Only sticks, not carrots, will force Putin to honour a full ceasefire with Ukraine

13 May 2025, 10:08 | Updated: 13 May 2025, 10:16

Donald Trump has encouraged Vladimir Putin to stay the course by offering him numerous carrots and reserving his sticks for Ukraine.

Europe's (European Union and United Kingdom) ultimatum to Russia to abide by a full ceasefire by the end of Monday will be ignored by President Vladimir Putin who maintains his maximalist stance that has existed since the full-scale invasion was launched on 24 February 2022. US President Donald Trump has encouraged Putin to stay the course by offering him numerous carrots while reserving his sticks for Ukraine.

Putin has not been swayed by the loss of nearly one million casualties (killed and wounded) in just over three years of fighting, a figure which is twenty times what the Soviet Union sustained when occupying Afghanistan in 1979-1989. Russia’s loss of military equivalent is mind boggling, including over 10,000 tanks – or double the number of tanks that European members of NATO possess.  Putin has also not been embarrassed to claim on the one hand Russia is a ‘great power’ while on the other sending a begging bowl to Iran and North for military assistance. Three years of war have shown Russia is the second-best army in Ukraine - not the second-best in the world.

Putin’s maximalist aims are encapsulated by the Kremlin’s linking of peace with resolving the ‘roots of the war,’ a term largely ignored by Western policymakers. The ‘roots of the war’ amount to the Kremlin demanding Ukraine capitulate and accept it will be a Russian puppet state resembling Alexander Lukashenka’s Belarus. Obviously, when hatred of Russia and Russians are at an all-time high in Ukraine, no Ukrainian leader – President Volodymyr Zelenskyy included – would ever agree to capitulate.

The Kremlin’s ‘roots of the war’ reveal how blaming NATO enlargement for the Russian-Ukrainian war has no basis in fact. NATO has never offered Ukraine membership. Russian demands, which are tantamount to those of an occupying power with no respect for Ukrainian sovereignty, include that Ukraine can never join NATO, no longer receive Western military assistance, and drastically reduce the size of its armed forces to only 85,000 personnel. Russia would, of course, still have the right to receive Iranian, North Korean, and Chinese military equipment and maintain its bloated armed forces.

The Kremlin’s demand to resolve the ‘roots of the war’ goes even further in two ways in disrespecting Ukrainian sovereignty.

Firstly, by demanding Ukraine legally recognise the Crimea and four Ukrainian regions (Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson) as Russian. Russia does not fully control these four regions. Trump also floated the idea that the US would legally recognise Crimea as Russian, which the UK and Europe strongly opposed. Both Putin and Trump ignore Ukraine’s constitution, which only permits changes to the constitution through referendums. But referendums cannot be held during martial law.

Secondly, the Kremlin’s Spring 2022 draft ‘peace’ proposals, which continue to remain in place, listed three pages of Ukrainian legislation on culture, language, education, and religion that it demanded Ukraine annul. The Kremlin demands Ukraine become a Russified and Sovietised puppet state. This legislation, and the goal of NATO membership, are found in Ukraine’s constitution, which can only be changed by an impossible-to-achieve two-thirds parliamentary vote.

Trump’s approach of offering Putin carrots not surprisingly failed to persuade Russia to agree to a thirty-day ceasefire. Europe’s (EU+UK) tougher sticks towards Russia may encourage a moderation of the Kremlin’s demands – but don’t hold your breath.

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Taras Kuzio is a professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy.

He is co-editor of Russia and Modern Fascism: New Perspectives on the Kremlin’s War Against Ukraine (Columbia University Press, 2025); co-author of The Four Roots of Russia’s War Against Ukraine  (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Crimea: Where Russia’s War Started and Where Ukraine Will Win (Jamestown Foundation, 2024), and Russian Nationalism and the Russian-Ukrainian War (Routledge, 2022).

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