Photo: WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP via Getty Images
This series—led by the Futures Lab and featuring scholars across CSIS—explores emerging challenges and opportunities likely to shape peace negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. All contributions in the series can be found by visiting Strategic Headwinds: Understanding the Forces Shaping Ukraine’s Path to Peace.
Increasingly pro-Western public opinion in Ukraine makes it nearly impossible for its leaders to commit to meeting Russia’s desire to keep Ukraine in its sphere of influence. This, in turn, incentivizes Russia to negotiate in bad faith while pursuing total victory on the battlefield. Traditional tools for resolving commitment problems in negotiations are unlikely to resolve one based on long-term shifts in public opinion. Ukraine’s backers seeking a negotiated solution to the war should continue providing military aid to increase the costs Russia faces in pursuing military victory in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine partly to reassert what he views as Ukrainians’ proper place within Moscow’s sphere of influence. This desire has manifested in several ways, including Putin’s assertion that Ukraine is an inherent part of Russia, his belief that Ukraine’s remaining under Russian influence is essential to restoring Russia’s status as a Great Power, and his fear of NATO expansion. But no matter the exact reason for the invasion, Ukrainians have grown dramatically more pro-Western and less pro-Russian since the illegal Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. Most Ukrainians outside of occupied Ukraine favor joining NATO (Figure 1), and nearly 100 percent view Russia as hostile.
Ukrainians’ increasingly pro-Western attitudes make any commitments to neutrality or pro-Russian policies made at the negotiating table fragile. Because Ukraine is a democracy, albeit an imperfect one, the popular desire to increase integration with the West will push its political leadership to continue shifting away from Russia and towards Europe and the United States. Even when pro-Russian candidates win elections, there is no guarantee that their policies will last. The last Ukrainian president who tried to reverse Ukraine’s westward shift was ousted in 2014 following popular protests. As a result, there is little Ukraine’s negotiators can do to convince Russia that it will abide by any commitments it makes to remain politically or culturally aligned with Moscow.
This commitment problem is bad news for Ukraine, its backers, and those who want a negotiated solution. States that cannot trust their adversaries to abide by war-ending agreements sometimes seek unilateral solutions like annexation or regime change. In extreme examples, states may seek to destroy not just the adversary’s state through annexation but entire polities through the systematic extermination of a people or a culture.
Each of these three unilateral solutions works in a different way. Annexation prevents a united people from exercising self-determination, eliminating their ability to defect from an agreement except through violent or non-violent rebellion. Changing a country’s political institutions alters the political incentives that contribute to interstate conflict, which may explain how foreign-imposed regime change is associated with longer post-war periods of peace. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, or their less lethal variants seek to change the makeup of a polity and, therefore, its preferences.
Russia has demonstrated a willingness to undertake all three types of unilateral solutions in Ukraine. It formally but illegally annexed five regions of Ukraine, including Crimea, in 2014. Its initial strategy in its 2022 invasion appears to have been built around changing Ukrainian leadership at multiple levels of its political system, breaking the link between public opinion and policy through regime change. Russia has even sought to eliminate Ukrainian culture and identity in the areas it controls, including by abducting children to Russia for forced indoctrination.
Traditional diplomatic tools for resolving commitment problems will have little leverage over Putin’s fear that Ukrainians are moving away from Russia and toward the West. Peacekeepers, arms control agreements, and territorial swaps would do nothing to make Ukrainians want to rejoin Putin’s imperial project. Ukrainians have been reporting their native language as Russian at decreasing rates since at least 2012, and support for increasing integration with Russia peaked at 52 percent in 2009 before collapsing to about 10 percent in the year before the 2022 invasion.
Increasing military aid to Ukraine is the best way to compel Putin to negotiate in good faith and reach a negotiated peace. States that cannot trust their adversaries to abide by war-ending agreements tend to fight on while resisting concessions at the negotiating table but can be compelled to concede if their hopes for victory vanish or the costs of continued fighting increase. Absent continued aid, Russian hopes for total victory will only increase, incentivizing Putin to negotiate in bad faith while pursuing a total victory on the battlefield. Such a situation would undermine the incoming Trump administration’s apparent policy of freezing the frontlines and pursuing a negotiated solution.
Alexander Palmer is a fellow at the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Special thanks to Jose M. Macias III in the Futures Lab for data visualization and editing support and Madison Bruno for editing and publication support.
