At the end of the year
At the close of 2025, as the war in Ukraine enters its fourth year in full scale form, international attention once again turned to Florida. On 28 December 2025, President Volodymyr Zelensky met with President Donald Trump at Mar a Lago. The meeting was followed by closed door talks between delegations and a teleconference with several European leaders. Speaking to journalists afterwards, Trump declared that “we have come closer to the end of this cruel war,” listing European counterparts he had consulted, including the president of Poland.[1]
It was an end of year diplomatic scene carefully designed to signal urgency and momentum. Two leaders formally standing on the same side of the conflict discussed ways to bring it to an end, immediately triggering interpretation. Diplomatic activity itself was again read as evidence of progress. Some commentators saw the meeting as proof of Trump’s renewed determination to deliver on his long standing pledge to end the war. Others viewed it primarily as political theatre shaped by domestic considerations and year end optics.[2]
After years of war and repeated diplomatic initiatives that have failed to halt it, however, focusing exclusively on Western intentions and personalities risks obscuring the central analytical problem. To understand why moments such as the Florida meeting generate expectations they cannot fulfil, it is necessary to shift the lens. The decisive question is not what Washington signals at the end of the year, but how those signals are interpreted in Moscow.
After nearly four years of full scale war, and more than a decade since the conflict began in 2014, the Russian perspective is no longer simply one viewpoint among many. It is the reference point against which negotiations are assessed and calibrated. Only by returning to it can we understand why diplomacy has become more visible, why meetings proliferate, and yet why the underlying structure of the conflict remains stubbornly unchanged. As Europe enters 2026, movement has increased, but change has not.[3]
Continuity and political time
Since 2000, Vladimir Putin has remained Russia’s paramount decision maker. Over that same period, the United States has had five presidents, Germany six chancellors, France four presidents, and the European Union several institutional configurations. For the Kremlin, this asymmetry is not incidental. It is structural. Western positions are expected to fluctuate with electoral cycles, coalition politics, and shifts in public opinion, while Russian core interests are assumed to remain constant.
This assumption explains why Russian diplomacy often appears repetitive to Western audiences. It is repetition, but purposeful repetition. Negotiations are not treated as moments of rapid compromise, but as long duration processes designed to outlast political change on the other side. The objective is less to persuade today than to prevail tomorrow, when elections, fatigue, or political realignments alter what becomes acceptable in Western capitals.[4]
This long run approach predates the full scale invasion of Ukraine. It was visible, in unusually explicit form, in December 2021, when Russia presented the United States and NATO with draft security agreements demanding legally binding guarantees that Ukraine would never join NATO and calling for a rollback of NATO’s military posture in Eastern Europe.[5]
The crucial point for understanding the war is not simply that these demands were made, but that they were articulated before February 2022 and that their core has remained stable ever since. The war that began two months later did not introduce new Russian goals. It marked a shift from diplomatic signalling to coercive enforcement once it became clear that Western rejection of Russia’s demands was firm. From Moscow’s standpoint, February 2022 was not the failure of diplomacy, but its escalation.[6]
From early talks to managed diplomacy
The first weeks of the full scale invasion produced what, in retrospect, may have been the closest moment of direct Russia Ukraine negotiating contact at scale. Talks held in Belarus and later in Istanbul in March and April 2022 exposed a structural fault line that has not shifted since. Russia pressed variations of neutrality and long term constraints, while Ukraine sought meaningful and enforceable security guarantees. When these talks collapsed, it was not because channels were exhausted, but because the core strategic disagreement remained intact.[7]
Two lessons emerged clearly in Moscow. First, sustained Western backing could widen Ukraine’s bargaining horizon, reducing Kyiv’s willingness to accept arrangements that froze its strategic alignment. Second, any ceasefire not tied to binding strategic constraints risked becoming an operational pause rather than a step toward settlement. In Russian logic, sequencing process ahead of fundamentals is not neutral. It is a mechanism that enables rearmament, entrenchment, and the deepening of Western military commitments.
This logic explains the Kremlin’s consistent emphasis on so called root causes throughout the war. The central issue, from Moscow’s perspective, has never been a map, but the security architecture surrounding Ukraine. The House of Commons Library timeline shows that the crisis escalated in late 2021 and early 2022 precisely around disputes over NATO posture and Ukraine’s strategic trajectory, before Russia formally recognised the so called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics on 21 February 2022 and launched the invasion three days later.
As diplomacy resurfaced at the highest political level in 2025, this approach remained unchanged. The Trump Putin summit held in Anchorage, Alaska, on 15 August 2025 carried significant symbolic weight, reviving a model of leader driven and transactional diplomacy familiar to Moscow. Yet by most accounts the meeting produced no substantive shift in Russia’s position. Engagement was reaffirmed, but core demands remained anchored in the same conceptual framework centred on NATO and long term alignment.[8]
By late 2025, this continuity intersected with growing political pressure in the West to demonstrate progress. In Washington, debate focused for months on a so called 28 point Trump peace plan. However, on 24 December 2025 Reuters reported that Ukraine had moved to a revised 20 point proposal, explicitly described as an evolution of the earlier draft. The revision sought to narrow gaps while leaving key disputes unresolved, including territorial control and the status of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Four days later, the Trump Zelenskyy meeting in Florida took place against this backdrop, with public statements acknowledging both progress and the persistence of thorny issues.
This sequence illustrates a broader pattern. Western diplomacy increasingly seeks to translate political urgency into structured documents and visible processes. From Moscow’s perspective, however, documents do not alter the conflict’s structural parameters. They reframe them. For Kyiv, coalition alignment is existential. For the Kremlin, it is a variable to be tested, weakened, and outlasted rather than accommodated.
Witkoff as conduit: transactional diplomacy meets historical doctrine
Into this process stepped Steve Witkoff, a Trump envoy whose role became central precisely because he is not a traditional Russia hand. Reuters reported multiple Witkoff engagements with Moscow in 2025, including plans announced on 22 April 2025 for another Moscow trip, and later reporting on high-level meetings and the Kremlin’s staging of the encounters.
By 2 December 2025, Reuters reported Putin meeting Witkoff (and Jared Kushner) for over four hours in Moscow, underscoring how much the channel had become personal and direct.
For Moscow, Witkoff is useful not because he “knows Russia,” but because he embodies a negotiating style the Kremlin can work with: a deal-oriented, leader-proximate channel, less constrained by alliance doctrine. Yet the same features carry risk for the West: transactional bargaining can prioritise “closure” over enforceability, and optics over architecture.
The point is not that Witkoff is ineffective. The point is that Russia’s negotiating doctrine is not transactional in the same way. It seeks legally binding constraints, strategic rollback, and a redefinition of Europe’s security order. When the two styles meet, the Kremlin will almost always try to translate the transaction into structure.
What Russia is negotiating and where this leaves us in 2026
At this stage, the continuum becomes unavoidable. Even as diplomatic formats change and envoys shuttle between capitals, Moscow’s core position remains recognisable from December 2021. Ukraine cannot become a NATO platform. NATO must be constrained near Russia’s borders. The post Cold War security settlement in Europe must be revised. These elements have not shifted despite three years of war, sanctions, and negotiation.[9]
Territory matters in this framework, but it is not the primary axis of negotiation. It functions as leverage, symbolism, and bargaining capital, and often as a means of forcing recognition of a new security reality. The deeper dispute concerns alignment and enforcement. Who determines Ukraine’s long term security posture, and who guarantees it in practice.
This is why, in the Reuters account of the 28 December 2025 Florida meeting, security guarantees and so called thorny issues remain central. It also explains why President Zelenskyy repeatedly refers to domestic and constitutional limits on any potential concession, including the need for parliamentary approval or broader public endorsement.[10] From Moscow’s perspective, these constraints are not obstacles to negotiation. They are part of the negotiating terrain.
Seen in this light, the end of year momentum generated around Washington and Florida is not necessarily threatening to the Kremlin. It may even be useful. Every public Western investment in a plan creates political pressure to deliver results. Every declared deadline increases the temptation to trade long term enforceability for short term optics. Time, once again, becomes a strategic asset.
As Europe enters 2026, the diplomatic landscape appears crowded. A leader level summit in Anchorage in August. Geneva meetings in November. Shuttle diplomacy to Moscow in December. The highly mediatised Zelensky Trump encounter at the end of the year. Yet beneath this activity, the core structure remains intact.
Russia has not meaningfully revised the strategic logic it placed on the table before the war began. The West, for its part, has yet to resolve the central question of enforceability. Whether it is willing and able to offer security guarantees robust enough to make any settlement durable and to deter renewed coercion.
In that sense, the year ends not with closure, but with clarity. The negotiation is not primarily about discovering a new compromise. It is about whether the West will eventually treat Russia’s long standing demands as negotiable, and whether Russia can use time, pressure, and political cycles to make that happen.
For policymakers at the start of 2026, the principal risk is to mistake diplomatic activity for strategic change. For Moscow, diplomacy is part of the battlefield, and the battlefield is part of diplomacy. The continuum is not a background condition. It is the point.
Endnotes
[1] Reuters, Trump says progress made after meeting Zelenskiy in Florida, 28 December 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-says-progress-made-after-meeting-zelenskiy-florida-2025-12-28/
[2] Financial Times, Why Trump may struggle to force an end to the war in Ukraine, 3 December 2025.
https://www.ft.com/content/ukraine-trump-war-leverage-analysis
[3] House of Commons Library, Conflict in Ukraine A timeline 2014 present, updated 2025.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9847/
[4] Nik Hynek and Michal Šenk, Ukraine Russia peace plans historical lessons operationalising criteria and comparative assessment, Peacebuilding, November 2025.
https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2025.2585235
[5] Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Draft Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees, December 2021
[6] House of Commons Library, Conflict in Ukraine A timeline 2014 present, updated 2025.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9847/
[7] Anton Troianovski et al., Ukraine–Russia Peace Is as Elusive as Ever. But in 2022 They Were Talking, The New York Times, 15 June 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/15/world/europe/ukraine-russia-ceasefire-deal.html
[8] Reuters, Trump and Putin meet in Alaska as talks focus on Ukraine war, 15 August 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-putin-meet-alaska-ukraine-war-2025-08-15/
[9] Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Draft Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees, December 2021.
https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790803/
[10] Reuters, Trump says progress made after meeting Zelenskiy in Florida, 28 December 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-says-progress-made-after-meeting-zelenskiy-florida-2025-12-28/
Negotiating the Same War.
Autor foto: FKP
Negotiating the Same War. Russia’s Continuum, America’s Cycles, and Why Momentum Still Isn’t Change?
January 15, 2026
Author: Maciej Dachowski
Negotiating the Same War.
Autor foto: FKP
Negotiating the Same War. Russia’s Continuum, America’s Cycles, and Why Momentum Still Isn’t Change?
Author: Maciej Dachowski
Published: January 15, 2026
At the end of the year
At the close of 2025, as the war in Ukraine enters its fourth year in full scale form, international attention once again turned to Florida. On 28 December 2025, President Volodymyr Zelensky met with President Donald Trump at Mar a Lago. The meeting was followed by closed door talks between delegations and a teleconference with several European leaders. Speaking to journalists afterwards, Trump declared that “we have come closer to the end of this cruel war,” listing European counterparts he had consulted, including the president of Poland.[1]
It was an end of year diplomatic scene carefully designed to signal urgency and momentum. Two leaders formally standing on the same side of the conflict discussed ways to bring it to an end, immediately triggering interpretation. Diplomatic activity itself was again read as evidence of progress. Some commentators saw the meeting as proof of Trump’s renewed determination to deliver on his long standing pledge to end the war. Others viewed it primarily as political theatre shaped by domestic considerations and year end optics.[2]
After years of war and repeated diplomatic initiatives that have failed to halt it, however, focusing exclusively on Western intentions and personalities risks obscuring the central analytical problem. To understand why moments such as the Florida meeting generate expectations they cannot fulfil, it is necessary to shift the lens. The decisive question is not what Washington signals at the end of the year, but how those signals are interpreted in Moscow.
After nearly four years of full scale war, and more than a decade since the conflict began in 2014, the Russian perspective is no longer simply one viewpoint among many. It is the reference point against which negotiations are assessed and calibrated. Only by returning to it can we understand why diplomacy has become more visible, why meetings proliferate, and yet why the underlying structure of the conflict remains stubbornly unchanged. As Europe enters 2026, movement has increased, but change has not.[3]
Continuity and political time
Since 2000, Vladimir Putin has remained Russia’s paramount decision maker. Over that same period, the United States has had five presidents, Germany six chancellors, France four presidents, and the European Union several institutional configurations. For the Kremlin, this asymmetry is not incidental. It is structural. Western positions are expected to fluctuate with electoral cycles, coalition politics, and shifts in public opinion, while Russian core interests are assumed to remain constant.
This assumption explains why Russian diplomacy often appears repetitive to Western audiences. It is repetition, but purposeful repetition. Negotiations are not treated as moments of rapid compromise, but as long duration processes designed to outlast political change on the other side. The objective is less to persuade today than to prevail tomorrow, when elections, fatigue, or political realignments alter what becomes acceptable in Western capitals.[4]
This long run approach predates the full scale invasion of Ukraine. It was visible, in unusually explicit form, in December 2021, when Russia presented the United States and NATO with draft security agreements demanding legally binding guarantees that Ukraine would never join NATO and calling for a rollback of NATO’s military posture in Eastern Europe.[5]
The crucial point for understanding the war is not simply that these demands were made, but that they were articulated before February 2022 and that their core has remained stable ever since. The war that began two months later did not introduce new Russian goals. It marked a shift from diplomatic signalling to coercive enforcement once it became clear that Western rejection of Russia’s demands was firm. From Moscow’s standpoint, February 2022 was not the failure of diplomacy, but its escalation.[6]
From early talks to managed diplomacy
The first weeks of the full scale invasion produced what, in retrospect, may have been the closest moment of direct Russia Ukraine negotiating contact at scale. Talks held in Belarus and later in Istanbul in March and April 2022 exposed a structural fault line that has not shifted since. Russia pressed variations of neutrality and long term constraints, while Ukraine sought meaningful and enforceable security guarantees. When these talks collapsed, it was not because channels were exhausted, but because the core strategic disagreement remained intact.[7]
Two lessons emerged clearly in Moscow. First, sustained Western backing could widen Ukraine’s bargaining horizon, reducing Kyiv’s willingness to accept arrangements that froze its strategic alignment. Second, any ceasefire not tied to binding strategic constraints risked becoming an operational pause rather than a step toward settlement. In Russian logic, sequencing process ahead of fundamentals is not neutral. It is a mechanism that enables rearmament, entrenchment, and the deepening of Western military commitments.
This logic explains the Kremlin’s consistent emphasis on so called root causes throughout the war. The central issue, from Moscow’s perspective, has never been a map, but the security architecture surrounding Ukraine. The House of Commons Library timeline shows that the crisis escalated in late 2021 and early 2022 precisely around disputes over NATO posture and Ukraine’s strategic trajectory, before Russia formally recognised the so called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics on 21 February 2022 and launched the invasion three days later.
As diplomacy resurfaced at the highest political level in 2025, this approach remained unchanged. The Trump Putin summit held in Anchorage, Alaska, on 15 August 2025 carried significant symbolic weight, reviving a model of leader driven and transactional diplomacy familiar to Moscow. Yet by most accounts the meeting produced no substantive shift in Russia’s position. Engagement was reaffirmed, but core demands remained anchored in the same conceptual framework centred on NATO and long term alignment.[8]
By late 2025, this continuity intersected with growing political pressure in the West to demonstrate progress. In Washington, debate focused for months on a so called 28 point Trump peace plan. However, on 24 December 2025 Reuters reported that Ukraine had moved to a revised 20 point proposal, explicitly described as an evolution of the earlier draft. The revision sought to narrow gaps while leaving key disputes unresolved, including territorial control and the status of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Four days later, the Trump Zelenskyy meeting in Florida took place against this backdrop, with public statements acknowledging both progress and the persistence of thorny issues.
This sequence illustrates a broader pattern. Western diplomacy increasingly seeks to translate political urgency into structured documents and visible processes. From Moscow’s perspective, however, documents do not alter the conflict’s structural parameters. They reframe them. For Kyiv, coalition alignment is existential. For the Kremlin, it is a variable to be tested, weakened, and outlasted rather than accommodated.
Witkoff as conduit: transactional diplomacy meets historical doctrine
Into this process stepped Steve Witkoff, a Trump envoy whose role became central precisely because he is not a traditional Russia hand. Reuters reported multiple Witkoff engagements with Moscow in 2025, including plans announced on 22 April 2025 for another Moscow trip, and later reporting on high-level meetings and the Kremlin’s staging of the encounters.
By 2 December 2025, Reuters reported Putin meeting Witkoff (and Jared Kushner) for over four hours in Moscow, underscoring how much the channel had become personal and direct.
For Moscow, Witkoff is useful not because he “knows Russia,” but because he embodies a negotiating style the Kremlin can work with: a deal-oriented, leader-proximate channel, less constrained by alliance doctrine. Yet the same features carry risk for the West: transactional bargaining can prioritise “closure” over enforceability, and optics over architecture.
The point is not that Witkoff is ineffective. The point is that Russia’s negotiating doctrine is not transactional in the same way. It seeks legally binding constraints, strategic rollback, and a redefinition of Europe’s security order. When the two styles meet, the Kremlin will almost always try to translate the transaction into structure.
What Russia is negotiating and where this leaves us in 2026
At this stage, the continuum becomes unavoidable. Even as diplomatic formats change and envoys shuttle between capitals, Moscow’s core position remains recognisable from December 2021. Ukraine cannot become a NATO platform. NATO must be constrained near Russia’s borders. The post Cold War security settlement in Europe must be revised. These elements have not shifted despite three years of war, sanctions, and negotiation.[9]
Territory matters in this framework, but it is not the primary axis of negotiation. It functions as leverage, symbolism, and bargaining capital, and often as a means of forcing recognition of a new security reality. The deeper dispute concerns alignment and enforcement. Who determines Ukraine’s long term security posture, and who guarantees it in practice.
This is why, in the Reuters account of the 28 December 2025 Florida meeting, security guarantees and so called thorny issues remain central. It also explains why President Zelenskyy repeatedly refers to domestic and constitutional limits on any potential concession, including the need for parliamentary approval or broader public endorsement.[10] From Moscow’s perspective, these constraints are not obstacles to negotiation. They are part of the negotiating terrain.
Seen in this light, the end of year momentum generated around Washington and Florida is not necessarily threatening to the Kremlin. It may even be useful. Every public Western investment in a plan creates political pressure to deliver results. Every declared deadline increases the temptation to trade long term enforceability for short term optics. Time, once again, becomes a strategic asset.
As Europe enters 2026, the diplomatic landscape appears crowded. A leader level summit in Anchorage in August. Geneva meetings in November. Shuttle diplomacy to Moscow in December. The highly mediatised Zelensky Trump encounter at the end of the year. Yet beneath this activity, the core structure remains intact.
Russia has not meaningfully revised the strategic logic it placed on the table before the war began. The West, for its part, has yet to resolve the central question of enforceability. Whether it is willing and able to offer security guarantees robust enough to make any settlement durable and to deter renewed coercion.
In that sense, the year ends not with closure, but with clarity. The negotiation is not primarily about discovering a new compromise. It is about whether the West will eventually treat Russia’s long standing demands as negotiable, and whether Russia can use time, pressure, and political cycles to make that happen.
For policymakers at the start of 2026, the principal risk is to mistake diplomatic activity for strategic change. For Moscow, diplomacy is part of the battlefield, and the battlefield is part of diplomacy. The continuum is not a background condition. It is the point.
Endnotes
[1] Reuters, Trump says progress made after meeting Zelenskiy in Florida, 28 December 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-says-progress-made-after-meeting-zelenskiy-florida-2025-12-28/
[2] Financial Times, Why Trump may struggle to force an end to the war in Ukraine, 3 December 2025.
https://www.ft.com/content/ukraine-trump-war-leverage-analysis
[3] House of Commons Library, Conflict in Ukraine A timeline 2014 present, updated 2025.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9847/
[4] Nik Hynek and Michal Šenk, Ukraine Russia peace plans historical lessons operationalising criteria and comparative assessment, Peacebuilding, November 2025.
https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2025.2585235
[5] Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Draft Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees, December 2021
[6] House of Commons Library, Conflict in Ukraine A timeline 2014 present, updated 2025.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9847/
[7] Anton Troianovski et al., Ukraine–Russia Peace Is as Elusive as Ever. But in 2022 They Were Talking, The New York Times, 15 June 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/15/world/europe/ukraine-russia-ceasefire-deal.html
[8] Reuters, Trump and Putin meet in Alaska as talks focus on Ukraine war, 15 August 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-putin-meet-alaska-ukraine-war-2025-08-15/
[9] Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Draft Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees, December 2021.
https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790803/
[10] Reuters, Trump says progress made after meeting Zelenskiy in Florida, 28 December 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-says-progress-made-after-meeting-zelenskiy-florida-2025-12-28/
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