During the Cold War, few senior Soviet officials understood the dynamics of Soviet relations with the West as well as Valentin Falin. A diplomat and adviser to several Soviet leaders, Falin was instrumental in improving relations between the Soviets and West Germany in the early 1970s. It was part of the détente that culminated in the Helsinki Accords, the breakthrough agreement that finally, 30 years after the end of World War II, stabilized relations between the Western alliance and the Soviet bloc. Looking back on his experiences, Falin wrote that “confrontation is not fate, but choice.” As he saw it, in the global face-off between superpowers, confrontation happened because one or both sides chose to fight; détente happened because they chose not to fight. In every case, he felt, what happened resulted from an absolutely conscious decision on the part of the respective leaders.

Falin’s insight may be particularly useful for grasping Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approach to the war in Ukraine—and why U.S. President Donald Trump’s yearlong effort to end it has continually fallen short. According to Trump, Russia should be happy to agree to a peace deal; it is just a matter of coming up with the right terms. Indeed, the Trump administration has proceeded from the same false (but understandable) assumption as its predecessor that Putin acts rationally. In the winter of 2021–22, U.S. President Joe Biden thought he could persuade the Russian leader not to launch the “special operation” because its motives made no sense and achieving its goals would be too costly in human and economic resources. By the same logic, Trump has assumed that the “special operation” could be ended by lavishing Putin with territorial concessions and new business deals with the United States, which should be particularly attractive against the backdrop of Russia’s eroding economy.

The Trump administration thus spent 2025 offering a series of apparently inviting options for Moscow, including ceding unconquered lands to Russia, prohibiting Ukraine’s entry to NATO, and placing restrictions on Ukrainian forces. The president also courted Putin with a grand summit meeting in Alaska and numerous phone calls, all the while assuring the world that a deal was about to be reached—on his first day in office, or by Thanksgiving, or by Christmas. Trump even agreed with the Kremlin’s implausible insistence that substantive negotiations, and even new presidential elections in Ukraine, can take place while fighting rages on.

But none of these offers has brought the end of the war any closer. Putin, who has begun appearing in public in military uniform surrounded by generals, no longer hides his desire to “return” the Donbas to Russia by military rather than diplomatic means. The past year has made it clear that he has decided to continue fighting, regardless of the economic and human cost. And he has determined that he can do so while keeping Trump’s United States as a geopolitical partner. This might be called the new “Putin doctrine.” Now that the United States has embarked on its own special operation, to capture Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, the second part of this doctrine may not be so successful: Moscow clearly wants to keep Caracas in its sphere of influence, but under the new circumstances, it can’t. All Moscow could respond with was a barrage of statements from the Foreign Ministry in defense of Maduro’s Venezuela and ironic remarks by Putin’s ally, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev: now the United States has nothing to reproach Russia for—the Venezuelan operation is just as much an exercise of “might makes right” as the Ukrainian one.

But Trump’s special operation lasted all of a few hours, while Putin’s has been going on for almost four years and has become a way of life for his political system. And every indication now suggests that Putin believes he has the time and resources to continue “returning” the Donbas and what the Kremlin calls Novorossiya—its propaganda term for the territories of southeastern Ukraine—for months to come. To anyone trying to understand what it will take to bring Russia to a deal, it will be crucial to recognize Putin’s choice.

For Russia, the story of 2025 was convergence with the United States on broader geopolitical strategy, not on ending the war. Putin was successful in imitating negotiations and turning their meaning upside down: all the major events of the year—the meeting in Anchorage, the telephone conversations with Trump, U.S. Special Envoy Steven Witkoff’s political tourism—have looked like negotiations in reverse. First come the red carpets and big words, not the discussions of anything meaningful. This approach allowed........

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