Putin, the Ultimate Winner of the Ukraine War?

Volodymyr Zelensky is set to travel to Berlin on Monday to hold talks on bilateral relations and Ukraine peace negotiations. According to a statement released by the German government, Zelensky and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz will, during this meeting, engage in further discussions alongside a large number of European heads of government and state, as well as senior representatives of the European Union and NATO.

According to Rokna, citing a Friday report by The Wall Street Journal and officials familiar with the matter, Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy, will also meet with Zelensky and European leaders in Berlin. According to an informed source who requested anonymity, under the latest US plan to end the war with Russia, Ukraine could join the European Union as early as January 2027. The source also told Agence France-Presse: “This issue is mentioned in the plan as a matter that needs to be negotiated, and the Americans support it.” The Guardian wrote in this regard that it is evident that the complex process of joining the European Union usually takes years and requires unanimous approval by all 27 members of the bloc.

Meanwhile, some countries, particularly Hungary, have consistently opposed Ukraine’s membership. Nevertheless, the proposal has been met with skepticism in Brussels, with diplomats and officials describing it as unrealistic. At the same time, a European diplomat told The Guardian: “It is as if the Americans intend to decide for us. This is nonsense; first there must be a genuine willingness to expand partnerships.” According to French sources on Friday, Europeans and Ukrainians have asked the United States to provide “security guarantees” before any territorial negotiations in eastern regions occupied by Russia.

At the same time, the Élysée Palace stated: “We need full clarity on the security guarantees that Europeans and Americans can offer Ukrainians before any agreement on disputed territorial issues.” In any case, observers believe Kyiv remains under pressure from the White House to accept peace swiftly, but Ukraine is currently resisting a US-backed plan that many consider favorable to Moscow.

Putin’s Grand Objectives: Weakening the “West” Rather Than Seizing Ukrainian Territory

Foreign Policy magazine, in a report explaining Europe’s and Russia’s positions regarding the US peace proposal, wrote that Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, these days appears notably satisfied and content despite having lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers and having achieved only very limited advances on the front lines in a war that has now lasted longer than the United States’ involvement in World War II. Yet among Western strategists, a strong view has emerged that regardless of what Putin does next, the Russian leader will ultimately emerge as the loser of his Ukrainian adventure. According to these strategists, in nearly four years of the Ukraine war, Putin has seized only about 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory.

Meanwhile, NATO has not only expanded, but by strengthening its defensive capabilities and adding Finland and Sweden to its powerful front line, has further increased its weight and influence. However, according to the magazine, if viewed from another angle, Putin has strong reasons for confidence. He appears to be making progress toward his broader objective of creating divisions and weakening what is collectively referred to as the “West,” namely the group of NATO member states. According to many observers and Russia experts, achieving this very objective was from the outset a significant part of what Vladimir Putin sought. Nothing has clarified this reality more than the chaos and failures of recent weeks, when negotiations initiated by US President Donald Trump devolved into confusion and mutual accusations on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this process, Americans and Europeans presented entirely incompatible peace plans and angrily accused one another of undermining talks. In recent days, this rift has deepened markedly, to the point that Trump, in an interview, described Western Europe as “weak” and “in decline,” and again raised the idea that Ukraine would be forced to cede the Donbas region to Russia. According to some analysts, these remarks reflect the newly published “National Security Strategy” of the Trump administration, which warns that Europe is at risk of losing its “Western identity” and emphasizes that the current focus of the president is on “restoring strategic stability with Russia.”

For Putin, the sum of these developments amounts to an early Christmas gift—an exceptionally large one. Bruce Jentleson, a Duke University professor and former senior foreign policy adviser at the US State Department, said in this regard: “Putin’s motivation from the very beginning of the operation was precisely this; he believed NATO would fall apart.” According to Jentleson, the Biden administration and key European leaders deserve credit for countering Putin’s scenario and paving the way for NATO’s expansion to Sweden and Finland. But now, with Trump acting as a peace facilitator, Putin once again—and more than before—has the opportunity to entangle the West in division.

Putin’s Trump Card

Since Trump’s election as US president, sharp disagreements and tensions have intensified not only between the United States and Europeans, but also within the Trump administration itself and even within the Republican Party over how to end the war. In Russia, however, such a situation is not observed; according to polls, public support for the war has consistently remained at a relatively stable level of between 70 and 80 percent, although, according to Maria Snegovaya, a Russia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, there are significant differences of opinion regarding the specific objectives of the war.

Snegovaya emphasizes that policymakers and decision-makers in Washington and Western Europe deceive themselves by assuming that Russian public opinion has grown weary of the war. Citing a wide range of polls conducted over recent years, she adds that although the majority of Russians surveyed do not fully accept the Kremlin’s official narratives about the reasons for the war—including the claim of “denazification” of Ukraine, which in Kremlin logic means regime change in Kyiv—both younger Russians and older, more conservative generations are “unusually” aligned in blaming the West for forcing Putin into war.

The report continues by asking what lies behind this broad support for the war. Peter Eltsov, a Russia expert at the US National Defense University, says: “For many Russians, the complete loss of Ukraine is almost equivalent to Americans losing part of the southwestern United States.” He also notes that even some prominent intellectuals, including Nobel Prize–winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, supported Putin’s claims regarding Ukraine. According to him, many Russians agree with Putin’s 2021 assertion that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people; a single whole.” He also referred to “Kievan Rus,” the kingdom that more than a thousand years ago was ruled from present-day Kyiv by Vladimir the Great, as the “cradle of Russian civilization.”

Moreover, Russian casualties in the war—due to Putin’s policy of relying heavily on forces often with criminal backgrounds or lacking clear career prospects—have had far less impact on public opinion than expected. Western sanctions, too, have not stopped Moscow as hoped. Snegovaya adds: “Russia’s economic situation is deteriorating, but this stagnation does not necessarily amount to a crisis, and so far it has been tolerable.” Recently, to highlight his international leverage, Putin traveled to India shortly after meeting Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s envoys, where he signed a series of economic and military agreements with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In any case, the conclusion is relatively clear: in the West, there appears to be almost no consensus, while in Russia, the majority of society remains, for now, largely unified. In addition, battlefield conditions, including the onset of winter, favor the Russian army rather than the forces of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who continue to struggle with shortages of manpower and ammunition and, according to numerous military assessments, suffer from frequent power outages.

What Trump’s National Security Strategy Means for the Kremlin

In the ten months since Trump took office, it has become clear that not only is there no real common ground between the United States and Europe on Ukraine, but perhaps the very notion of a “united West” no longer exists. This situation partly stems from differing interpretations of the meaning of the attack on Ukraine: Europe views it as an existential threat, while many officials in the Trump administration believe the United States should essentially distance itself from the war. According to some observers, however, the rift goes far beyond this and extends into outright disdain expressed by Trump and, simultaneously, his vice president J.D. Vance and other officials aligned with the “MAGA” movement toward Europe and its values—values they see as overly liberal and progressive—at a time when Europe itself is grappling with questions of identity.

Vance and many “MAGA” figures lean toward a form of Christian nationalism from which the European Union has long distanced itself. Vance, who must now be considered a potential successor to Trump and is likely the most hardline critic of Europe within the administration, enjoys comparing EU officials to Soviet-style “commissars.” According to Foreign Policy, all these developments fit within Putin’s long-term objective, described by renowned British Russia analyst Mark Galeotti as: “Russia’s efforts to undermine Western cohesion and exploit the fact that a collection of democracies inevitably produces internal disagreements and conflicts.” In this context, the claim persists that Putin may, in effect, have found a kind of fifth column within the Trump administration—something even he may not have anticipated—especially given the extent to which Kremlin operatives worked to secure Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.

In this regard, according to a US Defense Department official, Trump is so insistent on shaping this new relationship with Moscow that the Pentagon has gradually removed Russia from the list of potential strategic adversaries in several war games conducted outside the NATO framework. At the same time, the deep divide between the United States and Europe—particularly in outlook and policy—has been confirmed in the clearest terms by Trump’s new “National Security Strategy” document.

The document states that Europe faces a “civilizational extinction scenario,” attributing much of this to immigration policies that have eroded the continent’s “Western identity.” Nonetheless, the document appears to discredit the entire post–World War II European project—a decades-long process through which Europe built a common market and currency from the ruins of the war—and criticizes the European Union merely as a supranational organization that “crushes sovereignty.” In coded language, the new strategy also implicitly aligns with Vance’s well-known remarks at the Munich Security Conference last February and endorses the rise of far-right nationalist movements in Europe, including Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) and France’s National Rally—both supported by Putin and Trump and as reluctant as Vance to defend Ukraine.

The report further notes that while the strategy asserts that Europe remains strategically and culturally vital to the United States, it warns: “If current trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in less than 20 years. Therefore, it is far from clear whether some European countries will retain strong economies and militaries capable of remaining reliable allies.”

Europe Cautious and Seeking Strategic Autonomy—Unsuccessfully

In another blow to Ukraine’s hopes, the US National Security Strategy states that European leaders uniformly harbor unrealistic expectations about the Ukraine war while governing unstable minority governments, many of which, it claims, violate fundamental democratic principles to suppress opposition. The document emphasizes that Washington will pursue a policy of “ending the perception and preventing the realization of NATO as an ever-expanding alliance.” For many European diplomats, Trump’s hostility toward them and his inconsistency on Ukraine have turned Washington into a completely unreadable “black box.”

Only in September did Trump, after sharply criticizing Zelensky earlier in the year for “having no cards to play,” change his tone and write that Ukraine was now “in a position to reclaim all its territory in its original form.” Trump even began imposing secondary sanctions that could target Russia’s economic lifelines and its oil and gas exports. Then, suddenly, in mid-November, Trump reversed course again by presenting the 28-point Witkoff–Kushner plan, which many Europeans and even Trump’s Republican colleagues regarded as little more than Russian talking points. Just days later, facing serious opposition from Republican hawks in Congress, Trump temporarily retreated and sent Secretary of State Marco Rubio to help revise the plan into one more favorable to Ukraine.

Yet in an interview with Politico this week, Trump appeared once again to revert to his earlier stance, emphasizing that the burden lies with Ukraine to capitulate. He said Russia holds the upper hand and that Zelensky must begin cooperating and accepting the terms. Thus, the outcome once again seems to be a stalemate, with governments on both sides of the Atlantic entering what one European diplomat described as a “dialogue of the deaf.” Europe continues cautiously along this path, although true strategic autonomy from the United States, as called for by French President Emmanuel Macron, remains out of reach.