Un accord en Ukraine est-il possible ?

by Eric Ciaramella, Michael Kofman, Aaron David Miller, Alexandra Prokopenko, and Andrew S. Weiss

Published on February 27, 2025

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On this week’s episode of Carnegie Connects, Aaron David Miller spoke with Carnegie experts Eric Ciaramella, Michael Kofman, Alexandra Prokopenko, and Andrew Weiss on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They discussed battlefield conditions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s domestic challenges, the Russian economy, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Excerpts from their conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity, are below. 

Watch their full discussion here.

Aaron David Miller: If you were briefing [Trump administration officials], what do they need to know about Putin’s and Zelensky’s strategies and mindset as we enter the fourth year of the war?

Andrew Weiss: From my standpoint, the administration needs to understand that there are two big drivers of Russian actions in Ukraine.

At the time the war began, Putin was being an opportunist and really thought that he could replicate the Taliban’s success and engineer a takeover of Ukraine where the government would be decapitated, the military wouldn’t fight, and the world would have to adjust to new facts on the ground. That clearly didn’t happen. And since then, the Russians haven’t totally given up on those goals. But in the meantime, they’ve been trying to grind down Ukraine and wait out the United States and our Western partners.

And there’s been a sense of confidence on the Russian side for the past twelve-plus months that things are cutting their way. There’s been political transformation in the United States. There’s been questions of whether the war is sustainable for the United States and Europe, practically, in terms of the kinds of unbelievable military support we’ve provided to the Ukrainians, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. And there’s dynamics on the ground, where Russia, just by leveraging mass and singularity of purpose, has been able to show that time is not necessarily on Ukraine’s side.

Eric Ciaramella: On the Ukrainian side, Zelensky and the Ukrainian people are in a really difficult position. Things have not been trending in their favor for the past year and a half. It’s been a tremendously costly defense against Russia’s continued offensives in eastern and southern Ukraine. Ukrainians are exhausted. There are very difficult challenges related to manpower and recruiting for the military. So there is this desire for a change.

I think initially many Ukrainians welcomed the election of Trump as this kind of X factor to shake things up and shuffle the deck. [They hoped] that maybe Trump would put Putin on his back foot and turn the tables so that Ukraine could find a pathway to this just and lasting peace that it’s been in search of. But the past thirty days have seen radical changes that have largely been to Ukraine’s detriment, in terms of initiating this U.S.-Russia dialog without Ukraine at the table.

From a from a near-term perspective, Zelensky, Ukrainian officials, and the Ukrainian parliament are looking for a seat at the table. They don’t want the terms of Ukraine’s future security, prosperity, and democracy to be negotiated over their heads.

There is also the issue of keeping up Western support for Ukraine. This means navigating this very delicate sort of tightrope exercise with the Trump administration to maintain this at least minimal level of American military support, intelligence support, everything like that to continue to sustain Ukrainian operations. This puts Zelensky in a very difficult position of having to defend himself against these unwarranted personal attacks by Trump—calling him a dictator and saying he started the war and so on—while not going so far as to alienate Trump to the point that the White House just says, “We’re cutting it off, and you’re on your own.”

So despite all of this rhetoric, there has been a continuation of American military support to Ukraine. But it’s on a knife’s edge.

Then we get to the longer-term picture, and that’s where we come up with the same issues that have bedeviled these conversations since the first days of the war: What will the future security arrangements for Ukraine be, such that it’s capable of defending itself and deterring against a repeat Russian attack? I haven’t seen any new ideas coming out of the Trump administration that would lay out this pathway to a security framework that could give Ukrainians the confidence to enter into a ceasefire, knowing that it’s not a recipe to allow Russia to rearm and prepare for another attack [a few] years down the road.

Andrew Weiss: It’s really easy to telescope everything onto the Ukraine-Russia dynamic. But I do think there is a bigger game going on in the mind of Putin, which is trying to plant a lasting wedge between the United States and Ukraine, trying to plant a lasting wedge between the United States and Europe, and then trying to push the United States out of Europe entirely, as the United States focuses or reprioritizes on other issues in the Indo-Pacific. So I think it’s important to see that Russia’s policies are operating on two levels, as we focus on what’s going on in Ukraine in the here and now.

Aaron David Miller: How would you describe the battlefield reality at the moment?

Michael Kofman: I was there about a week ago, and the situation I saw remains a very difficult one, but it’s not dire. It’s surprisingly not as bad as things look like they might be if you were observing the trends and the trajectory of the war in the fall. There’s a couple of reasons for that.

Ukraine has held the last three months, and the Russian offense momentum has slowed down. Part of that is just plain weather. Part of that is Russian forces have been reconstituting in terms of materiel—they lost a lot of equipment fighting over the fall. And part of it is that Ukraine has gotten better at adapting tactically on the ground to the way the Russian military has been attacking.

I suspect Russia’s rather disappointed because despite the fact that they retain a very significant advantage in materiel and manpower, they’ve not been able to turn those advantages into big gains on the battlefield. They can’t attain operationally significant breakthroughs the way that they’ve been fighting. On the other hand, their approach is also one that doesn’t lead too much toward exhaustion, meaning they can sustain a conveyor belt of men that they’re throwing onto the battlefield. And even though they’re taking high levels of casualties, Ukraine is too.

It is a war of attrition. It’s not a great descriptor, but I think it helps for a lot of folks to understand that it’s not principally so much a war of terrain. Territorial aims are at least part of Russian minimal war aims, but they are at best lagging indicators. It’s much more a question of what will happen first: Will the Russian offensive momentum be exhausted and will Ukraine stabilize the front line? Or will Russia keep grinding on—sometimes slower, sometimes faster?

So far, Ukraine has proven a lot more resilient and has beaten the more pessimistic expectations. Right now, from my point of view, Ukraine is not facing a collapse of the front line, but it hasn’t stabilized it either. It’s way too early to get cheery and say that because the Russian gains have petered out these last few months, things have really turned around.

I think one of the big challenges for Ukraine is that it ultimately depends on external support. So does Russia, but much more so Ukraine, and much more so right now. And I think it faces great uncertainty, particularly after the spring. It’s also unclear that the Trump administration is going to sustain the assistance that was paid for by the Biden administration that’s scheduled to be shipped over the course of this year. That’s a policy decision for them to make, along with any additional assistance they provide.

So although you could argue that Ukrainian forces are exhausted and Ukraine does need a truce, perhaps ideally this year, it is not in such a desperate position that it needs to urgently negotiate from a position of weakness or just accept any deal. That’s not what the front line—at least what I saw on the front line—will lead you to believe.

Aaron David Miller: How has the economy factored into how the Russian people perceive the war?

Alexandra Prokopenko: [There have been] massive payouts to soldiers, and the broader surge in wages during the past two years has created a paradox. So while economic inequality has deepened, many Russians feel that their standards of living improved. Previously, they had nothing, and now they can change cars, they can pay their loans, or they can afford mortgages.

And surveys indicate growing perceptions of a favorable distribution of wealth within the country. Forty percent of respondents link their well-being to state wealth distribution rather than freedom, human rights, [etc]. All these improvements are temporary, and inflation is already eroding people’s well-being.

But this feeling could cement a dangerous narrative among society: wartime will be associated among people with prosperity and economic growth. And peace could be linked to decline and humiliation. And this creates a quite challenging political environment within the country.

Speaking about elites, the situation here is that no one is happy with what’s going on. Sanctions have left them in a sort of institutional vacuum. Previously, they had maybe not a safe haven, but some place they could go. Now they are locked within Russia, and they are adjusting to the situation, but they don’t have any kind of agency to act against Putin. They have put a lot of their hopes on Trump, as an external power who could change the situation.

Aaron David Miller: I spent the better part of my career in and around negotiations, usually not succeeding. They require urgency. They require two willing parties. They require mediation. They require a realistic outcome that meets the needs and requirements of each side. Is anything like that remotely possible in the next year?

Eric Ciaramella: Remotely possible? Yes. I think in theory there is a broad deal that can be reached. But it depends on the United States taking a much more coherent position in order to strengthen its and the West’s and Ukraine’s negotiating leverage vis-à-vis Russia.

And that means the United States committing in some more serious way to have Ukraine’s back militarily going forward. [It also means] to stop the back-and-forth with Europe that’s been really unproductive and get serious about if it’s going to renegotiate the balance of responsibility in NATO and for European security—to do this in a more coherent fashion that includes Ukraine. And have a better sense of what Europe is willing to put up along what timeline to guarantee some sort of peace. And have those conversations behind closed doors. And to provide Ukraine with some sense of what the postwar security architecture is going to look like so that they don’t feel like they’re going to be left on their own.

I think if those ingredients can be put into place and there’s some discipline and a little bit of patience on the American side, I do think that, with Trump’s willingness to engage personally with Putin, there is some possibility that you could you could land the plane and at least get some sort of cessation of hostilities with a security guarantee framework that Ukraine and the West work out, maybe that Russia just begrudgingly is forced to accept because it’s a fait accompli.

I don’t think that you’re going to get some sort of grand peace treaty where all the issues are resolved. These issues are too big and the positions are too mutually exclusive to get to anything like that.

Andrew Weiss: I think that the real pillars of U.S. foreign policy are in a state of transformation and flux with this new administration. And our former colleague and boss Bill Burns always said that our alliances are America’s greatest force multiplier. The durability of those alliances right now is being tested.

Much of the U.S. role, as leader of the system that emerged after ’89, has depended on some level of enlightened self-interest. And if everything is going to turn into a bilateral tussle and battle of wills, including with countries that are formidable (like Russia and China), it’s going to be hard to bind others to a system the United States leads. I think we’re going to see a lot more people straying. Part of the benefit of the [Ukraine] coalition that was created by President Biden was that we were corralling various countries, some of whom would have done things differently. So if we want to keep the allies that we’ve got and want to keep the Ukrainians basically aligned with us, it’s going to require a certain amount of give and take—we’re not going to get everything we want.

Use the player below to listen to the whole conversation, or watch it on YouTube.

Un accord en Ukraine est-il possible ?