The Peace Ukraine Can Live With

By Matthew Parish

Wednesday 9 September 2026

There is an uncomfortable truth about peace negotiations that Ukrainians understand better than most Western politicians, because they have learned it through experience at an almost unimaginable price: peace and security are not the same thing. A ceasefire may stop people dying tomorrow while establishing the circumstances in which considerably more people die five years later. A peace treaty may resolve a war, or it may merely postpone one. Territorial compromise may represent a pragmatic acceptance of military reality, but it may equally provide an aggressor with an improved starting position from which to launch her next invasion.

Ukraine knows all this because she has already tried the alternative. There were agreements after Russia’s first invasion in 2014. There were ceasefires, negotiations, international monitors and the Minsk agreements, with their characteristically diplomatic ambiguities under which everybody could claim that their essential interests had been preserved. Yet none of these arrangements resolved the fundamental problem, which was that Russia had not reconciled herself to the existence of an independent Ukraine pursuing a political future beyond Moscow’s control. On 24 February 2022 Russia invaded again, on a vastly greater scale, and much of the diplomatic architecture constructed since 2014 was revealed to have been little more than paper.

This history ought to dominate Ukrainian thinking as another American attempt to end the war gathers momentum. American diplomacy has returned to the familiar problems of territory, security guarantees, sanctions, reconstruction and Ukraine’s future relationship with NATO and the European Union. Russia continues to want Ukrainian territory she does not presently control, while Ukraine understandably refuses simply to hand it over. Yet territory, important though it is, should not ultimately be the central question by which any agreement is judged. The more important question is what happens after the agreement has been signed and the armies have stopped moving.

Ukraine should be prepared to compromise substantially to end this terrible war. She should not compromise upon anything that determines whether Russia can successfully start it again. That distinction ought to define the Ukrainian red lines.

The value of peace

After more than four years of full-scale war, it is easy for people sitting safely in London, Washington, Paris or Brussels to insist that Ukraine must continue fighting until perfect justice has been achieved. They are not the people doing the fighting, nor in most cases are their families sheltering from Shahed drones, ballistic missiles and glide bombs. The burden of an uncompromising Western position falls overwhelmingly upon Ukrainians themselves.

Ukraine has suffered destruction on a scale difficult for outsiders fully to comprehend. Cities and villages have been damaged or obliterated, millions of Ukrainians have been displaced and families have been divided across continents. Soldiers have spent years rotating through trenches, ruined industrial settlements and devastated tree lines. Civilians have adapted their lives to air-raid sirens, electricity shortages and the knowledge that an ordinary night’s sleep may be interrupted by an explosion. Children who were infants when the full-scale invasion began are growing up knowing the location of the nearest bomb shelter. The demographic consequences of the war may remain with Ukraine long after the physical damage has been repaired.

Peace therefore has an immense value in itself, and this needs saying because arguments about territorial compromise sometimes acquire a strange moral abstraction. A map is displayed, a line is drawn and commentators announce that Ukraine must never surrender another square kilometre. Yet every kilometre has a human price. If recovering some occupied territory requires another three years of war and hundreds of thousands of additional dead and wounded, a Ukrainian government is entitled — indeed obliged — to ask whether that price is bearable. States exist for their people, not their people for maps.

Precisely the same reasoning, however, operates in the opposite direction. A settlement that makes another Russian invasion probable does not save lives in any meaningful sense. It merely postpones their loss. Hence Ukraine needs neither maximalism nor capitulation. She needs a peace constructed around the requirements of her survival.

Sovereignty is not the same thing as control

The territorial question becomes somewhat easier to analyse once two concepts are separated that are too frequently conflated. Sovereignty is not the same thing as control. Russia presently controls substantial amounts of internationally recognised Ukrainian territory. Ukraine need not recognise that territory as Russian merely because Russian soldiers occupy it, and neither need the rest of the international community.

This distinction offers negotiators considerable room for manoeuvre. Ukraine could conceivably accept that she will not attempt to recover certain occupied territories by military force for the duration of a settlement without recognising Russian sovereignty over them. The fighting would stop, the line of contact would acquire some form of armistice status and the underlying legal question would remain unresolved. International affairs contain numerous territorial disputes that have persisted for decades without preventing the states involved from developing, trading and prospering.

For Ukraine this distinction is indispensable. Formal recognition that military conquest changes lawful sovereignty would establish an appalling principle, not merely for Ukraine but for the international system. It would also be politically poisonous inside the country and entirely unnecessary to the practical business of stopping the war. Russia does not need Ukrainian recognition of her sovereignty over occupied territory in order to order her soldiers to stop shooting. She requires a practical arrangement governing who controls what and under what conditions.

A peace settlement can therefore acknowledge that the parties disagree fundamentally about sovereignty and leave the matter unresolved. There is a tendency in international diplomacy to imagine that every dispute must be resolved in a single grand settlement. This is rarely true. Sometimes the wisest solution to an insoluble question is to postpone it.

The parts of Donetsk Russia does not control

A much harder problem concerns territory Russia claims but has failed to conquer. Moscow has repeatedly demanded that Ukraine withdraw from the remaining Ukrainian-held parts of Donetsk Oblast, including territory associated with the important defensive belt around Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. This is not equivalent to freezing the existing line of control. It would require Ukraine voluntarily to surrender territory, settlements and military positions that Russia has been unable to take through years of fighting.

Ukraine should be extraordinarily reluctant to do this. Freezing an existing front line recognises an unpleasant military reality; ordering the Ukrainian Armed Forces to abandon fortified positions awards Russia through diplomacy something she has failed to obtain through war. Worse still, those defensive positions protect the Ukrainian territory behind them. An agreement under which Ukrainian forces withdrew while Russian forces remained capable of advancing into the evacuated space might leave Ukraine strategically weaker on the first day of peace than she was on the last day of war.

If Washington concludes that some special arrangement for the remaining disputed portions of Donetsk is indispensable to securing Russian agreement, then there are more imaginative possibilities than unilateral Ukrainian withdrawal. A demilitarised zone might conceivably be negotiated, but only with reciprocal Russian withdrawals. An internationally supervised economic zone might be possible. There could be some form of interim administration or special regime without prejudice to ultimate sovereignty. The details would inevitably be difficult and perhaps unpleasant, but the governing principle should be simple: no territorial arrangement should leave Russia in a materially better military position from which to begin the next war.

Ukraine’s army is her principal security guarantee

One of the most dangerous ideas to have appeared in various proposals for ending the war is that the size or capabilities of the Ukrainian Armed Forces should be restricted as part of the settlement. Ukraine should reject any such proposal unless it forms part of a genuinely reciprocal arms-control regime imposing equivalent and verifiable constraints upon Russia.

Ukraine’s greatest security guarantee is not a treaty, an international conference or a solemn declaration issued by foreign governments. It is her own Armed Forces. This is not because alliances and guarantees are worthless, but because every external guarantee ultimately depends upon a political decision by somebody else. Ukraine’s own capacity to resist aggression does not.

Russia possesses a vastly larger population, enormous military-industrial resources and nuclear weapons. She has invaded Ukraine repeatedly. No prudent Ukrainian government can therefore accept a treaty deliberately weakening the country’s ability to resist a third invasion. There should be no externally imposed ceiling upon Ukrainian military personnel, no prohibition upon Ukrainian drones or long-range conventional weapons, no artificial restriction upon air defence or ammunition stockpiles and no prohibition upon the development of Ukraine’s increasingly sophisticated domestic defence industry.

Ukraine might sensibly negotiate reciprocal confidence-building arrangements with Russia. There may be merit in mutually agreed restrictions upon the positioning of particular categories of weapon near an armistice line, transparency measures or other conventional arms-control mechanisms. Yet reciprocal arms control is entirely different from unilateral Ukrainian demilitarisation. The former can increase stability; the latter merely prepares the battlefield for Russia.

NATO may be negotiable

This brings us to what may be the most emotionally difficult compromise. Ukraine may ultimately have to accept that NATO membership will not form part of the settlement ending this war. This would be deeply unjust. Russia has no legitimate right to veto the alliances chosen by a sovereign neighbouring state, and NATO did not invade Russia; Russia invaded Ukraine. Nevertheless diplomacy is concerned not only with principles but with achievable outcomes.

If Ukraine receives the substantive protections that NATO membership is intended to provide, then the label becomes less important than the underlying security architecture. What Ukraine cannot safely accept is exclusion from NATO combined with weak or discretionary security assurances. That would reproduce the strategic ambiguity that helped create the present catastrophe.

Ukraine has particular reason to be sceptical about beautifully drafted promises. She surrendered the nuclear arsenal left upon her territory after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and received security assurances in the Budapest Memorandum. Those assurances did not save Crimea in 2014 and they did not prevent the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Ukraine has therefore earned the right to insist that any substitute for NATO membership must consist of practical mechanisms rather than diplomatic prose.

What a security guarantee must mean

The expression “security guarantee” is dangerously vague because almost anything can be described in those terms. A promise to consult after an attack may be called a security guarantee, as may an undertaking to convene an emergency meeting or consider additional sanctions. None of these things will stop a Russian tank or intercept a ballistic missile.

Ukraine needs commitments sufficiently concrete that Russian military planners can calculate the consequences before they begin another invasion. The principal Western powers should therefore determine in advance what happens after specified categories of Russian violation. If Russian forces cross an agreed armistice line, predetermined weapons deliveries might commence automatically. If Russia resumes systematic missile attacks upon Ukrainian cities, specified sanctions could snap back. If Russia begins another major invasion, Western intelligence, logistics, air defence and military support should expand according to arrangements agreed before the crisis rather than improvised in its midst.

The essential concept is automaticity. Deterrence becomes weaker whenever Moscow

believes that another act of aggression will be followed by several weeks of European summits, American political arguments and debates about proportionality. The time for those arguments is before the peace agreement is signed. The settlement should tell Russia what will happen if she breaks it.

There is a deeper point here about international agreements. Treaties are most effective not when they presume good faith but when they organise incentives in circumstances in which good faith may be absent. Ukraine has no reason to trust Russia. Nor does a successful peace require her to do so. It requires an arrangement under which renewed aggression is manifestly contrary to Russia’s interests.

Western troops and the architecture of deterrence

The question whether European military personnel should remain in Ukraine after a settlement is more complicated. Russia objects vehemently to the idea, which is itself an indication that their presence might have deterrent value. Nevertheless there are configurations short of placing enormous NATO combat formations along the armistice line.

European personnel might train Ukrainian forces, support air defence and logistics, participate in monitoring arrangements or be stationed principally in western and central Ukraine. A multinational force might protect designated infrastructure or perform verification functions. There are many possible arrangements and their precise composition should be negotiable.

What should not be negotiable is the proposition that Russia acquires comprehensive authority over Ukraine’s future relationships with other European states. A peace settlement may legitimately address concrete Russian security concerns. It should not convert Ukraine into a Russian protectorate by another name.

Europe must remain Ukraine’s future

If NATO membership may prove negotiable, membership of the European Union should not. The distinction is important because the European Union is not principally a military alliance. Ukraine’s integration into Europe concerns law, institutions, markets, investment, governance and ultimately the political and cultural direction in which she chooses to develop.

Russia should possess no veto over this. Indeed European integration may ultimately prove one of the most important guarantees of Ukrainian survival because the greatest strategic Ukrainian victory after the war would not necessarily be measured in territory. It would be measured in success.

Imagine Ukraine fifteen years after a durable peace: reconstructed cities, modern infrastructure, substantial European investment, a sophisticated defence industry, millions of Ukrainians returning from abroad, rising salaries, functioning institutions and full participation in the European single market. Imagine, alongside this, a Russia still struggling with the consequences of militarisation, demographic decline and authoritarian stagnation. The comparison would speak more powerfully than any propaganda campaign.

A prosperous democratic Ukraine would represent a profound defeat for the ideology underlying Russia’s invasion because she would demonstrate that a large, culturally complex, predominantly Slavic post-Soviet state can flourish outside Moscow’s political orbit. Russia’s war has always been about more than territory. It has also been about preventing precisely this possibility.

Reconstruction is national security

For the same reason, reconstruction should not be regarded as an economic appendix to a peace settlement. It belongs at its centre. A poor, depopulated and traumatised post-war Ukraine would remain vulnerable to Russian political pressure, subversion and renewed military aggression. A prosperous Ukraine integrated into European markets and institutions would be considerably harder to destabilise.

Reconstruction will necessarily involve repairing energy infrastructure, housing, railways, roads, hospitals and schools, together with the enormous tasks of demining and environmental remediation. Yet Ukraine should resist the temptation simply to recreate the country as she existed in January 2022. The objective should be to construct the Ukraine of 2040: modern railways and logistics, distributed energy systems less vulnerable to Russian attack, advanced manufacturing, defence technology, artificial intelligence, modernised agriculture and cities capable of attracting back the millions of Ukrainians who have spent the war living elsewhere in Europe.

This is also why economic guarantees and military guarantees cannot sensibly be separated. International investors will not build factories in Ukraine if they expect Russian missiles to destroy them three years later. Ukrainians living abroad will be reluctant to return permanently if they expect their children to endure another invasion. Security creates investment and investment creates resilience. Reconstruction, properly conceived, is therefore part of deterrence.

Sanctions should enforce the peace

Western sanctions against Russia should not disappear merely because a peace agreement has been signed. To do so would squander one of the West’s principal mechanisms for ensuring that Russia observes the agreement after receiving the immediate benefit she wants most: an end to hostilities on terms she can present domestically as acceptable.

Instead sanctions should be removed progressively as Russia performs specified obligations. A verified ceasefire might justify one stage of relief. Agreed withdrawals might justify another. The return of prisoners, civilian detainees and abducted Ukrainian children might produce further relief. Successful operation of monitoring mechanisms and a sustained absence of violations could lead gradually towards wider economic normalisation.

The process should take years rather than weeks. Equally importantly, material violations should produce automatic consequences. Sanctions should return according to a pre-agreed mechanism rather than after months of diplomatic argument. The Kremlin should understand from the outset that the economic benefits of peace depend upon the continuation of peace.

This is preferable to permanent sanctions as well as immediate sanctions relief. If Russia knows that sanctions will remain forever regardless of her behaviour, then they cease to provide an incentive for compliance. If they disappear immediately, the West throws away its leverage. Conditional and reversible relief makes economic normalisation something Russia must continue to earn.

Russian assets as security

The same logic applies to frozen Russian sovereign assets. Whatever conclusions lawyers ultimately reach about the legality of confiscating the principal, these assets represent substantial negotiating leverage and Ukraine should resist any settlement under which they are simply returned to Moscow upon signature.

Some portion should support Ukrainian reconstruction wherever a lawful mechanism exists. A substantial residual pool could also be retained against Russian performance. If Russia complies with the settlement for agreed periods, portions might progressively be released. If she invades again, the remaining assets could become available for Ukrainian reconstruction, defence or compensation subject to the applicable legal architecture.

The concept is essentially that of a security deposit. Russia wants her money back. That desire is useful. A successful settlement should ensure that she has valuable things to lose if she returns to war.

Ukrainian democracy belongs to Ukrainians

Ukraine will obviously require elections after the war. Martial law cannot continue indefinitely and democratic renewal after years of conflict will be essential both domestically and to Ukraine’s European future. Yet Russia should have no role in determining when those elections occur.

Elections require conditions in which millions of displaced Ukrainians can participate, soldiers can vote, political parties can campaign and candidates can travel without polling stations being struck by missiles. There will also be difficult constitutional and practical questions concerning refugees, occupied territories, voter registers and demobilised servicemen.

These matters should be resolved according to Ukrainian constitutional law and democratic necessity. Russia invaded Ukraine. That fact does not confer upon her the right to write Ukraine’s electoral calendar.

The human questions

Certain issues should stand apart from geopolitical bargaining altogether. Prisoners of war must be exchanged, civilian detainees must return and Ukrainian children unlawfully transferred into Russian-controlled territory must be brought home. Families need reliable information about the missing and the bodies of the dead must be identified and repatriated wherever possible.

These are not peripheral humanitarian details to be addressed once important men have finished discussing maps. They concern human beings whose lives have already been consumed by decisions made in presidential offices. Any peace agreement congratulating itself upon resolving territorial questions while leaving thousands of families searching for children, husbands, wives or parents would be morally grotesque. Peace must bring people home.

No legal recognition of conquest

There is another red line whose significance extends far beyond Ukraine. Kyiv should not be required formally to recognise that Russian military conquest has created lawful Russian sovereignty over Ukrainian territory. This is sometimes dismissed as symbolism, but international law operates partly through the refusal to legitimise certain facts created by force.

If invading a neighbouring state, occupying territory, deporting parts of her population and waiting long enough eventually produces internationally recognised legal title, then the lesson to every revisionist power is obvious: war works. Ukraine can accept practical realities without blessing them. She can postpone sovereignty disputes, agree not to use force to alter an armistice line and negotiate practical arrangements for civilians on either side. None of this requires her to sign a document declaring that invasion lawfully transferred Ukrainian territory to Russia.

Time can deal with the sovereignty question. Peace does not require every historical dispute to be resolved at once.

No second Minsk

Above everything else, Ukraine should insist upon clarity. The Minsk process became entangled in competing interpretations, sequencing disputes and provisions the parties understood differently. A future settlement should minimise constructive ambiguity rather than celebrate it.

Who withdraws, from where and by what date? Who monitors the withdrawal? What constitutes a violation? Who determines whether one has occurred? What happens if Russia refuses inspectors? Which sanctions return after a material breach? What military assistance follows renewed aggression? What happens if supposedly unidentified armed formations appear in disputed territory? These questions should be answered before the agreement is signed.

The more boring the final treaty appears, the better. Lawyers should be permitted to perform their peculiar craft of imagining everything that can go wrong, because in Ukraine almost everything that could go wrong with previous agreements eventually did.

What Ukraine can concede

A viable Ukrainian negotiating position may therefore contain substantially more flexibility than either maximalists or defeatists imagine. Ukraine could potentially accept the indefinite postponement of NATO membership if meaningful alternative security arrangements exist. She could accept an armistice along something close to the eventual line of control and undertake not to recover occupied territory by military force while the settlement remains in effect. She could accept that the ultimate sovereignty of occupied territories remains unresolved, participate in special economic arrangements in contested areas where these do not prejudice sovereignty and agree to reciprocal military confidence-building measures.

Ukraine could also support phased sanctions relief as Russia performs her obligations. She need not object in principle to eventual renewed Western economic engagement with Russia. Nor need she care greatly if Vladimir Putin describes the settlement to his domestic audience as a glorious Russian victory. Ukraine does not need to control Russian television. If Putin requires a parade in Red Square in order to stop killing Ukrainians, then let him have his parade. What matters is the substance of the settlement and the strategic position it leaves behind.

What Ukraine cannot concede

The genuine red lines are fewer but considerably more important. Ukraine cannot safely accept substantial unilateral demilitarisation or surrender the defence-industrial capacity that has become one of the principal foundations of her national survival. She cannot allow Russia to veto her integration into the European Union. She cannot rely upon security assurances drafted so vaguely that Western governments retain complete discretion whether to honour them. She should not abandon strategically vital territory without reciprocal arrangements ensuring that her defensive position is no worse afterwards.

Nor should Ukraine recognise military conquest as lawful sovereignty merely to decorate the settlement with an appearance of finality. She should not allow Russia to dictate the operation of Ukrainian democracy and she cannot accept an arrangement under which every Russian violation simply results in another diplomatic conference at which Ukraine is pressured to make another concession. The next agreement must contain consequences.

The Korean possibility

The uncomfortable historical analogy may ultimately be Korea rather than Versailles. The Korean War did not conclude with a comprehensive political reconciliation resolving every dispute between North and South. An armistice froze the military reality while leaving profound political and territorial questions unanswered. More than seventy years later, the peninsula remains divided.

This is hardly an inspiring model and Ukraine’s circumstances are in many respects different. Yet South Korea survived, and then she prospered. Over time the economic, technological and political disparity between the two Korean states became overwhelming. The armistice did not solve Korea’s historical problems, but it created the space in which one Korean state could build an extraordinary future.

There is a lesson here for Ukraine. It is not necessary to resolve every historical grievance before people stop shooting. Sometimes the wiser strategy is to stop the war, secure the line, construct an immensely strong and prosperous state behind it and permit history to work upon the unresolved questions.

Ukraine’s objective should therefore not necessarily be the perfect peace treaty. Perfect peace treaties exist principally in the imaginations of diplomats. Her objective should be a durable strategic environment in which Ukraine becomes stronger with every passing year while Russia’s capacity to reverse the settlement becomes progressively weaker. That would be victory of another kind.

The test of every clause

There is a simple question Ukrainian negotiators should ask about every provision placed before them: if Russia decides to invade again in five or ten years, does this clause leave Ukraine safer or more vulnerable?

A strong Ukrainian army leaves her safer. European integration leaves her safer. Automatic sanctions snapback leaves her safer. Western intelligence cooperation leaves her safer. A reconstructed and decentralised energy system leaves her safer. A flourishing domestic defence industry leaves her safer.

A ceiling upon Ukrainian military personnel leaves her more vulnerable. Restrictions upon Ukrainian missiles while Russia retains her own leave her more vulnerable. Abandoning fortified territory without reciprocal Russian withdrawal leaves her more vulnerable. A vague promise that Western governments will consult after another invasion leaves her more vulnerable.

Once this test is applied relentlessly, much of the apparent complexity surrounding the peace negotiations disappears. The purpose of the agreement is not merely to end the present war. It is to prevent the next one.

Peace without illusions

Ukraine may soon face extraordinarily painful decisions and there is no reason to disguise them in diplomatic euphemism. Some Ukrainian territory may remain under Russian occupation for years or decades. Families may discover that the villages in which they were born lie upon the other side of an armistice line. Politicians signing such an agreement may be accused of betrayal. Soldiers who watched their friends die liberating Ukrainian territory may understandably ask why other territory is being left behind. No signing ceremony and no collection of flags in an ornate European conference room can make these things painless.

Yet statesmanship sometimes consists of distinguishing what is unbearable from what is impossible. Ukraine does not require a settlement that satisfies every historical claim in 2026. She requires one that ensures there will still be a sovereign, democratic, European and increasingly prosperous Ukraine in 2050.

That will require compromise, perhaps very painful compromise. It will also require absolute clarity about those things that must never be compromised. Ukraine can negotiate about territory, sanctions, NATO, economic arrangements, monitoring mechanisms and the sequencing of withdrawals. She cannot negotiate away the means of her own survival.

This is the central lesson of everything that has happened since 2014. Ukraine once possessed agreements, assurances, monitors and diplomatic processes. Russia invaded anyway. The next settlement must therefore rest not upon trust but upon incentives, deterrence and power. Trust may come later, perhaps much later, and perhaps it will never come at all. A durable peace does not require Ukrainians to trust Russia; it requires Russia to understand that violating the peace would be a catastrophic strategic mistake.

The United States can offer Russia economic rehabilitation. Europe can offer Ukraine integration. Sanctions can provide enforcement, frozen assets can provide leverage and diplomacy can establish an armistice. Nevertheless the most important guarantee of Ukrainian peace will remain the existence of a strong Ukrainian state, protected by formidable Armed Forces and embedded economically and politically within Europe.

The Kremlin must understand one proposition above all others: if Russia attacks Ukraine again, she will lose more than she can possibly gain.

That is the peace Ukraine can live with, because it is the peace Russia will be afraid to break.