Three dangerous illusions about ending the war in Ukraine

A Ukrainian soldier in a trench during a combat mission in the Donetsk region of Ukraine in February 2024. Photo: Shutterstock

What would it take for the war in Ukraine to end in a way that lasts? Not a pause, but a durable peace, one in which Russia is neither willing nor able to threaten Ukraine, destabilize Europe, or support aggression in other parts of the world. That is the standard any serious strategy must meet.

Most western debates about how to get there still begin from a comforting premise: that a ceasefire, a leadership change in Moscow, or a negotiated settlement will restore something like the old order. The problem is that the old order is what produced this war. Before we can build a strategy for what comes next, we need to let go of three illusions that continue to shape, and distort, western thinking.

Illusion 1: democracy is just one good election away

Western policymakers have spent decades looking for a democratic Russia just beyond the next political crisis. The “after-Putin” reflex is deeply embedded and amounts to the assumption that the current regime is an aberration. Once it passes, something more familiar and manageable will take its place.

Missing foundations

The problem with this assumption is that democracy requires more than elections. It needs institutions that constrain power: parties that compete, independent media that investigate, courts that resist the executive, and a bureaucracy that does not treat politics as security work. In Russia, these foundations were never properly built. What exists is a system designed for control, with coercion and propaganda used as routine tools of governance.

The weight of path dependence

The historian Douglass North, whose work on institutional path dependence earned him the Nobel Prize, showed that societies tend to reproduce the institutional patterns they already know, especially under stress. Russia’s trajectory fits this pattern almost too neatly. The only plausible democratic window, the brief and chaotic period between the Soviet collapse in 1991 and the shelling of parliament in 1993, lasted barely two years. The Bolotnaya protests of 2011–12 flickered into life and were extinguished even faster than they appeared. Each opening has been shorter and weaker than the last, and each closure more thorough. As the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev observed: “From February to October 1917, all possible parties and ideas paraded before the Russian gaze. And what did the Russian man choose? What he had all along: the Tsar and the Empire.”

The limits of the opposition bet

For years, the West invested in supporting Russian opposition figures and independent media, hoping their influence would eventually catalyse change from within. The results have been sobering. Opposition media inside Russia largely speak to the already converted, trapped inside an information bubble that barely dents the broader public consciousness.

The opposition itself remains fragmented, without a coherent agenda or unified vision for Russia’s future. Many of its prominent voices have been slow to confront the deeper problem of Russia’s imperial heritage. For years, leading opposition figures such as Alexei Navalny avoided taking an unambiguous position on Crimea and the rights of nations living within the Russian Federation. The old political proverb of “Russian liberalism ends at the border with Ukraine” proved difficult to shake.

When policymakers treat democratic transition as the expected outcome, they under-invest in everything else: containment, alliance resilience, long-term defence capacity. The illusion is not harmless. It shapes where money goes and where attention is directed, and both tend to flow toward the most comforting scenario rather than the most probable one.

Illusion 2: a ceasefire equals peace

A ceasefire can stop people dying tomorrow. It does not, by itself, remove the forces that will produce the next war. A ceasefire that leaves the imperial machinery intact is not peace. It is an intermission.

The word itself performs a kind of cognitive trick as it implies that silence on the front line means the conflict has stopped. But war is not only what happens between trenches. When a society reorganizes its education, its media, its public rituals, and its children’s aspirations around permanent confrontation, the war continues in a different form. What makes Russia’s case especially dangerous is that Moscow is treating this reorganization as infrastructure, not as a temporary wartime measure.

Raising the next war generation

It is important to consider what the Kremlin is doing with children. In 2025, it doubled budget funding for the Yunarmiya or “Youth Army”, a state-backed movement that mixes loyalty rituals with basic military training. In June, authorities lowered the minimum age for drone piloting competitions to seven. A month later, officials in Perm announced that six kindergartens would set up drone training hubs. Framed as “technical education”, this amounts to very early conditioning in a child’s life. Rewards are given to children for military-relevant skills and include public praise, turning war technology into a source of identity and pride.

The enemy is already Europe

The Kremlin has also redirected the object of hostility. In a Levada Centre survey from May 2025, Russians named Germany (55 per cent) and the UK (49 per cent) as the most “hostile” countries, ahead of Ukraine (43 per cent). As a result, the main enemy is framed as Europe and the wider West, not just Ukraine. A ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine does not resolve a confrontation that the Russian public increasingly understands as civilizational.

Beneath the propaganda sits something more structural. The Kremlin has built a coherent ideological framework of “Russian civilization” besieged by a decadent West. This is not Brezhnev-era cynicism where nobody believed the slogans. Polling suggests genuine internalization among younger cohorts, the very people who will be making decisions in ten or twenty years. You can sign a ceasefire. You cannot sign away an ideology.

An economy that cannot demobilize

The war economy reinforces this. Russia’s military spending has more than doubled since 2021, from around 3.6 per cent of GDP to 7.5 per cent of GDP in 2025, when it reached approximately 16 trillion rubles.

That spending has created new beneficiaries: defence industrialists, regional governors whose employment numbers depend on military orders, and a growing veteran class expecting permanent support. Demobilization now threatens not just the war effort but the domestic political settlement that has formed around it. Like the education system already reshaping the next generation, the war economy generates its own momentum. The longer it runs, the harder it becomes to reverse.

A frozen conflict does not freeze this transformation. It merely freezes the front line while the reshaping of Russian society accelerates behind it. Russia will not pause its youth programmes, its ideological conditioning, or its economic restructuring simply because the guns go quiet. The machine does not stop. Every month of continued conditioning without counter-pressure makes reversal harder. Time is not neutral in this equation. It works for the side that is actively using it.

Illusion 3: the existing toolkit can manage Russia

The most dangerous kind of self-reassurance sounds like this: “Our tools are working, just slowly.” Sanctions hurt. Deterrence holds. Isolation bites. Each of these is partially true, and each is becoming less true over time. That is what gradual erosion looks like. It is not a dramatic failure, but a slow loss of grip that is easier to rationalize than to confront.

The authoritarian supply chain

Russia is tightening its alignment with other authoritarian states, and this understanding is becoming more practical with each passing year. The relationship that brings Russia together with China, Iran and North Korea is a resilient network in which each partner provides what the others need, whether that is technology, ammunition, diplomatic cover, energy markets, or financial workarounds.

Geography is reinforcing this trend. As Arctic ice retreats, the Northern Sea Route is becoming a viable corridor for Russia-China trade and a way to reduce dependence on western-controlled logistics chokepoints. Western leverage over Russia depends on a focus on controlling the key nodes of global finance and shipping. Every alternative route or financial channel that opens dilutes that concentration. Over time, this reduces the West’s ability to impose meaningful costs and increases Moscow’s confidence that it can outlast pressure.

Rethinking pressure: from defence to offense

What is missing from the western approach is the willingness to compete in the domains where Russia has chosen to fight. For years, Moscow has run persistent information operations, election interference campaigns, and cyber intrusions against dozens of democracies. The western response has been almost entirely reactive: fact-checking, content moderation, and attribution reports published long after the damage is done. For the last fifteen years, Russia has found an asymmetric domain of impact where the western world has consistently failed to engage.

The West needs to build, and visibly demonstrate, its own capabilities in the information and cyber domains. These cannot be employed only through covert improvisation but as declared instruments of statecraft. This means fact-based audience engagement aimed directly at Russian society through the gaps the Kremlin has not yet closed. It means cyber capabilities that can impose real costs on the infrastructure sustaining hostile operations. And it means combining economic, informational, and cyber pressure with the kind of timed kinetic action Ukrainians are already demonstrating with remarkable effect.

Together, these tools would send a clear signal that the rules Russia has been writing for the cognitive battlefield will now apply to both sides. Democracies have hesitated to enter this space out of legitimate concern about norms and escalation. However, abstaining from the contest has not preserved the norms. It has only conceded the field. Russia already expects Europe to act decisively. It is time to live up to those expectations.

A contest the West can win

There is reason to believe the information domain may be one of Russia’s real weaknesses and not a strength. The Kremlin obsessively tracks government approval ratings, monitors public discourse, and invests heavily in controlling the narrative. Russia’s draft 2026 budget actually cuts some bits of military spending while boosting funding for state-run media by 54 per cent, a signal of where Moscow sees its own vulnerabilities. The state has been aggressively pushing citizens onto a government-controlled messenger app called MAX and blocking VPN services. This accelerating crackdown reveals anxiety, not confidence. The Kremlin knows its grip on domestic information is fragile, and it is racing to close the gaps. The window for action in this space is narrowing.

Classical deterrence assumes the adversary is calculating costs and benefits within a shared rational framework. But if Russia has restructured its economy around war, conditioned its population for civilizational confrontation, and built alternative financial and logistical systems, the calculus that deterrence depends on has shifted. What the West considers “unacceptable costs” may be reframed inside Russia as the price of national greatness.

These three illusions share a common root: they mistake what we want Russia to become for what Russia is becoming.

For Russia to transform in the ways that lasting peace requires, the West must first transform its beliefs, its assumptions, and its tools and capabilities.

Until this is done, every pause in the fighting will work for Moscow and against Europe. A ceasefire is not a neutral interval. When one side uses time strategically and the other uses it for relief, the intermission itself becomes a weapon. What a serious western strategy might look like across the possible scenarios for Russia’s future is the subject of our next article.

Sviatoslav Hnizdovskyi is the Founder & CEO of OpenMinds.

Valerii Pekar is a chairman of the board of the Decolonization NGO, the author of four books, an adjunct professor at the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School and Business School of the Ukrainian Catholic University, and a former member of the National Reform Council.

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Ceasefire, peace talks, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine, war in Ukraine