Russia’s inability to break through the stalemate in Ukraine is becoming so evident that significant voices in the Russian establishment have publicly started to call for an end to the conflict.
The big question is whether President Vladimir Putin will acknowledge this reality and abandon his aspiration to extinguish Ukrainian independence.
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with representatives of international news agencies on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum at the Constantine Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Thursday, June 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)
So far, there is no sign that, in the fifth year of Europe’s bloodiest conflict in generations, he is ready to climb down from the original objectives of his “special military operation.” But that could change if the tide of war turns further in Kyiv’s favor.
The calls don’t just come from the business elites and more liberal parts of the Russian establishment. Some of Russia’s best-known hawks have also become much more open in expressing a belief that Moscow simply doesn’t have the capacity to achieve an outright victory against Ukraine.
One of those is Oleg Tsaryov, a former Ukrainian lawmaker who fled to Russia in 2014 and who was one of Putin’s top candidates for heading a pro-Russian puppet regime that the Kremlin planned to install in an occupied Kyiv in early 2022. He was severely injured in an assassination attempt attributed to Ukrainian intelligence the following year.
In a Telegram post last month, Tsaryov warned that Russian propaganda had fostered a dangerous illusion about an inevitable victory against Ukraine.
“The professionals in creating an alternative reality have convinced not just the population, but also themselves, that the illusion that they have invented is in fact reality,” he wrote. “Sooner or later, these worlds of illusion and reality must clash. And now it is happening in the most painful form.”
Another hard-liner, historian and former Kremlin official Aleksey Chadaev, who runs the Ushkuynik drone-warfare research center, noted that pursuing the current course of war “is not just a path to ‘non-victory,’ but to a full-scale defeat.” He has called for a pause so that Russia can reorganize itself for the next round.
People examine an exhibition at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in St.Petersburg, Russia, Wednesday, June 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)
Vasily Kashin, director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, last month published a widely discussed piece in Russia’s foremost foreign-policy journal. He argued that Ukraine will inevitably remain an anti-Russian, pro-Western country, especially after hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed or maimed in the war. He said the goal of installing a friendly regime in Kyiv—one of Putin’s original war objectives—is no longer realistic.
Pointing to the example of the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran, Kashin said that even a major escalation, such as assassinating President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine’s military and civilian leadership, would likely bring to power a “more active, ambitious and radical” generation of Ukrainian leaders.
Nuclear brinkmanship has historically resulted in freezing conflicts along existing front lines, a freeze that Moscow can achieve right now, without the perils of a full-blown nuclear crisis. It also isn’t in Russia’s interest, he wrote, to destroy its technological and human potential “pursuing imaginary objectives” on the front line of Mala Tokmachka, a town in southern Ukraine that has become a byword for Russia’s inability to advance.
Kashin’s views, of course, aren’t universally shared. In the same foreign-policy journal, hawkish Russian academic Sergey Karaganov has repeatedly threatened nuclear war against the West if Ukraine doesn’t surrender. Russia analysts say the more pragmatic approach that recognizes the limits of Russian military power is favored in parts of the Kremlin, including Putin’s influential deputy chief of staff Sergey Kiriyenko , the SVR external intelligence service, and the economic bloc that wants a return to some kind of normalcy.
The course toward escalation, possibly to the Baltic states and other areas, is supported by the increasingly powerful Second Directorate of the FSB domestic security service. It is also backed by a motley crew of war propagandists, analysts and military volunteers who want a historic break with the West that would aid Russia’s transformation into an Orthodox blend of Iran’s theocracy and North Korean totalitarianism.
“It seems that in the fifth year of the war, some people are starting to realize that continuing the war for another year or two doesn’t seriously improve Russia’s negotiating position. It is becoming clearer and clearer to them that it’s time to wrap it up,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. “Elite discussion on the matter is starting to be normalized, with all the loyalty caveats. But does Putin realize that he is in a dead end, and that the war now has diminishing returns? This we don’t know. Nothing shows that he has changed his mind.”
The nature of the heavily militarized Russian state makes it unlikely that Putin will listen to voices of reason, said Pavlo Klimkin, a former Ukrainian foreign minister. “War is the modus vivendi of this regime; it’s like riding a bicycle—if they stop, they fall,” he said.
Russian officials say that they are ready to consider ending the war as long as the U.S. forces Ukraine to abide by the “Anchorage understandings,” a reference to a deal allegedly reached by Putin and President Trump in Alaska in August that would involve Ukraine surrendering the heavily defended belt of cities in northern Donetsk. Kyiv has refused to give it up and Russian forces have made only minimal advances in the region since the summit.
“Peace talks have been stalled and haven’t really delivered any results because the Russians are waiting for the Americans to deliver their maximalist demands around the negotiation table, that they haven’t achieved militarily,” said Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top foreign affairs and security policy official. “Of course, that is something that Ukraine cannot accept. Even if President Zelensky does, the nation does not.”
Putin has chosen in recent days to intensify missile strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. Heavy barrages on Monday night killed 22 and injured well over 100 civilians, one of the bloodiest attacks in the entire war. At a meeting with security officials hours earlier, Putin said Ukraine will have to endure “the new quality of the entire conflict.”
The escalation of attacks on Kyiv ostensibly came in retaliation for a Ukrainian drone strike that Russia said killed female students at a teachers college dorm in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Starobilsk. Ukrainian officials said they targeted a base of Russian drone teams there. The United Nations and other independent agencies haven’t been given unimpeded access to the area to verify the claims.
In Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, middle-range strike drones have in recent days paralyzed Russian logistics, a major new development in the war. Often using artificial intelligence, they have targeted fuel trucks and military convoys on roads that link Russia to the Crimean Peninsula and to bases along the front line. Fuel rationing has been imposed in Luhansk and Donetsk, and supplies have already run out in Crimea.
FILE – Rising smoke can be seen from the beach at Saky after explosions were heard from the direction of a Russian military airbase near Novofedorivka, Crimea, Aug. 9, 2022. The Crimean Peninsula’s balmy beaches have been vacation spots for Russian czars and has hosted history-shaking meetings of world leaders. And it has been the site of ethnic persecutions, forced deportations and political repression. Now, as Russia’s war in Ukraine enters its 18th month, the Black Sea peninsula is again both a playground and a battleground.(AP Photo, File)
Russian military commentators are warning of an imminent Ukrainian offensive. In recent weeks, Ukraine has had greater success in its long-range strikes throughout the European part of Russia, including Wednesday’s attack on the oil terminal in St. Petersburg, just as Putin’s hometown hosted the opening of an annual economic conference.
Kyiv’s drone campaign “shows the potential of havoc that the Ukrainian forces can bring on to Russia, but it might take time for this to diffuse into society and into political decision-making in Moscow because they have such an authoritarian grip on the population and the regime that is rather unified in terms of pursuing the war,” said Germany’s deputy defense minister Nils Schmid.
Russia’s ultra-hawks and the security establishment, meanwhile, are making sure that the new calls for pragmatism don’t spread too widely. Pro-Kremlin newspaper Moskovski Komsomolets deleted a much-discussed article last month that, without making specific references to Ukraine, recounted how defeats in past wars—such as the 1853-56 Crimea campaign and the 1904-05 war against Japan—ended up bringing greater freedoms and prosperity to ordinary Russians.
On Monday, the Telegram account of retired general Andrey Gurulyov, a prominent member of the Russian parliament, posted a bitter treatise about the stalemate in Ukraine and about the unwarranted optimism of Russian commanders wearing “rose-colored glasses.”
Hours later, Gurulyov went on Max, the new Russian social messenger, to say his Telegram account had been hacked. That was met with widespread disbelief by other Russian commentators, who suggested that the retired general had been forced to censor the inconvenient truth.
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
