Could Negotiations with Putin Be Closer Than We Think?

Vladimir Putin is absolutely committed to his war in Ukraine, and he would sacrifice everything, including the future of his own country, in order to achieve victory. That's the conventional logic on Putin's motivations, and before you take the title of this episode too close to heart, our Warfronts team should be very clear about where we stand.

Everything about Vladimir Putin's actions, and the actions of his regime in Russia, suggest that he is, indeed, willing to destroy everything in his path to conquer Ukraine.

Reports from within Russia leaked and whispered over time into the Western press indicate that Putin has decided to fully commit to this war for the next several months at a minimum.

Russia's strikes on Ukrainian energy and water infrastructure have only been escalating, Putin's forces are redoubling their attention on Ukraine's fortress belt of strategic cities, and Russian civilians are preparing for a new round of mass mobilization on the home front.

According to one recent article from The Economist, Putin believes that if he tries to end the war before he even captures Ukraine's eastern Donbass region, that, quote, they will hang me.

Today, not being the international community, but the warmongers within Putin's own ruling elite. At this moment in the conflict, it would be a major surprise if Russia were to suddenly reverse course.

Moscow's wartime decisions, combined with its escalating threats and hybrid war against the global West, suggest that Putin is telling his deputies to squeeze every last bit of warfighting capability out of the Russian state.

And yet, we can't help but notice that all around the periphery of this conflict, there are growing indicators that the headwinds Putin is facing may simply be too much to bear. For Russia, the great and fatal risk of this war has always been that Moscow would push and push and push until the foundations of the Russian state simply collapsed.

So, it's time that we at least explore the alternative case to understand this phase of the war.

If Vladimir Putin were to consider ending this conflict earlier than expected, then what are the key challenges and setbacks that would influence his decision-making? And how much stock should we put in the fact that some of those same setbacks are happening now?

THE PROBLEMS THAT MATTER At the outset of today's episode, we'd like to be real clear about what we do and don't hope to accomplish today, because what we don't want to do is give a false impression that a peace deal in Ukraine is currently likely.

We said it before and we'll say it again. Our team's assessment is in line with the broad majority of experts on this conflict, that Putin and his allies are doubling down, working to take as much Donbass territory and inflict as much pain as possible, and hopefully, from their perspectives, force a breakthrough that would allow Russia to win the war.

So, let's get started.

Let's get started. Let's get started. Russia to either take the Donbass or even push through to the rest of Ukraine.

More likely than not, Putin is engaged in those efforts because he's already made the decision to carry on, at least through the coming winter, with the likely intent to launch an all-out push in the springtime. Nor do we consider Russia's current attempts at starting peace talks as being even remotely credible.

Now, as ever, Russia floats the idea of peace talks while maintaining maximalist positions that it knows Ukraine can't accept, so that it can try to frame the war's continuation as being the fault of the defender.

So, rather than contradict any of those assessments, we're going to treat today's discussion as more of a thought exercise and work our way backward from an unlikely conclusion. If, hypothetically, Vladimir Putin were to surprise us all and engage in a genuine effort to reach a ceasefire deal, then why would he make that choice?

First, we'll answer that question in the abstract and present a test hypothesis, if you will, that we can compare against as the episode goes on.

If Putin were to encounter some new wartime complications, and that wartime complication were to substantively shift his thinking on a ceasefire, then it probably wouldn't have much to do with troop losses.

According to the latest estimates by British Intelligence, presented by the Chief of the UK's Defence Staff last Friday, more than half a million Russian troops have been killed in Ukraine since 2022, along with another million estimated to be wounded, captured or missing.

Clearly, at this stage of the war, those sorts of losses just are not a deterrence for the leadership in Moscow.

And nor are Russia's equipment losses. In fact, outside analysts widely agree that Russia sees itself in a position of temporary strength in which it can outproduce Ukraine and its Western backers for a limited time.

Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian factories do matter, but right now they matter at the margins, cutting into Russia's ability to produce specific high-tech equipment and knocking a percentage point or two off the number of munitions or drones that Russia can produce.

Similarly, Ukraine's strikes against oil refineries and fuel infrastructure have massively complicated Russian logistics, but not enough to paralyze Moscow on the front lines. Instead, the complications that would really matter to Putin and his inner circle are the ones that would obstruct the path to victory that Moscow is counting on.

Speaking in broad strokes, Moscow believes that it can gain a decisive edge over the next few months through a combination of long-range strikes to cripple Ukraine on the home front, plus a consistent forward push on the front lines that will ultimately dismantle Ukraine's fortress belt.

All the while, Russia will maintain the base level of international tolerance that it relies on from the international community. Sanctions and tough talk, but no direct kinetic escalation from the nations of NATO, while countries like China, India and the ex-Soviet sphere continue to work with Russia overtly or under the table.

Right now, Russia's theory of victory seems to rest on the idea that, under current conditions, Moscow can force Kyiv to crack under sheer pressure while it continues to endure the painful, but non-fatal, costs of war that Kyiv can impose.

COMPLICATING THE PLAN So if that's the general path to victory that Putin's counting on, then our next step is to zoom out and ask the question: How are Ukraine, NATO and anybody else managing to get in the way?

The first set of major complications for Putin comes from the front lines near Lyman, where Ukrainian forces and Russian war bloggers have each started to acknowledge a serious turn of the tide at the local level.

These are operations that Ukraine-aligned sources have been hinting at for months now, insisting that they couldn't share details due to operational security, but strongly implying that the situation near Lyman was far better for Ukraine than it appeared.

Now the veil has finally been lifted, with conflict monitors confirming that Ukraine has liberated upwards of 200 square kilometres over the past several months.

The areas that Ukraine has recaptured were incredibly costly for Russia to take in the first place, and given Russia's very slow pace of advance this year, the new Lyman counteroffensive will bring the territory exchanged between the two sides much closer to net zero.

Even more important, however, was the value of Lyman and the surrounding area from a tactical perspective.

This area was immensely important for Russia to use as a staging ground to place pressure, cut off supplies, and support an offensive against arguably the most important city in Ukraine's fortress belt, Slovyansk.

Now, with Ukraine's counteroffensive proving to be so successful, Russia will face immense difficulty in staging an attack on Slovyansk this winter. That doesn't mean that Slovyansk is totally safe.

In fact, Ukraine is now escalating its mandatory evacuation of families in the city and surrounding neighbourhoods due to Russia's increasingly frequent use of longer range drones and glide bombs. But actually, getting troops anywhere near the city will be exceedingly difficult without the use of that recaptured territory.

That, in turn, means that Moscow is looking at a much longer timeline than previously expected, before a takeover of the fortress belt is even a possibility.

Under current conditions, Russia would likely have to wait until it can totally capture the city of Kostiantynivka, where Russian troops have been fighting for nearly 11 months now and where Ukrainian forces are still in control of some territory, despite Russia's claims to the contrary.

Kostiantynivka is the southernmost city of the fortress belt, and once the city does fall, Russia won't be able to push westward and flank the next city because of Ukraine's robust network of fallback defences on the city's western edge. Russia also can't rely on a pincer-style attack from the north, which the territory near Lyman would have enabled.

Russia's only options are to either repeat the battle of Kostiantynivka three more times, in cities that will be even better defended than Kostiantynivka was, or wait for enough new troops to be conscripted that Russia could try an overwhelming wave assault against Slovyansk.

Either way, that's going to take far longer than Putin was probably expecting, based on his general's claims that there was nothing to worry about near Lyman, and that Kostiantynivka had already been captured. Then there are new indicators that Russia's economy may be facing significantly greater strain than previously thought.

Take a recent interview on Russian state media, where Putin's international development envoy, Boris Titov, was unusually candid about the risks that lie ahead.

In conversation with the business-focused outlet RBC, Titov warned that Russia's current economic imbalance, where its military-industrial complex is prioritised above all else, risked spiralling out of control with disastrous repercussions. Quoting Titov, "This is not an economy at all.

It's kind of a 'berserk' mode that can only exist for a very limited time, and the necessity of which should be considered very carefully." Nor was Titov the only Russian official to voice similar concerns.

In August, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyan, a relatively well-liked politician in Russia and one who's usually named on the shortlist of people who might take over for Putin one day, warned that, quote, "killing a normal economy is equivalent to killing the whole country." Andrei Klepak, formerly the chief economist at Russia's Development Bank, was fired in

August after issuing a similar warning, quote, "We will not win the competition in this war of attrition.

We have the illusion that everything there in Ukraine will collapse.

It has not collapsed and will not collapse. Our costs are mounting." End quote. Further from the spotlight, but perhaps most important of all, Russian central bank head Elvira Nabolina recently decided against interest rate cuts, after cutting rates 10 times in the last year and a half.

Nabolina, by most accounts, seems to be a truly excellent economist trying to complete an impossible task: keeping Russia afloat by any means necessary. She's known to be under immense pressure from Putin to make whatever economic decisions will make this war easier to win.

For her to finally be getting in the way, and for Russia's central bank to start taking measures to avoid serious inflation and tightened monetary policy, would suggest that even Putin now accepts there's reason to be concerned.

Like the Lyman counter-offensive, it's not the immediate losses that matter to Putin, whether it's the inflation, the imbalance in Russia's domestic economy, or even the threat that Russian finances might go berserk in the near future.

The real threat is that economic catastrophe might come sooner than Russian victory, and with Russia having to anticipate a more protracted offensive against the fortress belt, that's just more time for the catastrophe to arrive.

Beyond Russia's internal troubles, there have also been increasing signs of breakdown in the international permission structure that Russia relies on.

Perhaps the most overt signal within the last few weeks came from the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who met personally with Vladimir Putin on the sidelines at a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Kyrgyzstan.

During those talks, Modi told Putin outright that it's time to end the war in Ukraine, quoting here, "We need to move from endless war to an end to this war, to a cessation of hostilities, and we will need to move precisely in this direction." It wasn't the first time that Modi's called for peace in Ukraine, but a public statement to Putin's face at such a

High-profile event was a new level of pressure, especially from a nation, in India, that's been a critical economic lifeline for Russia.

Then, just a few days ago, Modi issued the same call to Putin again at the BRIC summit in New Delhi.

Those remarks from Modi came on the heels of a similarly sharp rebuke a few weeks prior from the leader of Kazakhstan, Qasem Jamat Tokayev. Speaking to Putin in a face-to-face summit on the 25th of July, Tokayev told Putin, despite his status as the leader of an ex-Soviet state that economically depends on Russia, that the war should be frozen.

As Tokayev told Putin, "It is a shame.

Young people are dying. All this has to be stopped." And according to the President of Finland, Alexander Stubb, speaking to journalist Paul Ronzheimer in late August, Russia is also under pressure from China.

By Stubb's telling, China has been "very clear" with Russia that Moscow is simply not allowed to escalate to the use of nuclear weapons, one of the few tools left at Russia's disposal to really shift the balance of this war on the frontlines.

Taken together, pressure from India, China, and a key member of the ex-Soviet bloc may suggest to Putin that the patience of his critical allies is running out.

And we could go on to name all the other new complications that don't just impose costs on Russia, but actively, directly interrupt the logic that Russia was relying on to try and justify continuing the war through 2027.

There's the reaction among ordinary Russians when news of upcoming mobilization started to circulate, as over 113,000 people crossed into Georgian territory in the span of a single week, so many that the Georgian housing market saw a surge in home prices because of the new demand.

In other words, Russians provided a very clear signal that if Moscow tries a mass mobilization, the public won't acquiesce quietly.

There was the European Union decision on 11 September to provide Ukraine with loans and shipments to procure desperately needed Patriot missile interceptors, including with direct transfers from EU member states, raising the real possibility that Ukraine could at least partially defend itself from ballistic missile attacks this winter.

Thus, Ukraine becomes more resilient, and a weapon that Russia may have counted on to break Kyiv's will or force Zelensky to panic will be considerably less effective than anticipated.

We've said it before, we should say it again: even with all these pressure factors starting to stack up against Russia, directly interfering with Russia's best path to victory, it's still, more likely than not, that Putin will commit to this war through the winter and the springtime, at a minimum.

And yet, we'd be remiss not to mention one final complicating factor: Russia's State Duma elections, scheduled to run from this Friday through to Sunday.

The outcome of the election is not in doubt: Vladimir Putin's United Party will surge to victory, the sole party protesting the war in Ukraine has been barred from participation, and the State Duma will continue to rubber-stamp Putin's favoured policies.

But, according to suggestions from named and unnamed Ukrainian, American, and European officials, the elections may still force Putin to the negotiating table.

The elections are expected to be an informal barometer, to show the Russian people's tolerance, or lack thereof, for Putin's leadership, with high or low turnout, votes for certain regional candidates, and other metrics interpreted by the Kremlin as positive or negative signs.

That was the thinking that purportedly sent US envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to both Moscow and Kyiv over the last several weeks.

While in Moscow, the two envoys reportedly got an earful from Vladimir Putin himself, who rattled off wildly inaccurate claims about supposed Russian victories on the front lines, and then pivoted into a tirade that many ex-diplomats are familiar with, an extended, and apparently mind-numbingly boring explanation of Russia's historical justifications for its

Ukraine invasion.

In Kyiv, meanwhile, Kushner and Witkoff expressed that America believes Russia will be willing to negotiate after the State Duma elections, and after that visit, France, Germany, and Britain agreed to work with Ukraine to lay out a new set of negotiating conditions ahead of a period of crisis.

Thus, Russia will be able to negotiate with Ukraine, even if it's just for a short period of time.

We should emphasize, of course, that in the past, America's Trump administration has seemed highly preferential to Russia's negotiating positions. But after this last round of discussions, Kyiv and its European counterparts seem to be working from a state of guarded optimism, which is a hell of a lot better than anything we've seen recently.

And so, as we conclude today's episode, we've got to temper that sense of optimism one more time.

Our goal today isn't to claim that a Russia-Ukraine peace is imminent, or anywhere close, but instead to take the time and point out the ways that Moscow's situation has grown more complex in ways that directly get in the way of Putin's plans for the next several months.

In Ukraine, Russian troops continue to push forward, and just days ago a Russian drone strike appeared to target trains carrying British ex-Premier Boris Johnson and former CIA Director David Petraeus as they moved through Western Ukraine. As of now, Putin continues to pursue his invasion with all the force he can muster.

We can only hope that these new complications for Russia's war machine, and the new signs of potential peace talks on the horizon, are a real signal cutting through all the noise. Thank you for watching.