The Kremlin is ready to start ceasefire talks and is willing to make some “limited” territorial concessions, Reuters’ Moscow bureau chief Guy Faulconbridge reported on November 20, citing five senior current and former Kremlin sources.

Moscow is ready to start talks after Donald Trump is sworn in as the next US president in January, according to the sources cited by Reuters. Russia is also reportedly willing to freeze the conflict along the current front line and cede a limited amount of occupied territory but is demanding in exchange significant Ukrainian concessions.

Russia’s proposed terms for negotiations are based on the failed 2022 Istanbul peace deal. Ukraine’s presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych, who led the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul, confirmed that a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine was agreed in principle in March 2022 and said all the points were initialled. He said his team opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy rejected the deal days later. Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who participated in the Istanbul talks, listed the conditions in an interview with Berliner Zeitung on October last year:

• Ukraine would abandon its Nato aspirations;
• The bans on the Russian language in Ukraine would be removed;
• Donbas would remain in Ukraine but as an autonomous region (Schroeder: "Like South Tyrol");
• The United Nations Security Council plus Germany should offer and supervise the security agreements; and
• The Crimea problem would be addressed, but by future generations.

Top of the list is that Ukraine renounces its aspirations to join Nato and return to its pre-2014 stance of constitutionally enshrined neutrality. The Kremlin has made it explicitly clear since the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued an eight-point list of demands in December 2021 that any and all negotiations start with an “iron-clad legally binding” guarantee that Ukraine will never join Nato.

Moscow has also returned to its demands that Ukraine dramatically reduce the size of its army – a hotly debated point in the Istanbul deal, but one that was eventually agreed to in principle.

Moscow is also insisting that laws constricting the use of the Russian language be dropped and that Russian be made an official language. In Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent Valdai speech outlining his multipolar world view he repeated concerns for the rights of ethnic Russians that were caught in other countries following the fall of the Soviet Union and the issue of language rights has always played an important role in those concerns.

Additionally, Moscow insists on security guarantees for Ukraine that also cover Russia and will avoid future direct conflicts between Russia and the West in the future.

In the run-up to the Istanbul talks, Ukraine already conceded it was willing to give up its Nato aspirations during the initial peace negotiations in Belarus in March 2022, if it received bilateral security guarantees from its Western allies. Those hopes were dashed during the famous meeting between Zelenskiy and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in April, who told the Ukrainian leader that the West would not provide Ukraine with security deals, and to “fight on.”

Since then Ukraine has signed a series of “security assurances” with European allies, but these all stop short of Western allies coming to Ukraine’s military assistance should it be attacked by Russia again.

These assurances fall short of what Ukraine would like to see and Zelenskiy has been pushing hard for accelerated accession to Nato to provide real security guarantees as part of his victory plan.

More recently, backed into a corner by Trump’s threat to bring the war to an end “in 24 hours” and in anticipation of evaporating military and financial support from Ukraine’s Western backers, Zelenskiy has switched his rhetoric from victory to “resistance”.

Territorial concessions

Putin appears more willing to make concessions to get a deal than most commentators believe, according to the Reuters report, as the officials interviewed suggest that the Kremlin will concede some territory as part of the talks.

While Putin has publicly said that any deal will have to take account of the "territorial realities on the ground" – widely assumed to mean Russia intends to keep the territory it has occupied – Reuters interlocutors suggest that there is actually some wiggle room.

Moscow might relinquish control over small areas of the Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions. There is also “room for discussion” on the status of four regions it annexed last year – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – declared part of Russia in 2022. Previously, Putin has said publicly that Kyiv must recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions, despite the fact that the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) do not fully control any of them.

However, the Kremlin has made it crystal clear that it is not prepared to discuss returning the Crimea and the officials interviewed by Reuters did not mention the status of the land bridge that connects the Crimea to the Russian border at Rostov-on-Don, which presumably will also remain under Russian control.

Russia ready to stop the war

The very first ceasefire talks began on February 28, 2022, at a time when Russian forces had seized swaths of territory in the south, east and north of Ukraine, where they had advanced close to Kyiv after pouring across the border from Russia and Belarus.

The draft – titled “Treaty on the Resolution of the situation in Ukraine and the Neutrality of Ukraine” – is dated March 7, 2022, a week after Russia launched the invasion.

Putin has been hoping to improve his relations with the West for a long time but has been repeatedly disappointed. There was a brief glimmer of hope after Biden took office in 2021, when he met with Putin in Geneva and rushed through a renewal of the START III missile treaty – the first Cold War arms control treaty to be renewed since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian side immediately called for work to be started on renewing the lapsed Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), another Cold War arms control deal, but those talks never began as tensions escalated rapidly.

Russia has had the upper hand in the Ukraine war since the fall of Avdiivka on February 17 and time is on Putin’s side in any negotiations, but the Kremlin is slowly coming under more pressure to halt the war and start repairing the damage to its military and economy.

Heavy military spending has sent inflation skyrocketing, which the CBR has been unable to reign in. Russia’s economy is cooling and set for a sharp slowdown in 2025, according to a pessimistic medium-term macroeconomic outlook issued by the regulator at the start of August. Record-high borrowing costs could spark a wave of bankruptcies in the new year, although others have argued that Russia’s economy is more robust than it first appears.

The Kremlin has been signalling since the summer that it is ready to stop and Ukraine had also been inching towards a ceasefire agreement as it began to run out of men, money and weapons. A preliminary first round of talks on halting Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure had been scheduled to happen in Qatar in August, but that meeting was called off after the Kursk incursion.

Zelenskiy has also said that he wants the war to finish this year as Ukraine’s position becomes increasingly dire, but he has backed himself into a corner with his maximalist demands on a complete Russian withdrawal to the 1991 borders.

While Russia is currently producing more arms than all of the EU combined, it is still digging deeply into its Soviet-era stockpile and needs to start rebuilding its military, making it increasingly vulnerable to a Nato attack. Experts estimate that it will already take decades just to get back to where the military was at the start of 2022.

Security deals

Russia has long called for a new pan-European security deal and a new European security infrastructure that reflects the post-Cold War realities that would move beyond Nato, which was specifically designed to threaten the Soviet Union.

Putin first warned that Russia would “push back” if Nato kept expanding in his famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, but was widely ignored by the West.

In his first act as president, Dmitry Medvedev travelled to Brussels in 2008 and offered a Russian draft pan-European security deal, but it was rejected out of hand. Tensions escalated from there and Russian started to modernise its army in 2012 in preparation for WWIII; this was complete by 2021 when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was ready to throw down the gauntlet with his “new rules of the game” speech. The war in Ukraine started a year later when his challenge went unanswered. Lavrov then lambasted the West in his “Empire of Lies” speech a year later, detailing all of Russia’s complaints with the West.

Military size

Russia has already shown it is willing to make some concessions in Istanbul to bring about peace, although the longer the conflict goes on the less those concessions will be, most experts agree.

During the Istanbul ceasefire talks in March 2022, reports indicated that the Russian side was pushing for Ukraine to significantly reduce the size of its military.

Russian negotiators were reportedly demanding that Ukraine limit its armed forces to around 50,000 to 60,000 troops from the 200,000 active military personnel serving before the war. At the same time, the Russian delegation demanded a cap on the Ukrainian tank force to no more than 100 to 150 tanks from the estimated 800 to 900 tanks Ukraine had before the Russian invasion. Similarly, the Russian side reportedly wanted to limit Ukraine's air force to a few dozen planes, potentially capping it at 50 aircraft or fewer, vs the approximately 125 combat-capable aircraft in the Ukrainian pre-war air force, and a ban on developing or deploying missiles with a range of over 250 km. Moscow also wanted to be able to prohibit other types of weapons in the future.

However, subsequent reports claim that the Russian side made concessions on the military size issue, but in the end the Ukrainian side agreed to a substantial reduction in its armed forces. Of the various plans being discussed since Trump’s election victory, many of them include substantially beefing up Ukraine’s military, which will be a non-starter for the Kremlin should talks happen.