Watch any single round of the so-called peace talks and you will recognize it as the next showing of a film you have already seen. The same delegations file into the same hall. The same demands are read from the same pages. The same word, “negotiations,” is pronounced with the same gravity, and at the end nothing has moved an inch closer to peace. It is Groundhog Day staged with cameras and translators. The Turkish hosts pronounce a meeting “not negative,” which seems to mean only that there was no fistfight, and the world is invited to take this as progress. I want to argue something blunter than the diplomatic vocabulary allows: these talks are not a road to peace that keeps hitting potholes. They are a fraud by design. You cannot negotiate an end to a war while you are busy waging it, and you cannot find a compromise with a party whose only real demand is that the other party cease to exist.
The root cause is Ukraine itself
Everything turns on a phrase Moscow repeats like a liturgy: the war must end by “eliminating its root causes.” It sounds technical, almost reasonable, the kind of language a mediator might welcome. But you only have to ask what the root cause actually is. In the Kremlin’s own worldview, stated openly and repeatedly, the root cause of this war is the existence of an independent Ukrainian state. That is not my inference; it is the logic of every speech, every propaganda broadcast, and the bare fact of an invasion that no Ukrainian action provoked. The euphemisms confirm it. “Denazification” means the destruction of Ukraine’s political existence. “Demilitarization” means the dismantling of its army, the very thing keeping it alive. When you decode the demands, you get a settlement that is comprehensive and permanent only in the sense that a grave is permanent.
And notice the tell buried in the rhetoric. The same propaganda machine insists this war is a continuation of the Second World War, a fresh battle against Nazism. Apply the machine’s own logic to that claim. You do not negotiate with Nazism. You do not sit across a table from it and split the difference. You destroy it. By framing Ukraine as the new Reich, Moscow is announcing, in language meant to sound heroic, that it intends not a deal but an annihilation. So when the Kremlin says it wants talks “without preconditions,” it is lying twice over, because “eliminate the root causes” is itself the largest precondition imaginable: the disappearance of the country sitting opposite. To return to the negotiating table on those terms is not to discuss peace. It is to discuss the precise wording of a full and final capitulation.
Two frameworks that cannot meet
Strip away the noise and you find two incompatible understandings of what talks are even for. One framework, the one held by Ukraine and by Europe, says you stop the shooting first. A ceasefire in the air, on land, and at sea, for thirty days, prisoners exchanged, and only then, in the silence where guns are not firing, do diplomats and leaders begin to talk about the hard questions. This is simply how serious negotiation works. The fighting is paused so that the situation stops changing underneath the negotiators’ feet, so that no one is being killed while others sit and bargain over their fate. It is the normal, sane sequence: silence, then words.
The other framework belongs to Moscow, and it is the exact inverse: keep fighting, and talk at the same time. This is not a stylistic preference. It is the entire point. Negotiating during active war is a contradiction, because every day the battlefield shifts and dissolves whatever was agreed the day before. We have seen this before. In 2022 the early Istanbul track collapsed precisely because you cannot hold a war and a peace process in the same hands. The flagship of the Black Sea fleet was sunk; the massacre at Bucha was uncovered; the emotional and moral ground moved so violently that any tentative understandings became unthinkable. You simply cannot keep a communiqué alive while atrocities are being discovered in real time. Moscow learned the wrong lesson from that collapse. It concluded not that war and talks are incompatible, but that the incompatibility is useful, that a permanent half-finished “process” is the perfect cover under which to keep killing. For a regime like this, negotiations are water for a fish. They are the medium in which the aggression swims.
The talks as camouflage
If you doubt that the process is camouflage, look at what happens to the killing once the negotiation mania begins. It does not slow. It intensifies. Over roughly half a year of these on-and-off “peace” overtures, the strikes on peaceful cities sharply increased, the meat-grinder assaults grew heavier, and civilian casualties rose. The pattern repeats at the smallest scale, too: a phone call produces a grand announcement of a halt to strikes on energy and infrastructure, and within hours of the announcement the monitoring channels light up with fresh attacks on exactly those targets. An order is “immediately given to the military,” and Ukrainians immediately feel that order in the form of air-raid sirens. This is not a process that occasionally fails to prevent violence. It is a process whose function is to provide a respectable backdrop for violence, to let the aggressor pose as a peacemaker while the bombs keep falling. The negotiations are the smokescreen; the war is what the smoke conceals.
And whom is the smoke for? Not for the parties at the table, who know exactly what is happening. The performance has a single, specific audience: one spectator across the ocean, whose favor everyone is afraid to lose. Ukraine attends because falling out badly with that one man could mean the end of aid and the cutting of intelligence sharing. Moscow attends because the appearance of “talking” lets it deflect new sanctions, postpone the consequences, and whisper to the world: why punish me, I am negotiating? So the whole spectacle is staged for an audience of one, and both delegations endure it not because they expect a signature but because neither can afford to be seen walking away.
The casting tells you everything about Moscow’s sincerity. To a meeting supposedly deciding the fate of a nation, the Kremlin sends a figure of essentially zero political weight, someone nowhere near the actual decision-maker, a man who answers a list of hundreds of abducted Ukrainian children with a sneer about not putting on shows for sentimental old European ladies. You do not send a man like that to sign a historic peace. You send him to stall, to insult, to run out the clock. And then comes the demand that Ukraine replace its president before anything can be signed, delivered through a ministry official, as if the aggressor had the standing to dictate to its victim whom to elect. Read together, the empty envoy and the demand for a change of leadership send one unmistakable signal: there will be no agreement, because an agreement was never the goal. The goal is to mislead, to delay, and to keep the war going behind the curtain.
The rabbit and the predator
This is why the comforting slogan of “peace through strength” misfires when applied here. The slogan assumes a rational opponent who, faced with sufficient pressure, will calculate that stopping is in his interest. But you cannot negotiate your way to safety with a creature whose fixed intention is to consume you. A rabbit cannot strike a bargain with the predator that wants to eat it; there is no point on the menu where the predator agrees the rabbit may keep living, because the rabbit’s continued life is the very thing the predator has come to end. That is the structural impossibility I keep returning to. It is not that Moscow is a hard bargainer, or that the right inducement has not yet been found. It is that the thing being demanded, the end of Ukraine, is the one thing Ukraine cannot concede and still be Ukraine. Demands to halt mobilization, to stop Western arms, to dissolve alliances, to abandon a NATO aspiration written into the constitution, to withdraw from land that has never been occupied, are not opening positions in a haggle. They add up to disarmament before the talking even starts, which is to say, to capitulation. There is no overlap between the two sides’ positions, no zone of possible agreement, because one side’s bottom line is the other side’s extinction.
Why the illusion is dangerous
I am, for the record, a man who wants peace. I would accept even a bad peace, even a humiliating one, because the lives of ordinary people weigh more than pride or territory. So this is not the position of a person who relishes war. It is the position of a person who has looked hard at the predator and concluded that even the shameful peace is not on offer, because the predator has no intention of stopping. And that conclusion matters, because the opposite illusion is not harmless. It does real damage.
When people are told that peace is five minutes away, that we are practically at the signing, the questions follow naturally and corrosively: then why keep sending weapons? Why keep sending money? Why should anyone keep fighting and dying, when surely it is nearly over? The illusion eats away at the support Ukraine needs to survive, and it demoralizes the soldiers who must hold the line, because there are few things more bitter than the fear of dying in the last five minutes of a war that everyone has been told is ending. The peace fantasy, in other words, is a weapon that fires backward. It disarms the side defending itself.
The real outcome of this war will not be written at any negotiating table. It will be decided on the battlefield and in the slow construction of a European security architecture, the armed resolve of countries that have stopped pretending the predator can be charmed. The honest task, then, is not to chase the next round of theatrical talks but to refuse the illusion they manufacture, to keep arming and supporting the side fighting for its existence, and to say plainly what the diplomatic vocabulary is designed to obscure: that this is not a negotiation, that it cannot become one, and that the only language the predator has ever respected is strength that does not flinch.