings.
Ultimately, he wants his own incompetence as a war leader to be erased and his image instead to be that of a heroic defender who split the transatlantic alliance, boxed NATO armies into a corner and reclaimed a Russian sphere of interest.
After the fighting ends in Ukraine we can’t let that distorted history stand. The frozen Russian assets in Belgium and elsewhere have to be warmed up and used not just to rebuild the country but also to help restore our own credibility.
The Times
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