After more than four years of full-scale war, the United States, Ukraine and Russia have agreed to a framework intended to bring sustained large-scale fighting to an end. The settlement does not resolve the conflict in the clean way either side once imagined. Russia will retain de facto control over substantial Ukrainian territory it currently occupies, while Ukraine will not formally recognise Russian sovereignty over those territories. The front line will therefore become the basis of an armistice without becoming an internationally accepted permanent border. Ukraine will receive long-term Western security assistance and continue moving towards deeper economic integration with Europe, while negotiations over sanctions, reconstruction and the eventual legal status of occupied territory will continue separately. The agreement is understandably difficult for Ukrainians who have spent years defending their country, and Moscow has not obtained all the political concessions it originally demanded. Yet this may be precisely why the framework has become possible. Peace has emerged not because either side has resolved the argument over justice, but because both increasingly recognise that continuing to pursue complete justice through force would impose costs larger than the additional gains either can realistically expect.
The distinction between peace and justice is uncomfortable but essential. Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders provide a strong legal basis for its territorial claims. Russia invaded Ukraine and attempted to change those borders through force. From a purely legal perspective, therefore, allowing Russian forces to remain on occupied territory can appear to reward aggression. Yet political leaders do not make decisions inside legal theory alone. They also have obligations to living citizens who bear the cost of attempting to enforce legal claims militarily. If recovering another region requires tens of thousands more deaths with no reasonable guarantee of success, a government must consider whether preserving the claim while suspending the attempt to enforce it is morally preferable. This is not surrendering the principle. It is recognising that a just entitlement does not automatically make every possible cost of recovering it justifiable.
The settlement therefore relies heavily on the difference between de facto possession and de jure sovereignty. Russia controls territory physically, but Ukraine and most Western governments can continue treating that territory legally as Ukrainian. This arrangement is intellectually untidy, but international politics often depends on precisely this kind of ambiguity. The Korean peninsula has existed under an armistice since 1953 without a comprehensive peace treaty. Territorial disputes elsewhere have remained legally unresolved for decades while ordinary political and economic life continued. Sometimes political order requires societies to tolerate unresolved questions rather than forcing an answer through continued violence.
The danger, however, is obvious. If Russia invades a neighbour, occupies territory and eventually keeps practical control over part of it, other governments may conclude that aggression works. This is why the settlement’s deterrent architecture matters more than whether diplomats describe the outcome as territorial compromise. Russia needs to emerge from the war believing that repeating the strategy would produce costs exceeding any likely territorial benefit. The expansion of NATO through Finland and Sweden, enormous Russian military casualties, long-term damage to European economic relations and a much more heavily armed Ukraine all contribute to that calculation. An aggressor can gain territory while still making itself strategically worse off.
Ukraine’s security guarantee is therefore the foundation of the settlement. A ceasefire without deterrence would simply freeze the battlefield while both sides prepared for another round. Ukraine needs enough air defence, drones, intelligence, ammunition and domestic defence production that Moscow expects another invasion to be extremely expensive. European governments will carry much of this burden, with American capabilities continuing to provide an important backstop. This is deterrence by denial: peace survives not because Russia suddenly trusts or likes Ukraine, but because military success against Ukraine becomes sufficiently improbable.
This is a more realistic basis for peace than friendship. International relations frequently asks governments to cooperate with actors they have excellent reasons not to trust. Institutions become valuable precisely because they reduce the amount of trust required. Monitoring mechanisms, predetermined sanctions, military hotlines and transparent force deployments can allow adversaries to anticipate consequences even when their interpretations of history remain completely incompatible. Good political institutions do not assume human beings or states become virtuous; they make predictable behaviour possible despite the expectation that they may not.
Sanctions should operate according to the same logic. Removing every restriction immediately would surrender substantial Western leverage before Russia demonstrates compliance. Maintaining every sanction permanently regardless of Russian behaviour would give Moscow little economic incentive to preserve the agreement. Phased relief therefore makes more sense: verifiable compliance produces specified economic benefits, while renewed aggression automatically restores costs. Sanctions become conditional incentives rather than permanent punishment.
Ukraine’s reconstruction may eventually become the most important measure of whether the settlement succeeded. Hundreds of billions of dollars will be needed to repair infrastructure, housing and productive capacity, while millions of Ukrainians living abroad must decide whether to return. Security will affect all of those decisions. A family does not return because diplomats declare peace; it returns when parents believe their children will not face another invasion several years later. A company does not build a factory because reconstruction conferences produce pledges; it invests when the expected return exceeds the risk of destruction. Credible security therefore has an economic value that never appears directly in the defence budget because it lowers the risk premium on everything else.
This creates an opportunity for Ukraine to pursue a strategy more ambitious than simply rebuilding what existed before 2022. The war accelerated Ukrainian capabilities in drones, software, electronic warfare and decentralised manufacturing. Deeper European integration can connect those capabilities with capital and markets. A secure Ukraine could therefore become economically and technologically stronger even while the territorial question remains unresolved. Over decades, the relative attractiveness of political systems can itself become strategic power.
There is an important philosophical point here. Territory matters because people live on it, because communities attach identities to it and because governments exercise jurisdiction through it. But territory is not the ultimate purpose of the state. The state exists to secure the political community living within it, not the political community merely to maximise the acreage controlled by the state. If preserving every territorial claim through immediate warfare begins destroying the population whose sovereignty gives that territory meaning, political leaders need to reconsider the relationship between means and ends.
This does not mean Ukrainians living under Russian occupation become irrelevant. Their rights, property and political status remain central unresolved issues, and Ukraine should continue advocating for them. Prisoner exchanges, family movement and protections against forced demographic or cultural change need continuing international attention. Freezing the territorial dispute cannot mean freezing the people living inside it outside moral consideration.
Russia faces a similar transition from war towards political responsibility. If Moscow retains practical control over occupied territory, it acquires obligations towards the populations living there. Military conquest is easier than legitimate government. The longer Russia administers those territories through coercion rather than consent, the more the settlement remains vulnerable to future revision. Control answers who can enforce rules today; legitimacy asks why people should accept those rules tomorrow.
Trump will undoubtedly present the agreement as proof of his transactional diplomacy, and there is a legitimate achievement in bringing adversaries towards a settlement after years of war. Yet the durability of the agreement will depend much less on the personality of the mediator than on the institutions remaining after he leaves office. A peace dependent on Trump personally managing Putin and Zelenskyy is not a stable peace. The objective should be making future violations costly enough that leaders who never participated in these negotiations still prefer compliance.
Europe has an especially important role because the settlement concerns the long-term security order of its own continent. The increase in European defence capacity over the past two years means Europe is gradually becoming more capable of sustaining Ukrainian security even if future American administrations reduce involvement. That may become one of the war’s most consequential unintended outcomes: Russia invaded partly to constrain the Western security order around it and instead helped produce a more heavily armed Ukraine and a more strategically serious Europe.
The framework therefore cannot be described honestly as complete Ukrainian victory or complete Russian victory. Russia retains territory. Ukraine retains sovereignty, an independent government and a much deeper Western relationship than Moscow wanted. Europe bears enormous new security obligations. America remains involved without becoming the sole guarantor. Everyone receives less than their preferred outcome.
That is often what sustainable compromise looks like.
The relevant question is not whether the agreement perfectly corrects the injustice that produced the war. Few peace settlements can. It is whether the political order created now makes another war less attractive than preserving the imperfect peace.
If Ukraine becomes secure and prosperous, Russia concludes further territorial expansion is prohibitively expensive and Europe maintains enough military capability to enforce the balance, the unresolved border can remain unresolved without remaining permanently violent. If those conditions fail, today’s armistice simply establishes the starting line for another conflict.
After four years of war, the most mature objective is therefore not to demand that one agreement settle history permanently. It is to construct institutions strong enough that history can remain disputed without requiring another generation to die proving which interpretation possesses the stronger army.
