Following their visits to Moscow and Kyiv, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s envoys, voiced hope for a “win-win” peace settlement in Russia’s war in Ukraine.
But John Lough, a senior research fellow at the New Eurasian Strategies Center (NEST), argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not interested in — or looking for — a ceasefire or a pause in the war.
“A pause could actually be damaging for him — and it would look like weakness if he pursued a ceasefire at this stage,” Lough says in a wide-ranging interview with Independence Avenue Media.
He says Putin has continued to live in what former German Chancellor Angela Merkel called a “parallel universe” since the 2014 annexation of Crimea — one that has only narrowed in recent years.
“Putin believes that he has the upper hand and it’s just a question of time before Ukraine accepts this fact that further resistance is simply pointless because Ukraine is just going to lose land and eventually it’s going to have to surrender,” says Lough, who in the 1990s set up NATO’s Information Office in Russia and was the first alliance official to be permanently based in the country.
Despite Putin’s broad support among the population, Lough argues, the danger to his stability may come more from the pro-war community in Russia than from the anti-war one, especially if he agrees to a ceasefire. Cracks in the Kremlin’s walls have also started to appear, Lough says — though he sees no imminent signs of a coup, and no prospect of economic collapse.
“There is certainly a possibility of poor decision making … They’re going to get things wrong. And there could be, for example, a couple of major problems to manage, which perhaps are poorly managed or create dissension within the system. If this all happens together, it could then create a set of problems that together prove very difficult to manage. So I think that’s where we see the biggest difficulty,” Lough says.
Lough also downplays the risks of Russia attacking a NATO member state. “As long as U.S. forces are in Europe, Russians have to reckon with a reaction from the United States, which might not be what they expect. [Unless] President Trump just abandons NATO or says Article 5 doesn’t exist anymore, but I think if the lives of U.S. soldiers are in some way threatened, then Putin’s got to worry.”
This interview was recorded on Sept. 9, 2026, and has been edited for length and clarity.
Kiryl Sukhotski, Independence Avenue Media: Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Moscow and Kyiv, met with the two presidents, Vladimir Putin and [Ukrainian President] Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and they talked in Kyiv actually about the possibility of a “win-win” solution. Do you buy that? Do you think that Putin is interested at all in any win-win solution?
John Lough, New Eurasian Strategies Center (NEST) senior research fellow: No, I don’t think Putin does win-win solutions. For him, it’s a zero-sum game world. He continues to believe that he has Ukraine pretty much on the ropes and that he can continue to fight the way he is — which is slow, bloody, very painful, Russia is still losing tens of thousands of men a month, but this is affordable — and that Ukraine is simply not going to be able to sustain this level of resistance because it doesn’t have enough people. And he thinks that Ukraine’s European partners are also tired of this war and therefore victory is within close reach.
But the interesting point is that he’s been saying this pretty much for a year and a half, maybe closer to two years. He continually exaggerates the advances that Russian forces are making in the Donbas — and there’s no question they are definitely advancing, but still at a very, very slow pace.
And meanwhile, Ukraine has been able to bring this war home to the Russian population in a way that was really unimaginable six months ago. The fact that it’s caused a nationwide fuel crisis, which is still not over, attacking the largest online retailer [Wildberries], which is sometimes referred to as the equivalent of Amazon, which is a little bit misleading because it actually does sell military goods and has helped supply the front, which is one of the reasons why the Ukrainians have attacked it. But those attacks have been very effective in damaging a business that services so many Russian citizens right across the country.
But at the same time, Putin, of course, has responded [by] the effective closure of the Black Sea ports, which is costing Ukraine dearly. If we imagine that in 2021, the Black Sea ports were responsible for transporting goods with a collective value of about 25% of Ukraine’s GDP. So, of course, during the war years, that’s been much reduced because of the limited passage through the Black Sea — but now that’s been shut down, that’s a massive problem for Ukraine and for its European partners.
But the Ukrainians, for their part, have also hit the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, the Russian port, they are constraining Russian grain exports through the Black Sea. So there’s great damage being done on both sides.
But I think the point here is that Putin believes that he has the upper hand and it’s just a question of time before Ukraine accepts this fact that further resistance is simply pointless because Ukraine is just going to lose land and eventually it’s going to have to surrender. But we’ve heard this message for a long time now. So from my point of view, nothing much has changed.
IAM: Exactly. So it’s been four and a half years since the full-scale invasion. You’ve just mentioned that Putin has been saying this for at least a year and a half, if not longer. What is he counting on? It seems like he still intends to win, but what are the ways that he sees in front of him — an escalation?
Lough: Well, he is already escalating. And you can see this in terms of the way Ukraine is being attacked now — the use of these jet-powered drones that have been tormenting the citizens of Kyiv in recent weeks, these attacks going on pretty much around the clock. The use of ballistic missiles against which Ukraine has extremely limited defenses, possibly even no defenses right now because of the lack of Patriot interceptor missiles, many of which have been used, of course, in the Middle East, and are now going to be supplied by the U.K., Germany and, I suspect, others, but in very small quantities.
So Ukraine needs to find a solution there. I think Putin believes that he can inflict this level of destruction on Ukraine that will simply make the economy no longer viable. I think he feels he can subject the population to more suffering than it experienced last winter, which was bad enough. And let’s point out that last winter was actually very cold. And looking at the weather statistics of recent years, it was exceptional. So we probably wouldn’t imagine there would be another brutally cold winter this year.
But nevertheless, the Russian side has been attacking, and I know close to Kyiv it’s hit an important reservoir. We can imagine that other water installations, sewerage systems and things like that could be attacked, that potentially could make it difficult for people to continue living in the cities.
What I think Putin has continually underestimated is the desire of Ukrainians to continue to resist. And there still is a majority of people who are in this category. And also, I think the ways in which they’ve been able to self-organize and continue to do that, and this level of solidarity, which is still present in Ukrainian society in sufficient measure to sustain resistance — and some of my Ukrainian sources say this is just going to go on. They’re going to go through a brutal winter, but they’re not going to fall apart. And we certainly don’t see on the front line any signs that the front is under strain in certain areas, that it doesn’t look as though it’s about to collapse.
But Putin predicted in Bishkek about 10 days ago that the Ukrainian front is going to collapse. So he’s just making a straight bet that he can get there, I think, by military means. But if he is able to, for example, enlist the help of President Trump in making that route shorter for him, then that would certainly be valuable.
But there tends to be some confusion in Western discussion about the situation we currently face because there’s regular reference to the need for a ceasefire. And logically, you would try to bring this war to an end by persuading both sides that it’s in their better interest to go the route of a ceasefire and to reduce the level of destruction and suffering, all that economic damage, all those things — and use the ceasefire then as a window to work out some sort of eventual peace settlement.
But the Russian side has made it again very clear from an early stage of this war that they’re not interested in a ceasefire. They are interested in negotiating the terms of a peace settlement — and what they really mean here is the terms on which Ukraine should surrender.
So I don’t buy this idea that Putin is looking for a ceasefire or a pause in the war. A pause could actually be damaging for him — and it would look like weakness if he pursued a ceasefire at this stage.
Now, having set out his position so confidently that he can win this war and the Russian elites, the Russian society expecting progress to be made, but not seeing it — I think to step back and say, actually, I can’t really get what I want right now, so let’s have a pause and I’ll have another go later… I simply don’t think that’s going to wash.
And remember, he’s also got 10-15% of Russian society that is strongly pro-war, the Z-bloggers [pro-war military bloggers], the war veterans and others, those constituencies, who eventually could become, if left unmanaged, a quite dangerous political force for the Kremlin. So the danger isn’t so much from the anti-war community as I think as it is from the pro-war community.
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IAM: Let’s come back to the Trump administration in a moment, but just to seize on that point: we see Putin is heavily invested in this war, and even you’re talking about him seeking the peace settlement on terms favorable to him, effectively a capitulation of Ukraine. But is he interested in anything short of that capitulation and short of that surrender? Is he at all interested in any peace settlement that the Trump administration is actually talking about so much?
Lough: Well, I think he’s interested in a peace settlement that he can sell to the Trump administration as being the best way to end this war. And it certainly seemed in the early stages of contacts between the Trump administration and the Kremlin — this is after President Trump returned to the White House and the first visits by Steve Witkoff — that the White House was kind of broadly supportive of this idea that Ukraine should surrender territory that it currently controls, that there should be no NATO membership for Ukraine, probably that there should also be limitations on its ability to generate military power.
And the Kremlin has played a classic kind of, in the case of the Trump administration, wooing it through business deals, this sort of perspective of developing the Arctic, rare earths, other energy resources — and it can all be made to sound big and exciting — lifting of sanctions: we can all make money together.
IAM: But that’s something that both Ukraine and Europe will hardly sign up to.
Lough: No, they won’t. This is exactly the point. And I think this is where the concept of peace that President Trump, Witkoff and others were parading around the place, collided with reality — because this is not something that, as you say, Ukrainians or Europeans can easily accept because the outcome would be something that would still imperil Ukraine’s sovereignty, would store up a longer term security problem for the greater part of Europe.
And the Trump administration, I think, reluctantly concluded that although they were able to put pressure on Ukraine by, of course, stopping military and financial support for the country — and quite significant support — and pushing that burden onto the Europeans, that in fact the Europeans were able to cope with this. The Ukrainians had to make do with less, but they were still able to fight and then not just fight, but also innovate.
So if we remember that disastrous meeting in the Oval Office when Trump referred to President Zelenskyy not having any cards, the situation has changed. And each time that the United States has really pushed Ukraine to agree to terms that are very close to what Russia proposed, maybe even exactly what Russia proposed, they found there’s been blowback from the Europeans.
I thought it was striking that when Messrs. Witkoff and Kushner traveled to Kyiv, the security advisers from the E3 countries — that’s France, Germany, the United Kingdom — were present. And there’s obviously been regular contact between them and the Witkoff-Kushner team. So this is acceptance by the White House that you can’t just freeze the Europeans out of this equation. The Ukrainians have to have a voice and the Europeans are going to be strongly behind them.
So from that point of view, one can say that there are some certainly more experienced diplomats in the room — which is very much needed, because I worry greatly about what happens when Witkoff and Kushner go to Moscow dealing with President Putin and his knowledge of the issues, his way of conducting diplomacy. These are people who are simply unprepared for it — even if Steve Witkoff has now, I think, completed eight visits to Moscow. This is not something that he’s been trained to do.
IAM: We saw, though, CIA Director John Ratcliffe also traveling to Moscow in August. And according to a New York Times report, upon his return, he made a very bleak assessment and said that Vladimir Putin is operating on a very distorted perception of reality of what he can actually do. Do you think it’s some sort of maybe not equal but parallel to Trump’s White House where they may also be acting on a bit of a distorted perception of reality of what they can actually do when it comes to the settlement of the war in Ukraine?
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Lough: Well, Kiryl, I think you’re using some very diplomatic language here. I’m actually reminded of what Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, said about her experience of negotiating with Putin after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then the destabilization of the Donbas. And she said that he is living in a parallel universe.
He’s not just continued to live there. I think that universe for him has actually become narrower over the years. And during the COVID years, we saw some evidence of this. And it’s one of the reasons why I think he became so frustrated with his lack of success in Ukraine that he decided to go for the kill and conduct this full-scale invasion.
I think you can certainly say that there are members of the Trump administration who are not particularly knowledgeable about European history or European affairs in general, have little concept of how relations function between the rest of Europe and Russia, and try to impose this vision of the corporate world — and as you said, win-win solutions. We just have to trade with each other and then everything goes away. We’re all friends again.
Well, I mean, let us consider for a moment that there was a strong strand of thinking in Germany, particularly after the end of the Cold War, that if Germany could build deeper energy relations with Russia, if it could trade more with Russia, then this would be a stabilizing factor. And in actual fact, it turned out to be destabilizing because Germany developed an excessive dependence on Russia for hydrocarbons, then became seen by Moscow as a country that could be influenced and wasn’t going to stand in Russia’s way. And I think Russia played its cards brilliantly when it came to Germany.
IAM: Do you think that Russia is playing its cards brilliantly when it comes to Trump’s White House right now?
Lough: I’m not sure that’s the case, even though much would indicate that they’ve been able to woo Trump, despite the Alaska summit just over a year ago now, going off the rails because there was clearly some sort of misalignment, miscommunication.
I’m not convinced that they found the key to dealing with Trump and more than that, dealing with the U.S. Congress and selling a vision of Europe’s future, of the future of U.S.-Russian relations that would be favorable to a much broader group rather than perhaps those closest to the president.
IAM: John, speaking about Congress, the midterm elections that are less than two months away, and then in Russia, the Duma elections that are less than two weeks away — both of them — do you think they will be a factor in whatever is coming next in terms of the war in Ukraine?
Lough: Well, in a sense, yes, I think the Russians almost certainly realized that Trump is living on borrowed time — in a sense that his influence is likely to wane in the second half of his term, particularly if things go against him now in the midterms, which they look set to do because of the unpopularity, of course, of the Iran war, the economic consequences of that. So although he would retain, of course, his presidential influence over foreign policy, it would be much harder for him to sell any deal with Russia in Congress if he needed to.
I think it’s also a question of the future of NATO, for example, which one might say is very much up in the air. I worked for this organization over 25 years ago and I can assure you that it bears no resemblance to the alliance in which I worked at the time. And that’s because we just don’t know what the U.S. commitment is to it. But we know that within Congress there are people who are, I think, much more supportive of engagement with NATO than the Trump administration would suggest.
As far as the Russian parliamentary elections are concerned — they’re not elections, of course, in the Western understanding of the term. They are still nevertheless a process where the Kremlin can judge just how legitimate its rule is in Russia. It does everything, of course, to ensure that there is a favorable result for the ruling party.
But we can see a trend over the last two years or so that Putin’s personal rating is falling. The Kremlin’s party, United Russia, is looking at really very unfavorable figures. And so we can expect some of those figures to be massaged, of course, but I think [we can expect] an overall electoral program aimed at encouraging patriotism, support for the war, “you’ve got to stand by your country at this difficult moment.” And I think that message will sell because of the Kremlin’s control of the media, the seeming lack of alternative information sources.
And I think we also have to face the fact that a good deal of the Russian public may not especially like the war, but still I think admires Putin in lots of ways for standing up to the United States in particular, to the West, you know, building this relationship with the Trump administration. And it doesn’t look as though it’s all doom and gloom and there’s going to be some sort of global confrontation.
So I don’t think we should underestimate the fact that Putin for a wide section of the population in Russia still has a certain appeal, partly because they know nothing else and they don’t see an alternative at this stage. But it’s also clear that he’s aging, that he isn’t the path to the future, and the elites I think are probably increasingly uncomfortable with this war because they don’t see an end to it.
IAM: But do you really see any cracks in the Kremlin? How stable is Putin’s rule right now and in the foreseeable future, say in the next 18 months?
Lough: Well, the group I work with, the New Eurasian Strategies Center, we did actually publish a report on this subject earlier this year, and it’s called “Cracks in the Kremlin Walls.” And we look in detail at the potential threats to regime stability.
And our conclusion is that there’s no prospect of economic collapse. Western countries, of course, hope that they would be able to deeply destabilize the Russian economy through sanctions. Although there was some shock and awe effect at the outset, the Russian authorities have managed the situation pretty competently. As long as they can sell large volumes of oil to the Asian markets, to China and India in particular, they’re going to be able to get by.
We don’t see any imminent possibility of a coup. Although it has to be noted that there was the march on Moscow by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin back in 2023 that could have been actually disastrous for Putin, I think it could have escalated into a wider conflict in the system.
There is certainly a possibility of, I think, poor decision making. And you’ve got to consider that the Russian authoritarian system is highly centralized in its current form. Many decisions are being made at the highest level by Putin personally. And it’s difficult to ensure in these conditions the continued quality of decision-making. So they’re going to get things wrong. And there could be, for example, a couple of major problems to manage, which perhaps are poorly managed or create dissension within the system. If this all happens together, it could then create a set of problems that together prove very difficult to manage. So I think that’s where we see the biggest difficulty.
There are certainly problems related to succession in Russia. How long is Putin going to stay in office? Is his health going to stand up to the task? Because if he were to drop dead tomorrow, my personal view is that there will be a very rapid end to the war in Ukraine, but there would also be a period of relative instability within Russia itself as rival groups would be fighting it out to retain or indeed gain influence.
And there are some historical precedents here that indicate that these things are actually pretty difficult. You just have to consider the death of Stalin, for example, what happened in the period after that, to realize that Russia is probably going to go through a period which is not going to be considered to be a smooth transition. So there are a number of variables here, but overall I think we have to conclude that for the moment the Russian system looks pretty resilient and stable.
IAM: As you said, Putin and his circle can get some sort of affirmation during the coming parliamentary elections. So bearing this all in mind, and with that poor decision-making, can he go for something feared by some analysts — for mobilization, for an attack on NATO? If he believes that the country is behind him, and he can actually make poor decisions based on his living in a parallel reality — how likely is that?
Lough: Well, of course, the invasion of Ukraine, I think, is a stark example of very poor decision-making, limited information sources, living in an information bubble as he did. So, to answer a question about the possible aggression against a NATO member state, I don’t believe that Putin wants to get into a military conflict with NATO at this stage. And I’m absolutely certain that his General Staff does not want to go down that route because it would be extremely dangerous and unpredictable.
As long as U.S. forces are in Europe, Russians have to reckon with a reaction from the United States, which might not be what they expect. [Unless] President Trump just abandons NATO or says Article 5 doesn’t exist anymore, but I think if the lives of U.S. soldiers are in some way threatened, then Putin’s got to worry.
Where I do see increased scope for aggression against NATO countries is in the area of so-called sub-threshold activities. So we’re talking about various forms of sabotage, cyberattacks, information attacks, use of disinformation tools. All those things are going to continue and probably intensify because we’ve seen them intensify in recent months.
As far as mobilization is concerned, I’m not at all convinced that the Kremlin wants to go down this route. It knows the dangers. It saw them in late 2022 when it conducted a partial mobilization of 300,000 people that led, at the time, to around a million people leaving the country. Some of those later returned, it’s true. But I’m told by somebody earlier this week from Georgia that there are large numbers of Russians leaving the country, renting property in the capital, Tbilisi, and property prices are going through the roof.
So there’s, I think, an expectation in Russian society that this could happen. There’s a high level of anxiety about it. There’s no question about that. But does Putin really have the need to go down this route? I think they can probably conduct some form of mobilization by, let’s say, discreet means. They don’t call it mobilization, but they find a way of recruiting more students, for example, because they need people to go into areas. They don’t just need so-called cannon fodder. They need people to be drone operators, people with technical skills or the ability to acquire technical skills. And I think they will do everything to avoid mobilization. If Putin has to go down that route, then he’s going to say: I was forced to do it.
