Ukraine and its Western backers have precious little common ground with Russia. Yet all the key players seem to agree on one critical issue: the war in Ukraine will end in negotiations. As Russian President Vladimir Putin told the conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson in a recent interview: “We are willing to negotiate.” A spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, while casting doubt on Putin's sincerity, retorted in a statement that “both we and President Zelenskyy have said numerous times that we believe this war will end through negotiations.” The absence of decisive battlefield outcomes over the past two years has made the alternative to a negotiated end (one side's absolute victory) seem like a fantasy.
Despite the absence of a viable alternative to eventual talks, there is no sign that the belligerents will start negotiations any time soon. Both sides believe that reaching an acceptable deal is currently impossible; each fears that the other won't compromise or will use any pause to rest and refit for the next round of fighting.
Even if a deal is currently out of the question, all parties should take steps now to bring about the possibility of talks in the future. In the middle of a war, it is hard to know whether an adversary is genuinely ready to end the fighting or cynically talks of peace only to further the aims of war. The challenge of discerning an adversary's intentions is nearly impossible in the absence of dialogue.…
The remainder of this commentary is available at foreignaffairs.com
Samuel Charap is a senior political scientist at RAND. Jeremy Shapiro is the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
