Can there be peace in Ukraine, or is Putin just playing for time?

KYIV — For anyone following the war in Ukraine, a photo taken this week in the Saudi capital offers a striking illustration of the dramatic shift in the U.S. stance on the conflict. In it, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is seated across from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, discussing a possible deal to end the fighting. However, the notable absence in the room is any Ukrainian official.

Just three years ago, then-President Biden condemned Russia’s invasion as “a premeditated attack” orchestrated by President Vladimir Putin. “Russia alone is responsible for the death and destruction this attack will bring, and the United States, along with its allies and partners, will respond in a united and decisive way,” Biden said. Yet this week, President Trump referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “a dictator” and falsely claimed he was responsible for starting the war — the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stands next to a flag of the European Union as he arrives to meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the Munich Security Conference last week.

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Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Finding a quick end to the war was a centerpiece of Trump’s campaign. But many now fear the president’s eagerness could strong-arm Ukraine into a dangerous, temporary halt to the aggression that would allow Russia time to reconstitute its battered forces for a sequel in the fighting.

Russia needs time to regroup

“Putin is playing for time,” says Mikhail Alexseev, a professor of political science at San Diego State University, whose research is currently focused on the war in Ukraine. “Obviously, Russia has been suffering significant losses of manpower and equipment … they need time to regroup.”

Some experts are concerned that a ceasefire could be used by President Vladimir Putin, pictured in St. Petersburg on Tuesday, to legitimize the war that the Russian leader initiated.

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Mikhail Metzel/AFP via Getty Images

Remarkably, Ukraine has held its own on the battlefield despite being outnumbered and outgunned by Russian forces. “It’s not only that we survived the [2022 invasion], which is a miracle … it’s the fact that after three years, we are still fighting,” Dmytro Kuleba, who served as Ukraine’s foreign minister for much of the war, tells NPR.

Military aid from NATO countries, especially the U.S., has been a bulwark of Ukraine’s defense, he says, but acknowledges that it was a big mistake for his country not to ramp up its defense production after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. “We wasted a lot of time in internal discussion and fights,” he says. 

Meanwhile, both sides have been reluctant to provide specific casualty figures. Zelenskyy told NBC News on Feb. 16 that 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, while claiming the Russians have lost 350,000 troops.

The figure for Russian casualties is unverified, but most experts in the West agree that the Kremlin’s losses are massive. Despite that, Russians are advancing, albeit slowly, on the battlefield. Zelenskyy has said Ukraine can’t hold them back without U.S. aid or strong security guarantees.

Trump signals a dramatic policy shift

Although Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, the Trump administration’s envoy on Ukraine, has said that he understands Kyiv’s need for security guarantees. However, Trump has echoed Moscow’s rationale for the 2022 invasion, claiming that it was provoked by the prospect of Ukrainian membership in NATO.

Trump’s latest rhetoric on Ukraine represents a dramatic shift in U.S. policy, according to Kristine Berzina, managing director at the German Marshall Fund, a non-partisan policy organization. “The lack of understanding or willful reframing of the war to Russia’s favor is deeply shocking to Ukrainians and to Europeans more broadly.”

In the talks in Riyadh this week, Russia insisted the U.S. abandon its 2008 pledge to eventually bring Ukraine into NATO, and also dismissed the idea that member forces from the alliance could be deployed as peacekeepers in any deal to halt the fighting.

The Kremlin wants to get back Kursk, the Russian territory that Ukrainian forces seized in a lightning assault last year. Kursk is seen as a potential bargaining chip for Zelenskky in negotiations. Putin is “trying to move forward on the front lines in eastern Ukraine. And slowly and surely he’s making progress,” Berzina says. “But this is by no means a speedy dash across Ukraine.”

A ceasefire could be a trap for Zelenskyy

Zelenskyy is well aware that “a ceasefire can be a trap,” says Evelyn Farkas, a former Pentagon official in the Obama administration and now executive director of the McCain Institute, a nonpartisan organization with programs focusing on democracy and human rights.

“If he takes a bad deal, then he becomes weaker,” Farkas says. “Whereas Putin is heading this unpopular war. He’s paid a high price economically [and] politically, and it’s unclear whether he wants to continue paying that price.”

Without the security guarantees for Ukraine that would come with an armistice, there can be no real peace, according to Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy.

“The likelihood of a ceasefire benefiting Russia is increasing,” he notes, adding that should there be only a temporary truce, the map of the frontline “almost guarantees the resumption of the warfare in southern parts of Ukraine.”

“The Russians are very close to the major Ukrainian centers like Zaporizhzhya … a couple dozen kilometers away. They can easily bombard another important center — Nikopol,” he says. “So for Ukrainians, it’s a very uncomfortable place to be.”

Russia has a history of breaching ceasefires

Russia is no stranger to using ceasefire deals not as the basis of a lasting peace, but to further its short-term military and political aims, according to Plokhy, author of Chernobyl Roulette: War in the Nuclear Disaster Zone. That’s what the Kremlin did in Chechnya in two separate conflicts that spanned some 15 years, from 1994-2009, he says.

In Ukraine, two separate deals aimed at ending an earlier round of fighting, following the annexation of Crimea, fell apart after Russia used the hiatus to regroup and then restarted the fighting.

The Minsk agreements, as these deals are known, were signed during a period of intense fighting in the eastern Donetsk region. Kyiv said Moscow was sending Russian troops there to help pro-Russian separatists, but the Kremlin denied the accusations, insisting that Kyiv conduct direct negotiations with the breakaway republics there, and in another eastern region, Luhansk. Ukraine refused to deal with the separatists. The fighting never stopped, despite numerous ceasefires.

As part of those agreements, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, dispatched an observer mission to Ukraine. OSCE observers recorded ceasefire violations, but nothing was done. The OSCE quickly withdrew once Russia’s 2022 invasion got underway.

Marie Dumoulin, a former French diplomat who is now director of the Wider Europe program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote last year that the Minsk agreements had “become a byword for the West’s failure to deal with the post-2014 conflict in eastern Ukraine.”

San Diego State’s Alexseev is concerned that a ceasefire could again be used by Putin to legitimize the war that the Russian leader initiated. “It will give the Kremlin the option of pausing for a few months, and then to resume exactly what it is doing now,” he says.

Russia will be allowed “to falsely accuse Ukraine of ceasefire violations, and frame its whole military campaign as a response to those violations, so that in the eyes of less-informed publics around the world, it becomes a more obscure conflict where both sides can be seen as guilty,” he says.

Alexseev thinks it would take a year or two for Russia to reconstitute its forces and break a ceasefire deal. Other experts NPR spoke with for this story said it might happen in as little as six months.

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, whose country currently holds the European Union presidency, recently said that the EU will continue to provide military and financial support to Ukraine, even if the U.S. decides not to. He emphasized that the decision regarding the presence of foreign peacekeepers on Ukrainian soil would be up to Kyiv, not Moscow.

In recent days, Chinese media has speculated that Beijing might be willing to play a peacekeeping role, though no official confirmation has been given. Moreover, as reported by The South China Morning Post, there are still uncertainties about the extent of China’s commitment.

Farkas, of the McCain Institute, is also concerned that any ceasefire deal may send the wrong signal to Beijing. “Any victory by the war criminal Vladimir Putin will only embolden President Xi and other aggressive actors.”

NPR Producer Polina Lytvynova contributed reporting from Kyiv