Russia And Ukraine Still Disagree What The War Was About
The Root Causes Have A Definition, And The Terms Are It
Moscow has never said what the phrase means. Read against the memorandum it actually tabled, it means a Ukraine that has agreed by treaty to stop being a state.
The whole argument now runs through three words. Moscow says a settlement must address the root causes of the war, and has never published what they are. That silence is doing work: the phrase is heard in Washington as a security grievance about NATO, which is a thing a negotiation can trade. It is worth reading what has actually been asked for instead.
The list is on the record. Recognition of the occupied territories; withdrawal from the unoccupied Donbas, including the fortified belt that is the only defensible ground in the east; a permanent bar on NATO membership and on bilateral security guarantees from any individual Western state; caps on the size and equipment of the Ukrainian army. Then, in a memorandum tabled during the 2025 bilateral talks: official status for Russian, restored privileges for the Russian Orthodox Church, a Kremlin-acceptable version of Ukrainian history, and a ban on parties designated nationalist.
Five of those are security clauses. Four of them are constitutional ones, and no security architecture in Europe has ever required a neighbouring state to legislate its own history.
Which is why the argument that the war was provoked by enlargement has to be measured against the terms rather than against the speeches. Enlargement is a grievance Moscow has, and it is also the grievance a settlement could actually satisfy — Kyiv's membership is not on offer from anybody. If that were the cause, the file would be closable this month. It is not being closed, and Russia doubled down on the same demands after Davos in January rather than trimming them; the Kremlin has refused a leaders' summit unless a deal is pre-agreed, and welcomed the American envoys while continuing to strike Kyiv.
None of that makes the optimistic version true either. Ukraine's comeback through mid-2026 was real and was short-lived, and the binding constraint is manpower rather than morale or matériel. But the shape of the settlement matters more than its date. A deal struck over Kyiv's head to end the fighting quickly leaves a Russia that has learned the terms were negotiable, and Europe with an eastern border defined by whatever the next round concedes.
The whole argument now runs through three words. Moscow says a settlement must address the root causes of the war, and has never published what they are. That silence is doing work: the phrase is heard in Washington as a security grievance about NATO, which is a thing a negotiation can trade, and it is heard in Kyiv as something else entirely. It is worth reading what has actually been asked for instead of what the phrase suggests.
The list is on the record. Recognition of the occupied territories; withdrawal from the unoccupied Donbas, including the fortified belt that is the only defensible ground in the east; a permanent bar on NATO membership and on bilateral security guarantees from any individual Western state; caps on the size and equipment of the Ukrainian army. Then, in a memorandum tabled during the 2025 bilateral talks: official status for Russian, restored privileges for the Russian Orthodox Church, a Kremlin-acceptable version of Ukrainian history, and a ban on parties designated nationalist.
Five of those are security clauses. Four of them are constitutional ones, and no security architecture in Europe has ever required a neighbouring state to legislate its own history.
Which is why the argument that the war was provoked by enlargement has to be measured against the terms rather than against the speeches. Enlargement is a grievance Moscow has, and states are entitled to have grievances about alliances on their borders. It is also, conveniently, the grievance a settlement could actually satisfy: Ukrainian membership of NATO is not on offer from anybody, and has not been for years. If enlargement were the cause, the file would be closable this month at a cost the alliance is plainly willing to pay.
It is not being closed. Russia doubled down on the same demands after Davos in January rather than trimming them. The Kremlin has refused a three-way leaders' summit unless a document is pre-agreed, which is a way of declining to be seen refusing anything. The envoys were welcomed in Moscow in early September and the strikes on Kyiv resumed the moment they left. The pattern is legible without any theory of Russian psychology: a party that wants a settlement makes its terms cheaper over time, and these have not moved.
The honest counterweight is that the optimistic version is not true either. Ukraine's run through mid-2026 was real — the deep strikes, the fuel crisis, the sense that Moscow was under pressure for the first time — and it was short-lived, and the binding constraint on the Ukrainian side is manpower rather than morale or equipment. Anyone arguing that time is on Kyiv's side has to answer that, and the serious analysis on this side of the argument does answer it, rather than pretending the war can be won by attrition indefinitely.
But the shape of the settlement matters more than its date. What the war produced, besides ruin, is a country that improvises: a decentralised drone industry that is a political fact as much as a military one, and a society that argues with its own government in public in the middle of an invasion. A deal struck over Kyiv's head to stop the fighting quickly leaves a Russia that has learned which terms were negotiable, an alliance that has learned it will be negotiated around, and Europe with an eastern border defined by whatever the next round concedes. That is a peace with a date on it and no other property worth having.
