The Peace Deal Amounts To A De-facto Russian Surrender, And Prophecies The War’s Imminent End

When a conflict is in its twilight hours, its final death throes often manifest as an exponentially rapid alteration in at least one of its combatant’s positions, be they military or diplomatic. In the case of the largest and bloodiest war continental Europe has seen since the Second World War, we can now see clear evidence of the latter - and not from the Ukrainian camp. The culminating peace proposals from a weekend of breakneck cross-Atlantic detente-by-press-communique will have been shocking to many observers and proponents of the Ukrainian struggle, but they may well herald an imminent end to the conflict. 

It’s well known that, even though Russia is certainly advancing, such is the ferocity and depth of Ukrainian defences that the frontline has moved at a near glacial pace. Since March 2024, Russia has gained only 1% of Ukraine’s total landmass, yet to get there, Putin’s forces have expended more than 4,100 of their armoured vehicles and over 1,800 of their ever-aging tanks. Russia’s casualty counts are now well into seven figures.

However, nearly never highlighted in the press are the key signs of Putin’s own increasing need and desperation to cease fighting. On the morning of the Alaska Summit, Putin travelled to the remote Russian city of Magadan to lay flowers at a specifically joint American-Soviet fighter pilot memorial - no doubt as grand gesture towards his hosts. Far from an aggrandising relaunch onto the world stage, he had to then be the one to travel cap-in-hand back from his exile from his interpretation of the civilised world, to a backdrop of the very same world-leading hardware that is kept on standby with the sole purpose of being ready to destroy his country. He would have considered this a stomach-churning humiliation. It should be no surprise that such acts are now necessary. On the battlefield, it’s estimated that, maintaining current intensity of fighting, it would take Russian forces another four years and the deaths of a further two million of their own just to conquer the ‘fortress belt’ which makes up the marginally remaining unoccupied areas of Donetsk and Luhansk. On the home front, Putin faces widespread domestic fuel shortages triggered by intensifying air strikes on its predominantly southwestern-centric refinery sector, an unfolding $100 billion debt timebomb crisis in both the public and private sectors, and rare pockets of open rebellion in the streets. Whilst we’ve seen Moscow back away from terms that they have considered too unfavourable before, there can now be no doubt that Putin needs some part of the Ukrainian calculation to change significantly soon. 

This all brings us to last weekend. Though news of the existence of a newly developed US plan to end the war first began to trickle into news cycles as early as Tuesday 18th November, leaks of the first concrete details of a 28 point peace proposal - broadly accepted as having resulted from extensive dialogue between Washington and Moscow, proliferated throughout western mainstream media late into the following evening.

By Friday morning, the full text had been obtained and published by outlets across the world. Whilst Kyiv and many European capitals initially recoiled in horror at the idea of a pro-Russian Trumpian diktat, both their counterproposals - responsively leaked in full by Sunday evening, and what’s currently understood to be the jointly reconciled product of both sets of plans, closely resemble the White House’s original position.

If the knowledge that, at the very least, the US’s original 28 point plan was jointly thrashed out with the Russian negotiating team wasn’t enough to prove that Putin is willing to make such concessions for an offramp to a war he’s very much taken ownership of, then the fact that top Kremlin aides have been quoted on the record as describing it as much should cement the fact that there has been a remarkable shift in Moscow’s messaging. Any signs to the contrary from Putin here on in will be pure strategic sabre-rattling.

Break what’s considered to be the current peace deal up into its constituent parts, and it becomes clear just how much Russia has conceded from their original positions.

The original 28 point plan opened with a pledge for Russia to ‘confirm’ Ukraine’s sovereignty. It’s understood that this has since been redrafted to ‘reconfirm’ - asserting that Ukraine has had the right to be a sovereign nation ever since it broke free of its union republics standing within the Soviet Union. Either term represents a major concession on Russia’s part, as the notion of Ukraine’s illegitimacy in exiting Russia has been central to Putin’s narrative of justification for invasion. Such a notion flies in the face of Aleksandr Dugin’s The Foundations of Geopolitics - the coffee-table-read-come-playbook adopted by Putin’s cabal as near foreign policy gospel for how Russia should achieve reestablishment of its Soviet-era spheres of influence, especially as it’s clear that Putin’s original desired outcome was, at the very least, the installation of a Russo-centric puppet government facilitated by total surrender.

Further to this, it’s proposed that Russia will agree to not invade any nation that it shares land borders with. Considering that respective parties are only bound by the terms until their adversary breaks them, for as long as Ukraine and NATO keep up their end of the bargain then this essentially amounts to a complete encirclement of Russian territorial ambition - one of the very reasons Putin launched the war in the first place, and a large step backwards for a Dugin-style resurgence. 

Amongst the most contentious of proposals is the limiting of Ukraine’s army to a cap of 800,000 men in peace time, although we only know for certain that Russia accepts terms of 600,000. Russia’s previous position on this in the 2022 Istanbul negotiations was just 85,000, and Ukraine was openly willing to settle for a standing army of 250,000. Currently, Ukraine is using approximately 880,000 troops to stave off Putin’s all out assault. In a peacetime capacity, it is unlikely (and would likely be unsustainable) for Ukraine to maintain an standing perpetually active army of much larger than 600,000 - 800,000 anyway, with numbers of reservists unlikely to be restricted by the terms. Should hostilities return, there are few reasons why such a term would limit an almost return to the same warfighting output Ukraine is currently achieving.

Complicating this, however, is that Russia has made it clear that it’s not yet willing to accept NATO boots on the ground within Ukraine. Considering, though, that Turkey, Hungary and the current US leadership are among the very least of member states who would currently object to a Ukrainian application regardless of whether they’re treaty-bound to, such a clause therefore only serves to help Russian state broadcasts sell the success of Putin’s failed invasion to their constituent audiences. What is far more interesting is that, as a counterbalancing provision, Russia has offered to codify NATO’s right to stage coalition aircraft in Poland. In reality, the NATO clauses amount to the first binding recognition from Moscow of the accession of former eastern bloc states and union republics into NATO, but a legitimisation of Sweden and Finland’s entry into the bloc - which has brought NATO to 839 more miles of its own direct borders. An acknowledgment of Poland as a formal NATO staging round eviscerates Putin’s pre-war fabrication of a great post-cold war betrayal of a fictional pledge for NATO to not stop a foot eastwards from the suburbs of Berlin. Furthermore, EU membership would, in all practicality, effectively be a backdoor to within the collective western defence umbrella anyway. 

Which brings the focus to one of the most surprisingly radical pivots to have come out of Russia - that, despite the imminent prospect of EU membership broadly acting as a pretext for Russia’s initial and ongoing 2014 hostilities in the first place, Moscow is now willing to accept its immediate entry into the bloc as part of the price of peace. Russia too, however, will be reintegrated into the global economy, though it's worth mentioning that even the most generous versions of this clause briefed out still caveat that each of the thousands of individual sanctions will only be lifted on a ‘case by case’ basis. It’s worth considering that the idea of a sudden glut of global trade with Russia depends on such trade even being desirable with the potential negative PR connotations such as relationship could bring onto their brands. It’s also worth bearing in mind that practically any country or corporations that would want to trade with a post-war Russia never ceased. I’ve previously reported in this publication that European and NATO countries spent over $267 billion on Russian hydrocarbons in the first two years of the war alone - compared to just $180 billion from China and $93 billion from India. Just within this period, almost every EU nation sent more money directly to Russia’s treasury in exchange for its state-supplied oil and gas than the sum financial total of aid they’ve sent to Ukraine to date. In the industries that matter, Russia was never isolated from the global economy in the first place.

Much of the rest of the proposals call for Ukraine to commit to nuclear non-proliferation in line with normative UN non-proliferation agreements, for the adoption of the EU’s regulations on provisions for domestic minority ethnic groups, and the denazification of Ukrainian civil society - all just plays to chime with Russian domestic audiences conditioned to believe that these were all factors in launching the war. Their inclusion, pragmatically, is meaningless to Ukraine and the West. Ukraine is already party to the NPT, and, if joining the EU anyway, any assurances of minority rights and deradicalisation agendas would already be factored into Ukraine’s membership.

All of this being said, however, there are still two major sticking points.

Firstly, Russia is ultimately being rewarded with not just almost the entirety of the two puppet breakaway states of Donetsk and Luhansk that it’s claimed to be defending the sovereignty of since 2014, but also the majority of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson - along with the formalisation of its prior annexation of Crimea. Secondly, even under the most generous of proposals, there will be no immediate provision for holding a single person accountable for the countless atrocities inflicted upon Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops, or even for the invasion itself. These atrocities, including the genocide of Bucha where it has been evidenced that many of the 501 civilian victims were bound and executed - with girls as young as 14 raped, and the deliberate bombing of civilian air raid shelters as part of Russia’s siege of Mariupol for which we may never know the true death toll, should not be forgotten. 

The reality is, however, that these matters will simply hold little weight in any peace discussions. No aggressor is ever likely going to willingly hand over its own indicted war criminals unless faced with a situation of utter capitulation. A nuclear armed and Beijing-backed Russia will never get there, especially as one of the only conclusively indicted individuals is Putin himself. Likewise, it seems so utterly unlikely that the dynamics of the current frontlines will shift significantly enough to bring about tangible prospects of such a capitulation.

In an extraordinary hearing of the UK’s foreign affairs select committee on Tuesday afternoon, Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, the head of Ukraine’s EU integration committee, outlined that the conflict had been a war of subjugation and castigation of her nation and its people from the start. As the world’s alleged second superpower, coming away from such a conflict with your comparably minuscule adversary maintaining full sovereign control of 80% of its original landmass and achieving full newfound integration into a western sphere of allies is anything but a success. All witnesses agreed that what Putin is afraid of most is a united Europe and transatlantic cooperation. His current plea bargain enshrines as much.

Regardless of rhetorical bluster, what Putin is offering has radically and increasingly rapidly changed, and is finally, for some, reaching the threshold of becoming pragmatically palatable. It’s a terrible world we live in where a country is allowed to simply walk away from waging total conflict - indiscriminately victimising Ukrainian civilians in some of the worst ways imaginable, but this may well be the closest we come to a Russian surrender.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Presidential Executive Office of Russia (kremlin.ru)

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