When diplomacy mimics theatre and the war drums continue to thunder in the background, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish sincerity from performance. The second round of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine, scheduled for Istanbul next Monday, may look like a flicker of hope – but there is reason to be skeptical about whether it is anything more than a carefully orchestrated mirage.
After three years of grinding warfare, with tens of thousands dead and entire swathes of Ukraine in ruins, the long-overdue return to face-to-face negotiations ought to signal a turning point. Instead, what it reflects is the same weary cycle of stalling, escalation, and hardened positions that has defined this conflict from the outset.
Russia has signaled that it will present a “memorandum” during the next round of talks – yet has thus far refused to share its contents in advance, prompting justified frustration in Kyiv. “Diplomacy must be substantive,” Ukraine’s defense minister Rustem Umerov posted online, urging Moscow to table its demands before talks resume. Ukraine, for its part, claims it has already submitted its terms and awaits reciprocity.
The backdrop to this halting diplomacy is a grim mosaic of drone swarms, artillery barrages, and aerial bombardments. On both sides, escalation seems to be the lingua franca. Over the weekend, Russia launched one of its deadliest attacks in months, killing civilians as part of what it insisted were strikes on armament factories. Ukraine responded by unleashing nearly 300 drones into Russian territory. The resulting carnage drew condemnation from President Donald Trump – who nonetheless stopped short of imposing fresh sanctions, not wanting to “screw up” a potential deal.
Trump’s balancing act has been a spectacle of its own. Keen to deliver on his campaign promise to end the war, he has positioned himself as a would-be peacemaker, alternately cajoling and castigating both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. Most recently, he called Putin “crazy,” lamenting that the Russian leader had changed his tone since their last phone call. Yet, like a man trying to put out a fire with a leaky bucket, Trump’s rhetoric is undermined by both the scale of violence and the broader geopolitical inertia.
The media, predictably, pounced on Trump’s outburst, casting it as proof that he, too, is waking up to the reality of Putin’s supposed irrationality. The narrative goes: Putin is beyond reasoning, consumed by dreams of imperial conquest. Therefore, Trump’s attempts at negotiation are not only naïve but dangerously appeasing.
But this framing obscures far more than it reveals. For one, it glosses over the deep historical context and the West’s own role in constructing the architecture of this calamity. Much ink has been spilled over NATO’s relentless eastward expansion since the Cold War’s end, but rarely with the necessary honesty. Successive U.S. administrations chose to push a military alliance designed to counter the Soviet Union right up to the borders of a post-Soviet Russia still reeling from economic chaos, corruption, and Western-style shock therapy.
Even the most hawkish Cold War strategists warned that NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, and particularly into Ukraine, would provoke a crisis. Yet those voices were drowned out by an alliance of military contractors and foreign policy elites who saw in NATO’s growth both ideological vindication and lucrative contracts. When U.S. officials were told – explicitly – that Ukraine’s accession to NATO would be a red line for Moscow, they forged ahead anyway.
Predictably, Putin responded with force. The tragedy is not just that Ukraine became a pawn in this geopolitical tug-of-war, but that peace may have been within reach early on. After Russia’s invasion in February 2022, there was reportedly a draft agreement on the table that would have seen Russian forces withdraw to pre-invasion positions. But emboldened by Western promises, Kyiv walked away.
Since then, Ukraine’s leverage has diminished steadily. Despite billions in Western aid and weapons, the Ukrainian counteroffensive failed to dislodge Russian forces. Meanwhile, Russia’s grip on territory – including Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine – has hardened. The conflict has metastasized into a war of attrition, where diplomacy plays second fiddle to battlefield maneuvers.
It is little wonder then that Moscow, sensing strategic advantage, appears reluctant to agree to an unconditional ceasefire. For now, continued fighting may yield better results than a negotiated settlement. The recent buildup of over 50,000 Russian troops around Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy border underscores this logic.
Zelensky’s call for a trilateral summit with Trump and Putin – rejected outright by the Kremlin – was a desperate gambit. He rightly fears being boxed out of any eventual settlement brokered over his head. But Ukraine’s diminished negotiating position leaves it vulnerable. The truth is that both Putin and Trump may now see Ukraine less as an equal partner and more as a problem to be managed.
As ever, the cost of this geopolitical chess match is borne by ordinary people. Each drone strike and artillery shell hammers home the brutality of a war that could, and perhaps should, have ended long ago. Yet even now, key Western capitals cling to the fantasy that prolonging the war will somehow “weaken Russia” without direct confrontation.
This illusion – one that substitutes proxy warfare for diplomacy – has already failed. There are no wonder weapons left in NATO’s arsenal. Short of deploying U.S. troops into combat, there is little more that can be done to tip the scales in Kyiv’s favor.
Which brings us back to the Istanbul talks. If peace is to be more than a slogan, then it requires hard choices and a reckoning with uncomfortable truths. It means acknowledging that the war did not start in a vacuum, that Western hubris helped light the fuse, and that the path to resolution lies not in more arms shipments but in recognizing the limits of military solutions.
Trump’s attempt to broker peace – however flawed, however clumsily executed – is still a rare deviation from the bipartisan consensus that more war is the only answer. But peace cannot be imposed. It must be built, painstakingly, on a foundation of realism and compromise.
Until then, the war will grind on. And history will not be kind to those who saw the precipice, but chose instead to keep marching toward it.
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