Russian President Vladimir Putin has quietly expressed openness to discussing a ceasefire deal in Ukraine with US President-elect Donald Trump. Putin’s alleged position was revealed to Reuters by five Kremlin insiders and added ammunition to Trump’s plans to freeze the Ukraine war early in his presidency.

These are promising signs for Trump’s agendabut is Russia ready to negotiate? The Kremlin’s rhetoric suggests that the answer to this question is a resounding no. On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained that Putin “has repeatedly said that all options to freeze the conflict will not work for us.”

Russia also rejected Turkey’s peace plan for Ukraine. This proposal called for a freeze on current battle lines, no Ukrainian NATO accession for at least ten years, and the deployment of international troops to a demilitarized border line in eastern Ukraine. These terms closely mirror the peace plan that Trump will outline for Putin.

Unless the US agrees to Putin’s maximalist visionwhich includes occupying Ukrainian-held areas of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Donetsk and permanently excluding Ukraine from NATO membership, Russia’s short-term calculus on negotiations is unlikely to change.

And Trump is equally unlikely to agree to Putin’s far-fetched demands. Even the Russian-friendly Chinese and Brazilian peace plans go no further than freezing the conflict at current borders. Abandoning NATO’s open-door policy under Russian pressure would mean a long-term blow to its credibility as an alliance bloc.

While Russia is unlikely to negotiate in good faith, it still sees tactical value in diplomacy. Like Russian fighter jets and The mercenaries of the Wagner Group helped Syrian President Bashar al-Assads brutal recapture of Aleppo, Russia actively participated in the Astana peace process. While Russian forces carried out the Bucha massacre, Putin’s top diplomats toyed with the idea of ​​ending the Ukraine war at the talks in Istanbul in March 2022.

Putin’s phone call with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and openness to cease-fire talks with Trump is the latest manifestation of this playbook. For the Kremlin, diplomacy is a tool of psychological warfare and a deterrent tactic that enables military breakthroughs.

Once negotiations begin, Russia will almost certainly cite Ukraine’s use of long-range ATACM missiles on its territory and the occupation of Kursk as irreversible problems. Russia wants Ukraine to make unilateral concessions on both fronts.

To stop Ukrainian ATACM attacks, Russia may play to the sensibilities of Trump and his inner circle. As National Security Adviser Mike Waltz has highlighted escalation risks associated with Ukraine’s ATACM use and Trump regularly warns of World War III, Russia will ramp up its nuclear power.

Prominent Russian commentators such as former Kremlin adviser Sergey Markov claim that Biden authorized Ukraine’s use of ATACM to sabotage Trump’s presidency. Russian diplomats will use negotiations to convey this narrative to Trump, as it plays into the president-elect’s distrust of the US foreign policy establishment.

At Kursk, Russia will have a harder time achieving its preferred outcome. Ukraine is determined to hold onto the Kursk territory as it seeks to secure a land swap deal for Russian-occupied parts of Kharkiv or the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Russia is likely to continue its war of attrition in Kursk when negotiations begin.

Even if these problems are solved, Russian obstruction is unlikely to end. Putin sees the continuation of the war as crucial for the regime’s stability in Russia. The military industrial boom continues to prevent socio-economic unrest. Led by the fascist philosopher Alexander Dugin, many Russian ultranationalists see Putin’s consent to the 2015 Minsk II agreement with Ukraine as a naïve act of treason.

By authorizing a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin made a Faustian bargain with Russian ultranationalists. The mutiny of the Wagner group in June 2023 underscored the threat of ultranationalist dissent, and Putin sees continued war as the ideal way to appease this militarized faction.

The most effective way to change Putin’s calculus is to further increase the costs of Russian aggression. Tightened sanctions could eventually burst Russia’s wartime economic bubble and cripple its military supply chains. Long-range Ukrainian strikes could disrupt Russian energy production and drive more North Korean forces into the front line. Faced with a failing economy and diminishing returns on the battlefield, Putin may be forced to negotiate in a serious way.

Russia is determined to survive Western support for Ukraine and sees diplomacy as a tactic to achieve that goal. As Trump negotiates with Putin, he must remain attuned to this reality.

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