Pressure on Russia’s structural weaknesses could help Ukraine and force Russia to the negotiating table.
Calls for negotiations to end Russia’s war in Ukraine are growing louder. But much of the debate in Western capitals still misunderstands what Moscow fears most. The Kremlin is not primarily afraid of NATO enlargement, nor of where to draw a new demarcation line. President Vladimir Putin is afraid of Russians. Peace for Russia will mean domestic instability. This explains Russia’s unwillingness to take ongoing negotiations seriously.
This is why talk of ending the war through Ukrainian concessions is misplaced (though Ukraine has agreed to concessions, while Russia has not during negotiations thus far). This is Russia’s war to end, not Ukraine’s. Proposals that pressure Kyiv to surrender territory misunderstand the core problem: Putin’s fear of what happens when the war stops. The Euro-Atlantic community must accentuate that fear, pressuring Russia. Putin cannot easily stop this war because stopping it would expose the deepest structural weakness of his regime: Russia’s inability to demobilize without destabilizing itself.
For Putin, perpetual war has become less a choice than a mechanism of survival. This is not new. American diplomat George Kennan warned in 1946 that Moscow sought security not through compromise, but through “patient but deadly struggle,” driven by a chronic sense of insecurity.
The objective of Western policy, Kennan argued, was not to change Soviet intentions through force, but to exploit internal contradictions until pressure became insurmountable. Different times, similar logic.
Today, Russia faces what can be called a demobilization dilemma. The war in Ukraine is not about Ukrainian territory. The war is being waged as a response to Russia’s domestic fragility, declining legitimacy and a political system that depends on mobilization, fear and external confrontation to maintain control.
In Russia, foreign policy has long functioned as an extension of domestic policy. Putin’s civilizational rhetoric about the “Russian World” serves a dual purpose: justifying violence abroad while legitimizing repression at home. His popularity surged after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and again after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. War, for the Kremlin, reinforces obedience and conformity by militarizing society against a manufactured external threat.
Sustaining that fear is central to Putin’s legitimacy. In the Kremlin’s eyes, ending the war—through a ceasefire and negotiated settlement—would undermine that external threat, and therefore Putin’s power. It would entail not only releasing hundreds of thousands of traumatized, battle-hardened soldiers back into a society, already stripped of outlets for political frustration, but also a sudden halt to a war economy that is precariously propped up on unsustainable high defense expenditure as a percentage of the national budget. This is not a theoretical concern; it is a historical one.
The Soviet Union faced a similar reckoning in the 1980s after its disastrous invasion of Afghanistan. This reckoning, in part, was due to prudent American covert assistance to Afghan insurgents. As casualties mounted for Russians and victory remained elusive, the legitimacy of the Soviet war aims collapsed.
Veterans of this conflict, known as “the Afgantsy,” returned home disillusioned, disabled and angry. In part, they forced the state to address the question of why they shed blood, pressuring the system from all sides. They formed organized social groups and civil organizations that challenged party authority, fueled political dissent and later played disproportionate roles in the instability that ensued in Russia during the 1990s.
These internal dynamics mattered. The failed war sent shock waves through Soviet society, interacting with economic stagnation, nationalist grievances and elite fractures. The result was the collapse of the tyrannical Soviet Union.
Russia today is not the Soviet Union. But the parallels are striking. After more than a decade of war in Ukraine, and over four years of full-scale invasion, cracks are appearing beneath the surface of Kremlin control. Releasing large numbers of veterans back into civilian life poses an existential risk to the regime. These soldiers are often kept on the front against their will.
Unlike Western professional militaries, Russia’s forces are disproportionately composed of prisoners, ethnic minorities and contract soldiers recruited through exploitative arrangements.
Moreover, Russia’s domestic practices don’t mirror those of its Western adversaries. The abusive culture of dedovshchina—the systematic humiliation and violence inflicted by superiors—remains entrenched. Soldiers are routinely described as “meat.” Torture, sexual violence and extreme neglect are widespread.
The Russian military’s lack of concern for the lives and well-being of its personnel is not incidental; it is structural. Kremlin officials have even referred to the Ukraine war veterans as the new Afgantsy. The label is telling. This matters because it creates a volatile mix from the Kremlin’s perspective: traumatized fighters with combat experience, lots of weapons and new uncontrollable patronage networks.
Some of this energy has already manifested in private military company coups, disgruntled nationalist bloggers and open criticism of the Ministry of Defense—all previously unthinkable in an ever-more tyrannical dictatorship.
War keeps dangerous, politically discontent young men employed, contained and dependent. Peace does not. The dilemma extends beyond manpower. Russia’s economy has become deeply dependent on wartime mobilization. Massive defense spending now accounts for an extraordinary share of federal outlays, creating a powerful domestic constituency tied to continued conflict. While the economy has shown short-term resilience, its foundations are narrow and brittle. Inflation, labor shortages and overheating risks loom. Ending the war would make unwinding wartime stimulus politically and economically dangerous.
From a policy perspective, regime change should not be the goal—most notably because regime change in Russia could lead to groups that are often more radical than the Kremlin in its current form. Instead, we should pursue Kennan’s original policy of containment: “What happens in Russia should stay in Russia.” This means using pressure on the Kremlin to force its hand over negotiations in Ukraine. The Russian regime understands this danger and is banking on Western ineptitude.
The Euro-Atlantic community should leverage Russia’s weaknesses. From a modest perspective, advocating for an unconditional ceasefire during negotiations shifts the burden squarely onto Moscow. It exposes the Kremlin’s domestic vulnerabilities and forces it to publicly own the costs of continued aggression. Even if the unconditional ceasefire fails, a sustained initiative will, yet again, demonstrate to the international community that it has been a policy goal of the Russian Federation to wage an aggressive war against Europe that kills Ukrainians and its own men.
Moreover, this policy would give us more data points that can help us prepare for future aggression; if Russia cannot demobilize without destabilizing, then Europe (and the United States) should prepare contingencies for a Russia locked into permanent mobilization or internal instability.
As during the Cold War, the West’s advantage lies not in escalation for its own sake, but in forcing Moscow to confront the incompatibility between external aggression and internal stability. Putin’s greatest fear is not defeat abroad. It is demobilization at home.
Zak Schneider is a policy fellow at the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) and is completing his master’s in government and international security at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., after working at the Atlantic Council and in Poland, at the Community of Democracies. In the coming year, he will be studying eastern flank security and defense policy in Warsaw, Poland.
All views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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