February 10, 2026

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Maximalist Demands Stall Path to Peace for Russia and Ukraine

(Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Last week, Russia and Ukraine held peace talks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — one of several diplomatic efforts since U.S. President Donald Trump took office and promised a swift end to the conflict. The talks, held last Wednesday, continued discussions convened in the UAE the week prior and followed a separate bilateral meeting between U.S. and Russian officials in Florida. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the initial UAE discussions as unusually “focused,” contrasting them with earlier rounds that, in his view, had devolved into revisionist history lessons — fueling hopes among some observers that the resumed talks might yield a concrete step forward. However, the meeting produced little beyond a reciprocal exchange of 157 prisoners of war. Analysts warned that if the Abu Dhabi track failed to generate meaningful progress, the war would likely continue to grind on, despite President Trump’s June 2026 deadline for a peace deal. 

According to assessments by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), on the battlefield, Russia controls nearly all of Luhansk and about 80 percent of Donetsk, both of which make up the region of Donbas. Russian forces continue to probe for incremental gains, attempting to turn their foothold around Lyman into a broader push toward Slovyansk, a key Donbas city on important road and rail routes that support Kyiv’s defenses in eastern Ukraine. ISW assesses that Russia lacks the offensive capacity to do so in the short term. However, it is common knowledge that Moscow’s strength lies in a war of attrition: small assaults, heavy artillery, drone saturation, and limited territorial return. Despite repeated offensives, Moscow has yet to secure a decisive breakthrough that would fundamentally alter the front. By the same token, Kyiv has been unable to push against Moscow enough to change the tide of the war.  

Diplomatically, the Kremlin’s demands have remained consistent. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly called for Ukraine to accept “neutrality,” “demilitarization,” and “denazification,” alongside the formal surrender of Donbas, which includes areas that Russian troops do not even occupy. In practice, these conditions demand that Ukraine be unable to choose its own alliances, be unable to defend itself, and be governed by leadership acceptable to Moscow. Russian officials have reinforced that they will not agree to a ceasefire before a comprehensive political settlement is reached. Many officials have also claimed that they reject any Western troop deployment on Ukrainian soil as a part of a security guarantee. Dmitry Medvedev, former president and close ally of Putin, told Russian media ahead of the Abu Dhabi talks that security guarantees “can’t be one-sided," insisting that they must protect Russia as well as Ukraine — framing Russia as a co-victim.  

However, Kyiv has long stressed that it will only come to the negotiating table if it can be given security guarantees — a credible way to deter Russia from using a ceasefire or peace deal to regroup and attack again. Ukraine has long understood Russia's propensity for pushing the boundaries. First after 2014, when Moscow seized Crimea and sustained the Donbas conflict while repeatedly testing the limits of international deterrence, and again ahead of the full-scale invasion in 2022. 

Last week before the Abu Dhabi talks began, the Financial Times reported that Ukraine reached a preliminary understanding with the U.S. and European allies on a multi-tier enforcement plan for any ceasefire. According to the plan, if Russia violated a ceasefire agreement, there would be a response within 24 hours starting with a diplomatic warning and immediate Ukrainian military measures to stop the breach. If violations continue, a second phase would deploy intervention forces from a “coalition of the willing,” which consists of many EU states plus the UK, Norway, Iceland, and Türkiye. If the violation continues to expand into a broader attack, a coordinated Western-backed military response, which would include U.S. forces, would be triggered 72 hours after the initial breach. However, it remains unclear whether Russia would ever accept such an enforcement framework. Moscow certainly gave no indication during last week’s talks that it was prepared to agree to those terms. 

For years, Moscow has framed any deployment of Western troops in Ukraine as a red line and has signaled that it would only consider security arrangements on its own terms — often conditioning them on demands that Ukraine relinquish all of the Donbas, which Kyiv has consistently rejected as a nonstarter. Russia has, in the past, purposefully entered negotiations with maximalist positions partly because it believes battlefield pressure gives it leverage, and because sweeping demands can reframe talks around Russia’s preferred end state rather than Ukraine’s priorities.  

Ultimately, both past and future peace talks are likely to center on these two core issues: Ukrainian security guarantees and the status of Donbas. For Moscow, Donbas carries both strategic and symbolic value. Control of the region would secure a land corridor to Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. It would also reinforce the narrative of “reuniting” historically Russian lands, something that has largely underpinned Russian domestic propaganda efforts. Moscow also often argues that its desire to control Donbas rests in its efforts to protect Russian-speaking populations. This is a pretext for intervention or coercion that has long been used by Moscow across the post-Soviet space — not just in Ukraine — from the Baltics to the Caucasus. Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center also argues that if Moscow can extract Donbas at the negotiating table what it failed to win outright on the battlefield, it becomes harder to credibly portray a peace deal as a clear strategic Russian defeat — or an unambiguous Ukrainian victory. 

For Kyiv, ceding the region would mean relinquishing territory it still has control over. It would also mean surrendering a fortified defensive belt that currently constrains Russian maneuver space. Military advisors warn that abandoning those front lines could expose central Ukraine to far deeper Russian incursions. Additionally, some 190,000 civilians still live in the Ukrainian-held portion of Donetsk alone. Washington has reportedly floated the idea of converting the disputed territory into a demilitarized zone, although it remains unclear who would administer such a zone once both armies withdraw. 

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has expressed frustration with the persistent lack of movement in negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv. Kyiv has long tried to demonstrate that Russia’s negotiating posture follows a “give an inch, take a mile” playbook — except it rarely gives even an inch. The U.S., by contrast, has believed it can offer Moscow something that might buy at least an inch of movement. That difference has led many analysts to suspect the Trump administration sees Ukraine as needing to sacrifice something — most plausibly the Donbas — to secure peace, especially as Kyiv has increasingly found itself on the back foot both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. In many ways, that logic tracks: in most negotiations, the weaker party is often expected to concede something meaningful to secure its objectives. But it returns Ukraine to its enduring dilemma — how can it trade away the Donbas without robust security guarantees that Russia won’t simply regroup and invade again? 

To that point, many Ukrainian advisers likely view it as unwise to sacrifice the Donbas without firm security guarantees — even if the alternative is a slow bleed on the battlefield and the risk that Western support eventually thins out; at least then, Kyiv goes out fighting rather than signing away its leverage. At the same time, for Russia, an active war still serves the political elite. Life in Moscow has remained relatively unchanged, while everyday Ukrainians absorb the hardest costs.  

The Kremlin may also prefer to keep fighting than confront the burdens of a post-war reality — integrating large numbers of veterans, sustaining salaries and long-term benefits, and folding conquered territory into Russia’s political and social ecosystem — costs that are already straining a struggling economy, with reports of cut troop bonuses and delayed death benefits for soldiers’ families. Meanwhile, even in the territories Russia already occupies in eastern Ukraine, there are ongoing reports of how difficult it has been to consolidate control and “Russify” local populations. Ultimately, it remains to be seen whether Moscow and Kyiv can ever reach a durable diplomatic settlement, or whether the war will simply grind on. Still, talks are likely to continue as Trump’s 2026 deadline approaches, with a possible trilateral meeting in Florida on the horizon.