-Analysis-
BERLIN — Even if things are looking up with the return of Donald Trump to the White House, Vladimir Putin actually finds himself in a tough spot.
Russian soldiers are making slow but steady gains on the Ukrainian front. At the same time, Putin has to deal with the public impatience of Trump, who has sent his envoy, Steve Witkoff, to Moscow to broker a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.
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After the latest talks, Witkoff said the Russian president is “acting in good faith and conscience,” and Putin and Trump are expected to meet in person soon. Witkoff says he expects the talks to result in a “long-lasting peace.” This U.S. mediator seems remarkably trusting.
Trying to get inside Putin’s conscience is no easy task — assuming he even has one. Yet over his 25-year reign, the Russian president has offered a few clues about how he might handle this peace process in the coming months. And Mr. Witkoff may be in for a few surprises.
Putin often talks about negotiations, and he does so with ease. He wants to keep hopes alive at home and abroad, while at the same time sowing confusion about his true intentions. But no one should be fooled. Putin has no desire to return to the days of the Minsk talks or the shaky peace deals from before 2022.
That would be a step backward for him and would undercut his power. Instead, he is doing everything he can to drag out the peace process, which Trump has tried to speed up. He will bog it down with endless “nuances,” “details,” and new demands about what Ukraine must do before he even considers a ceasefire.
Putin wants no deals with the EU or NATO. Since Trump’s return to the presidency, Putin sees the so-called “collective West” as close to collapse. And he would love nothing more than to give it a final push.
Putinism after Putin
What matters to him now is not just what he has gained in Ukraine, but what he still hopes to achieve alongside Trump and China: the dismantling of what he calls the “Western-dictated world order.” Rather than reaching a compromise and returning to peaceful coexistence in Europe, Putin is laying the groundwork for a long war, whether through military means, intelligence operations or propaganda.
The battle against Western ideals, institutions and societies is now the cornerstone of his grip on power. He is reshaping his nation for an era defined by endless conflict.
It has become his biggest and maybe his final project.
Ukraine is only one stage. There, he might even accept a temporary ceasefire, but only on his terms. That would mean an end to Western arms deliveries to Kyiv, the dismantling of the Ukrainian military and the installation of a pro-Moscow regime. But Europe is part of the bigger stage. From there, he wants U.S. forces, along with their weapons, to leave entirely so that Russia can extend its “security umbrella.”
On the global level, Putin envisions Russia joining forces with China to dominate the international order. But one key reason he will not end the fighting lies within his own borders. After a quarter-century in power, Putin has made war the defining narrative of his rule. It has become his biggest and maybe his final project.
Time is running out
Confrontation with the West — whether with the United States or just Europe — is central to shoring up his rule. When he launched the latest invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the reaction inside Russia was not a surge of patriotic fervor but more of a numb resignation. Beneath that response lay fear and fatalism. By plunging Russia into what he frames as a global conflict, Putin justifies his authority. Only he, he claims, can save Russia in this existential struggle.
As Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin once declared in all seriousness that “without Putin, there is no Russia.” Since Feb. 24, 2022, the world has also come to understand something else: without Putin, there is no war. But the longer it drags on, Putin sees it the other way around: Without war, there is no Putin. That is why the war must go on, whether nearby or far away, whether hot, cold or hybrid. The important thing is to keep the enemy in sight.
At 72 years old, Putin knows his time is running out. To prevent the next generation from questioning his legacy or starting to wonder whether a Western orientation might not be such a bad idea after all, Putin has given a special mission to the education system. Schools will now fully serve the cause of victory. A new generation of Young Putinists is being groomed for a Putinism that will live on even after Putin himself is gone.
How to avoid a lasting peace
In craft classes, students are being taught how to make crutches, splints and prosthetics for wounded soldiers. Teachers have their students write letters filled with encouragement to the “men at the front.” New textbooks hammer Putin’s talking points into the minds of the next generation. Putin himself has suggested that the veterans of the Ukraine war should become “a future elite” in whose hands Russia’s fate can safely rest.
To understand why Putin spent three years brushing off all peace mediators and why he is now stalling the talks with Trump, you have to step into his mindset. Imagine if he actually had to govern under the tough conditions of a real peace with Ukraine and the European Union. His pivot to China would lose momentum. Russians would want to rebuild ties with the West. The government would lose its excuse for keeping the population under tight control. The economy, now built around wartime needs, would have to be painfully overhauled into a peacetime model. And Putin’s hold on power would need a new storyline.
Putin will pull out all the stops to avoid the “lasting peace” that Trump’s envoys are talking about.
Instead of poring over military maps with his generals, he would be stuck dealing with the grind of peacetime governance: supporting disabled veterans, raising the retirement age, fixing the healthcare system, stabilizing the Russian ruble, and figuring out what Russia can still sell to the world once oil demand dries up. None of these are topics that interest Putin in the slightest.
This is why Putin will pull out all the stops to avoid the “lasting peace” that Trump’s envoys are talking about. What separates him from Europe, and much of the rest of the world, is a fundamentally warped sense of what counts as normal. For most people, peace is the natural state of things, and war is an unbearable exception that should be stopped as soon as possible. For Putin, it’s the other way around. Out of the 25 years he has been in power, he has spent 20 waging war — in Chechnya, Georgia, Africa, Syria and for the past 11 years, in Ukraine. For Putin, war is the norm.
