Only a popular uprising against globalist leaders in Europe and their proxy in Ukraine, will do
A Sustainable Peace in Ukraine: Diplomacy, Neutrality, and the Limits of the Current Order
Ian Proud was a member of His Britannic Majesty’s Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023. He served as the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to February 2019. He recently published his memoir, “A Misfit in Moscow: How British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019,” and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute.
Cross-posted from Ian’s Substack
There is no functional way to end the war in Ukraine, on the basis that NATO and the EU have stolen the sovereignty of their members, refuse to talk to Russia and see no interest for their citizens in peace-making.
In a perfect world, NATO and common EU foreign policy would cease to exist, but that won’t happen this side of the next decade.
So, I predict that at some point over the next year Zelensky will be ousted, and that from 2027, support for globalist mainstream parties will start to crumble across Europe as citizens increasingly come to the realisation that their prosperity and safety have been sold out to prolong a forever war that no one wants.
Peace in Ukraine can only happen if Ukraine and Russia agreed to coexist without war under the UN system. That does not mean a state of friendship between the two countries. It is impossible to imagine that any time soon and it would take a generation to restore any normality in relations.
Rather, it would mean an agreement by both sides to settle future disputes through dialogue and diplomacy — a situation that has not pertained in Ukraine since 2015.
Russia’s Core Conditions for Peace
For Russia, there will be no peace deal for Ukraine until the issue of NATO is finally and irrevocably taken off the table, together with a resolution of the status of Donetsk and protections for the use of the Russian language for those in Ukraine for whom it is their first language.
Ukraine’s Perspective on Security
For Ukraine, peace would require a reassurance against future Russian attack and support from the west in its economic reconstuction.
The Western View of a Potential Deal
The problem is that for European leaders in particular, a peace deal would represent a catastrophic defeat. Having spent years presenting Ukraine as a core and essential part of the NATO family, such a deal would confirm that European efforts had failed, despite years of asserting that the billions invested in the war would eventually secure success.
Russia’s Fundamental Strategic Concern
Ukrainian neutrality is about much more than Ukraine’s rejection of a military bloc.
For Russia, the Ukraine conflict — and now the full-scale war — has always been first and foremost about denying the West’s right to impose its will by force and economic pressure. Specifically, it has been about preventing the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s border, against Russia’s repeatedly stated position that such expansion was unacceptable.
Many argue that Russia does not have the right to decide who can or cannot join NATO. Strictly speaking, this is correct. However, Russia does possess the right, as a sovereign nation, to determine what constitutes its core strategic interests.
It decided decades ago that NATO expansion ran directly counter to those interests — to the extent that it would be prepared to fight to prevent it.
Of course, Ukraine also has the sovereign right to choose its alliances, although the relationship of most Ukrainians with NATO has been ambivalent at best. Even if every Ukrainian had viewed NATO membership as an absolute priority — a situation that has never existed — Russia’s security concerns would remain.
The Requirement for Negotiated Solutions
The only way forward in those circumstances would have been for Ukraine and Russia to negotiate a resolution that addressed both sides’ concerns, as required by the UN Charter. On this basis, Russia and Ukraine held talks about Ukraine’s NATO aspirations on multiple occasions after Putin came to power. At every stage, Russia expressed its strong objections.
When President Putin met Ukrainian President Yushchenko in February 2008, he described the potential military escalation between Russia and Ukraine under a NATO membership scenario as “horrible to say and terrifying to think.”
Ukraine’s NATO aspirations had largely disappeared under the Yanukovych presidency.
NATO expansion was driven primarily by Western powers, above all the United States, which meant that what Ukraine itself wanted or did not want became largely incidental. Even President Poroshenko was initially very cautious about NATO membership, noting that a majority of citizens did not favour it. He did not mention NATO during his inauguration speech.
It was only in late November 2014 — almost three months after he attended the NATO Summit in Wales and with his military campaign in the Donbas backfiring and pulling Russia deeper into the fight — that he stated Ukraine was “decisively resuming its political course for integration into the Euro-Atlantic security system.”
A month later, Poroshenko signed into law the repeal of Ukraine’s 2010 non-aligned status, setting in motion a five-to-six-year programme for Ukraine to meet NATO standards and promising a referendum on membership.
Zelensky was elected by a landslide in 2019 on a platform to bring peace with Russia. He also indicated that any future NATO membership bid would require a referendum.
As of today, no vote has ever been put to the Ukrainian people on NATO membership, although a significant majority of the population that remains in unoccupied Ukraine would likely support it today.
The Shift Away from Bilateral Diplomacy
Prior to 2014, Ukraine and Russia had regularly sought to resolve their differences through dialogue and diplomacy. From 2014 onwards, however, the West adopted the view that so long as it could support a leadership in Ukraine favouring NATO integration, the preferences of ordinary Ukrainian people became secondary. That position has remained unchanged.
In that sense, Ukraine has effectively subordinated its sovereign right to choose in favour of Western strategic interests. While Ukraine retains the appearance of a democratically elected president — although Zelensky has not faced an election in over seven years — elected Ukrainian leaders have been expected to follow the Western directive on the specific issue of NATO.
Even if one accepts the proposition that Ukraine is a fully sovereign nation making choices independently of Western influence, it has not, since 2014, been permitted to settle its disagreement with Russia through dialogue and diplomacy. The US, UK, and European strategy has been to deny that Russia has any legitimate say in the matter and to demand that it unconditionally back down.
This approach denies that Russia’s concerns about NATO expansion — expressed consistently throughout Putin’s presidency — have any legitimacy. It also denies the validity of the argument that NATO expansion escalated tensions and eventually contributed to war.
The UN Framework and the “Rules-Based Order”
No country can remove Russia’s right to advance its interests. The UN Charter repeatedly calls on states to settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
The West’s strategy has been to deny Russia’s sovereign right to articulate its concerns and to resolve those concerns through diplomacy. In doing so, the West has chosen to operate outside the spirit of the UN Charter, subordinating the sovereign interests of both Ukraine and Russia in order to advance NATO expansion.
NATO does not enjoy legal statehood. It is a collection of sovereign states that have chosen to align their national interests with the institution as a condition of membership. Like the EU institutions, NATO is a bureaucratic entity with its own institutional interest in survival and growth and with a leader who has not faced a public vote. It does not possess sovereignty.
Yet it has acquired or assumed the sovereignty of its members. Its policy has effectively allowed member states to pressure Russia into accepting their collective goal of expansion into Ukraine over Russia’s expressly stated objections.
NATO has placed itself in a position analogous to that of the UN in setting the rules of the game. Unlike the UN, however, NATO has no dedicated mechanism for the peaceful resolution of disputes with nations that fundamentally disagree with its purpose or its plans for expansion.
The international legal system built on the UN has therefore been sidelined in favour of what Western powers describe as the “rules-based international order” — a phrase that, in practice, often means “our rules, not yours.” For the record, I had not once heard the term “rules based international order” used in the British Foreign Office before the Ukraine crisis started. It emerged as a confected phrase within a new lexicon to describe the rules that other states should obey.
The Nature of the War
The war in Ukraine has never been primarily about territorial conquest. It has been a battle between two systems: a Russia-favoured UN system in which disputes are to be handled through diplomacy, and a NATO-centred system in which Russia has had no say and has been expected to accept NATO’s terms. In this regard, Russia does not view the current President of Ukraine as an independent actor, but rather as a figurehead of a NATO-aligned system — someone elected on a platform of peace who subsequently aligned with Western preferences against the interests of the citizens who voted him into a power, and who no longer have a right to vote by virtue of the war.
There is little dispute that, at the outset, Russia’s aim was to remove the Zelensky government and install one that would adopt a less confrontational posture toward Russia. That attempt failed, locking both sides into more than four years of bloody war in which the front line has moved only slowly.
It would nevertheless be a mistake to describe the war as one of territorial conquest, even though the collapse of the draft Istanbul Agreement in April 2022 led Russia to advance claims over four additional oblasts.
For Russia, the war has become an existential struggle to prevent the expansion of the NATO bloc to its borders and to resist the imposition of a system of power that runs counter to the UN framework.
NATO’s Character and the Escalation Dynamic
NATO is a military bloc originally established to counter the Soviet Union. Today, its primary focus remains Russia — the only major military power that directly borders the alliance. The claim that NATO is purely defensive becomes harder to sustain when one considers that it accounts for approximately 53% of global defence spending, a percentage that will grow significantly as European nations rearm. Within the next decade, NATO may account for two thirds of global defence spending.
And yet it claims to be a defensive alliance. The Ukraine crisis began because Russia concluded that the NATO alliance sought to determine who governed Ukraine by interfering in its political system and supporting a change of government that installed a NATO-friendly regime.
In 2014, Russia responded by annexing Crimea — partly to secure the Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol — and by supporting separatists in Donbas. This allowed Western leaders to reinforce the narrative that NATO needed to expand in the face of a revanchist Russia.
Russia’s move on Crimea was framed as both a defensive measure and a correction of the Soviet-era administrative decision to transfer the peninsula to Ukraine. Prior to 2014, there is little evidence that Russia had active imperial designs on Crimea, which Russian citizens could visit under visa-free arrangements.
For years, Russia provided military support to separatists in Donbas in response to Ukrainian military operations and to protect the Russian-speaking population. There is little evidence, however, that Russia seriously considered absorbing the region until around the time the full-scale war began.
The key point is that every escalation has allowed Western leaders and commentators to strengthen the narrative that Ukraine needed protection from Russia, and that the best form of protection was NATO membership. This has created a self-reinforcing cycle in which both sides attribute every deterioration to the other, while the absence of sustained dialogue between Russia and NATO prevents any meaningful dispute resolution.
Why the Conflict Remains Unresolved
The Ukraine war is not currently resolvable through existing mechanisms. Russia will not abandon its long-standing objections to NATO expansion. NATO continues to maintain that expansion is the only reliable way to protect Ukraine. The Ukrainian leadership amplifies the NATO position and has shown little interest in realistic dialogue with Russia.
Western leaders keep calling on Russia to adopt a ceasefire.
And yet a ceasefire alone will never be acceptable to Russia, because while it would end the fighting, it would leave the underlying concern about NATO expansion unresolved while Ukraine rearms and seeks to integrate more deeply into a militarising Europe.
Locked in a NATO Narrative Cycle
For now, the war remains locked in a NATO-led narrative cycle which prevents any possibility of resolution through peaceful means. One of the biggest narrative thrusts is that Putin doesn’t want peace and that therefore we should avoid all diplomacy with him because there would be no point in talking to someone who doesn’t want peace.
However, this is an outright falsehood because peace will only be possible through diplomacy. Denying diplomacy is therefore denying the possibility of peace. As peace would require a reckoning with the underlying cause of the war — the role of NATO as a destabilising agent — no mainstream leader in Europe is prepared to countenance any sort of concession on NATO. So, the best form of deflection is to say that Putin doesn’t want peace.
However, Putin’s conditions for peace have been made clear consistently: Ukrainian neutrality, recognition of the current realities in Donetsk, and language rights. There is no evidence to support the allegation that he would reject diplomacy with European leaders. Putin engaged in direct peace talks with Donald Trump in Alaska and they have spoken on the phone many times. NATO and European leaders have said repeatedly that they see no value in direct talks with Putin because he does not want peace.
Yet Putin has said consistently that he is prepared to have direct negotiations. Zelensky has made several performative efforts to suggest peace talks but not in a manner that would suggest he is willing to follow through.
For example, his recent letter piled insult after insult on Putin while making a meeting sound like a throwaway remark. Zelensky has been one of the most vocal in saying that Putin should be forced to negotiate, even though Putin has consistently said that he is ready to negotiate, with no forcing needed.
So there can be no peace without diplomacy, and it is clear that NATO and European leaders have rejected diplomacy because that would require a reckoning with the underlying drivers of the war.
Signalling That Russia Is Losing as a Tool to Avoid Diplomacy
This has placed a huge emphasis on European leaders trumpeting signs of success in Western strategy, specifically proof that Russia is losing and will eventually lose. None of these communications strategies are remotely accurate, but they do help to maintain the position of no diplomacy.
The first is that Ukraine is turning the tide on the battlefield. There is nothing to suggest that this is true. Even Ukraine’s former Chief of the Defence Staff, now Ambassador to London Valerii Zaluzhnyi, recently admitted that the war is stuck in an attritional phase, dependent on which country has the most resilience — in circumstances where Russia has more troops, more money, more energy, and a strong industrial base to sustain the war.
Ukraine has a chronic manpower shortage and is conscripting its citizens in increasingly violent ways. It is totally dependent on the West for financial aid and for a significant part of its military needs. It is energy-dependent and much of its heavy industry has been degraded. At best the war is stuck in a chokehold in which Russia, unwilling to commit more troops through general mobilisation, is seeking to bleed Ukraine dry of men and bleed Europe dry of the economic means to support the war.
Ukraine will not win this on the battlefield, and most people, including many now in Ukraine, accept that. And yet Western mainstream media continue to peddle this line regularly.
The second claim is that Russia’s economy is about to implode. Again, nothing suggests this is true. Russia has undoubtedly suffered fuel supply problems from Ukrainian strikes on its oil refining infrastructure. That is causing inconvenience to the population and affecting views among Russians towards the war. However, that is not the same as suggesting that Russia’s economy is in trouble. It still turns in significant export surpluses, has practically no unemployment, industry working at full capacity, and significant financial reserves of gold to manage external shocks.
Ukraine, on the other hand, has become an economically failed state, totally dependent on Western support at a time when Europe itself is in industrial and economic decline.
Related to this is the repeated call for more sanctions on Russia to ratchet up the economic pain. As I have said countless times, the West long ago passed the point of diminishing marginal returns on sanctions. Each new package now serves only to harden Putin’s resolve and to prevent the possibility of any compromise on Russia’s part.
Related to this, Zelensky now calls for deep missile strikes inside Russia as long-range sanctions designed to force Putin to the negotiating table. Deep strikes inside Russia appear only to precipitate an equal or heavier response from the Russian side – another point Zaluzhnyi conceded – which the West will then spin as evidence that Putin does not want peace and therefore we should not engage in diplomacy with him.
On the basis that European leaders refuse to engage in diplomacy, it is disingenuous to talk of forcing Putin to a negotiating table that clearly does not exist. Once more, this is another press line to prevent the possibility of direct dialogue.
The Claim That Russia Will Attack Europe Next
This is yet another self-serving line that supports massive inputs into the European and Ukrainian defence industrial complex at the expense of productive economic development and social spending in those countries.
It is clearly absurd to suggest that, having been waging a slow attritional war in Ukraine for four and a half years, Russia somehow has the desire and the resources to attack Europe next.
Firstly, that assumes Russia can subjugate the whole of Ukraine so it does not have to fight on two separate fronts which is self-evidently unrealistic given progress made so far in the Donbas.
As importantly, it puts the conversation into Russia being an imperialist power intent on conquest and takes the conversation away from the root cause of the war in Ukraine, which is NATO itself. Russia has fought Ukraine to a standstill precisely so it can avoid having NATO on its doorstep. Why then attack the largest military bloc in the world that it has determined to keep its distance from?
The Claim That Russian People Are Turning Against Putin
Finally, there is the claim that Russian people are turning against Putin and will soon evict him from power, so we need to keep the pressure up. For a long time, Western policy hitched itself to an approach of “boiling the frog,” in which ever-increasing pressure on Putin will eventually precipitate some sort of collapse of his rule and usher in a change in power more favourable to good relations with the West.
Even though there is no evidence that a direct military victory can be secured against Russia by Ukraine fighting on its own, claiming that Putin’s legitimacy is collapsing blocks off any suggestion of direct dialogue, because if Putin will soon be out of the picture, then let’s wait until he is gone.
The most troubling aspect of this line is its assumption that any future replacement for Putin would be more favourable towards the West. Firstly, there is little evidence that Putin wants to live in a state of permanent hostility with Europe. He has been remarkably cautious in his prosecution of the war. Militarily he could have escalated several steps up the ladder, including through strikes into Europe or the use of tactical nuclear weapons, which he has actively avoided.
It is my assessment that despite many hardliners in Russia calling for sharper escalation, Putin is driven by a desire one day to normalise relations with Europe and is keen to avoid anything that would deepen an already gaping gulf between Russia and the West.
But the point is that it is deeply mistaken to believe that any future change in leadership in Russia will precipitate a change of heart about the threat of NATO towards Russia. A collapse in Putin’s rule, it is assumed, would usher in Ukraine’s membership of NATO and create a sense of the West finally having prevailed.
Yet it is incredibly foolish to believe that, given the treasure and hundreds of thousands of Russian lives lost in Ukraine, a future Russian leader would resist NATO expansion as fiercely, if not more so. There is a presumption of liberalism in this Western view — that a future Russian leader might be more moderate. The reality is that they could take a much tougher line.
Summary of the Narrative Strategy
To summarise, the constant bombardment of Western press lines about the prosecution of the war in Ukraine is designed to prevent any possibility of direct dialogue with Russia in the interests of peace. In circumstances where the war is functionally at a stalemate, with Russia holding the strategic assets to wait, that leaves us in a position of having no way out of war.
The Western policy position has meant that European countries have subordinated their sovereignty to supranational bodies in the form of NATO and the EU and they are unable on a bilateral basis to break the deadlock of the consensus that governs those organisations, which are led by unelected officials with outsize power to decide policy.
The irony is that the underlying basis of the war is and remains Russia’s claim that NATO expansion threatened its sovereignty.
So, to bring it back to the top of the discussion, NATO has not only supplanted the UN in deciding the rules that Russia should accept without condition. It has taken upon itself the sovereignty of its member states to prevent the types of bilateral dialogue between states that the UN Charter provides for.
The obvious way to end the war would be to disband NATO and return to the norms of diplomatic engagement that are set out by the UN. But that simply will not happen because NATO itself has the convening power to corral the sovereignty of its members around a raison d’être that the bureaucracy, rather than elected officials, decides.
Even though I believe that removing NATO would remove the problem, I judge that it will be practically and politically impossible in modern Europe with the globalist leaders that we have in charge, at a national and at a supranational level.
How Will the War End?
As of today, there is no functional route out of the war in Ukraine. Western leaders have locked themselves into supporting Zelensky come what may, and Putin is unwilling to back down. There is an absolute resistance to a diplomatic settlement and an outright military victory appears unlikely.
Russia will probably seek to paint out the rest of Donetsk, though that may take some time yet. There is a chance, should there be no change from the European side, that Russia would then seek to occupy Odessa, possibly. But that would take much longer. It is far from clear that the West would change its narrative approach, even if Russia made further slow advances. The response would almost certainly be that Russia’s slow progress is a sign of their weakness and the strength of Ukrainian and European resolve.
And even greater gains by Russia might not provide for a negotiated way out if Zelensky and European leaders continued to refuse to engage.
So we risk literally being in a never-ending war in which little military advancement is made at huge cost to Russia, Ukraine and Europe in men and materiel but without the diplomatic means to escape.
That’s why I consider the war will end through popular resistance to it, not through any political moves by Western leaders or through a decisive military victory. The biggest weak point will be in Ukraine itself, with war weariness now heavy and with increasing rebellion against the brutal forced recruitment tactics being employed to shore up the country’s shaky military manpower situation. I therefore predict a forcing event inside Ukraine, either an assassination of Zelensky — who now deliberately spends much of his time outside the country — or, more likely, an internal coup d’état.
A coup could take place on the back of a popular uprising against the continuance of the war and his extended period in office. Or it could be a palace coup. There are risks of an ultranationalist takeover of the Ukrainian state. But given the allegations that Ukrainian ethnonationalists have an outsize role in war policy, I assess that pragmatists within Ukraine’s political elite will seek to oust him, most likely through an impeachment on the back of corruption scandals.
On the European side, I see popular unrest about the war policy of EU and NATO institutions leading to seismic political change in the main powers — France, Germany and the UK. There will be a concerted media campaign to prevent victories by the AfD, National Rally and Reform, though I consider these will ultimately prove fruitless.
A major by-product of the war in Ukraine has been to remove the rights of ordinary citizens to choose their future. This may ultimately lead to the slow erosion of NATO and the EU.
But assuming that Zelensky has not been removed from office by 2027, I predict that the collapse in Western support for the forever war in Ukraine will start to crumble after the French Presidential election, which Marine Le Pen is considered in hot contention to win. France under Le Pen will not want Ukraine to join the EU because of the loss of financial benefits to France that would result. I predict she would not want to prolong the war in Ukraine further given the significant indirect economic cost to France from the decline of Europe that it has precipitated.
There will be an enormous legal and media campaign to prevent Le Pen from winning, much as there will be a similar campaign in Germany in 2029.
Even in Britain, political elites are already looking to unpick the Brexit vote and suck us back into the warmongering supranational structure of Europe.
But the simple truth is this, the only way to end the war in Ukraine is the get rid of Zelensky and the globalist elites in London, Berlin, Brussel and Paris.
There is simply no other functional way to make it end, on the basis that NATO and the EU have stolen the sovereignty of their members, refuse to talk to Russia and see no interest for their citizens in peacemaking.
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