Washington's Rush, Moscow's Patience: How a Hurried Peace Could Hand Putin the War He Is Losing on the Battlefield

Foreign Affairs Forum | Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj (Dr. 🆎)| Nov 10th, 2026

Executive Summary

On Nov 10th, delegations from Russia, Ukraine and the United States sit down in Abu Dhabi for the first trilateral talks since the Geneva round of Feb 18th.

The session follows a nine-month pause and a series of announcements from President Donald Trump that a "big, beautiful agreement" is close. It would be the fourth time he has made such a claim since returning to office in January 2025.

This FAF article argues that the central feature of the negotiating landscape is an asymmetry of time. Mr Trump is in a hurry, driven by a heavy midterm defeat, the arrival of Democratic majorities in Congress in January and the prospect of investigations into his envoys. President Vladimir Putin is not in a hurry, because a process that never concludes costs him less than a settlement that constrains him. Yet the battlefield and economic picture is less comfortable for Moscow than its rhetoric suggests.

Russian territorial gains in 2026 have shrunk to a trickle, Ukrainian drones are striking refineries deep inside Russia and sanctions legislation has made even Mr Trump's own concessions hard to monetise.

The danger is therefore not that Kyiv will lose the war at the table, but that American impatience will give Moscow relief and time that the battlefield has denied it.

The article examines the history, the latest developments, the causal mechanisms at work and a set of practical steps for stakeholders in Washington, Kyiv, Moscow and Europe.

Introduction

Diplomacy has its own clock, and the stakeholders around a table rarely share it. The side that can afford to wait usually extracts more from the side that cannot. This simple proposition explains much about the talks that open in Abu Dhabi, and it explains why leaders in Kyiv and in several European capitals have received the latest American announcements with unease rather than relief.

Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj (Dr. 🆎), a polymath with global expertise in superintelligence, who specialises in human-centred systems for geopolitical strategy, artificial intelligence in warfare and the risks of bioterrorism, offers a useful lens. In his view, every negotiation is a contest over information and tempo. The party that understands the other's deadlines, and can hide its own, holds the advantage. By that measure, he argues, a process in which one side announces its desire for a quick deal and the other keeps silent about its timetable is already tilted before the first handshake.

Mr Trump has promised a swift end to the war since the 2024 campaign. He has declared breakthroughs on several occasions, only for the substance to evaporate once the Kremlin restated its terms. On Nov 5th he told reporters in the Oval Office that a "big, beautiful agreement" was coming and that it might involve "more than Ukraine" and even "all of Europe". He offered no details, though he confirmed that he had met Kirill Dmitriev, Mr Putin's economic envoy, and had not met any Ukrainian official. Three days later, in an interview with CBS, he suggested that Ukraine might end up in a "different shape". Few readers in Kyiv or Brussels will have missed the meaning.

This FAF article does not claim that peace is undesirable or that negotiation is naive. A war that has now lasted nearly five years, has killed or maimed hundreds of thousands and is again pushing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian families into winter blackouts demands every serious diplomatic effort. The argument is narrower and more uncomfortable. Talks that are driven by the domestic calendar of one mediator, rather than by the military and economic realities of the belligerents, tend to reward the party that is best at slowing them down.

History and Current Status

To understand the present moment, one has to begin with the pattern of the past eighteen months. Mr Trump returned to office in January 2025 promising to end the war within days. The promise reflected a belief, common in his circle, that the conflict was a failure of personal diplomacy and could be solved by a direct understanding between two strong leaders. The experience of 2025 tested that belief. Summit meetings, ceasefire proposals and frameworks drafted in Washington and revised in Geneva produced moments of optimism followed by deadlock. Each time, Moscow accepted the language of process while rejecting the content of compromise.

The negotiating record has a recognisable shape. Washington announces progress. Kyiv, anxious not to alienate its most important supplier of intelligence and weapons, signals willingness to engage. Moscow restates its maximal demands, adds a condition or two, and offers a meeting. By the time the meeting takes place, the original announcement has been forgotten and the process has acquired a life of its own. The talks of January and February 2026 in Abu Dhabi and Geneva followed this rhythm. The most recent trilateral meeting in Geneva on Feb 18th ended without a breakthrough, and the three delegations then went their separate ways for nine months.

The substance of the dispute has barely moved. Russia occupies roughly 20% of Ukraine, including Crimea and large parts of the Donbas, a recognition that no government outside Moscow's circle has granted. President Putin wants all of the Donbas, which would mean Ukrainian forces withdrawing from fortified positions that they have defended since 2014. He also demands a legal ban on Ukrainian membership of NATO, limits on the size and capabilities of Ukraine's armed forces, and changes to the treatment of the Russian language and of a Moscow-linked church. Moscow also speaks of its own "security guarantees", which President Volodymyr Zelensky has said would in practice mean a rollback of NATO's military presence in eastern and central Europe.

Kyiv's position is equally clear. It rejects withdrawal from land it still holds, refuses to recognise the occupation in law and will not accept restrictions on its armed forces. It proposes an unconditional ceasefire as the first step, an idea the Kremlin has repeatedly dismissed. And it insists on postwar guarantees, including continued Western military support, a European-led reassurance force inside Ukraine and a commitment modelled on Article 5 of the NATO treaty.

The political context in Washington has changed sharply in the past week. The midterm elections of Nov 3rd handed Democrats control of both houses of Congress, taking effect in January. Insiders in America and Ukraine say that the result has injected a new urgency into the process. For the president's main negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the new Congress is a firm deadline. They could soon face investigations into alleged conflicts of interest, and a visible diplomatic success would offer both political cover and a counterweight. Ukrainian negotiators, according to people familiar with their thinking, are privately sceptical of a breakthrough, yet they have been instructed to approach the talks with an open mind, if only to avoid annoying Mr Trump.

The line-up in Abu Dhabi reflects these calculations. Washington sends Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner. Ukraine fields a large and experienced team led by Rustem Umerov, head of the foreign intelligence service, and including Kyrylo Budanov, the president's chief of staff, Serhii Kyslytsia, David Arakhamia and Vadym Skibitsky. Russia is represented by Vladimir Medinsky, a presidential aide who has led Moscow's delegations since the early days of the war, together with deputy foreign ministers and senior military intelligence officers. France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy are sending national security advisers, alongside NATO and EU officials, but Russia has made plain that it does not want Europeans in the negotiating room. The Kremlin spokesman has described the talks as a three-way format in which Washington keeps its own channels to the Europeans. The compromise, a separate European meeting in the same city, tells its own story about who is deemed to own the subject of European security.

Key Developments

Several developments in the past two weeks define the landscape.

The first is the American announcement itself.

The phrase "big, beautiful agreement" is not new in Mr Trump's vocabulary, but its scope is. By suggesting that a settlement could involve all of Europe, the president has implied that the terms of the war's ending will be bound up with a broader reshaping of European security. For Moscow, which has argued since 2021 that NATO's posture is the true cause of the conflict, this is an invitation. For Europeans, it is a warning that the continent's arrangements may be negotiated without them.

The second development is the battlefield.

For much of 2025, Russian forces advanced slowly but steadily, taking more than five thousand square kilometres of Ukrainian territory, including ground recaptured in the Kursk region. The picture in 2026 is strikingly different. According to the assessments of the Institute for the Study of War, Russia gained only about one hundred and seventeen square kilometres in the first ten months of the year. The daily rate of advance has fallen from more than thirteen square kilometres in 2025 to well under half a square kilometre. Russia also lost ground that it had firmly controlled or infiltrated in September and October. President Zelensky has used his nightly addresses to argue that Ukraine is "genuinely strengthening" its negotiating position and that Russia is suffering record losses. Ukraine's General Staff estimates that some three hundred and eighty-one thousand Russian personnel were killed or seriously wounded between January and October, with monthly totals rising to more than fifty-four thousand in October. These figures are Ukrainian claims and Moscow disputes them, but independent assessments of the slowing front are consistent with the broad direction. Russia's estimated recruitment capacity, at twenty-four to thirty thousand a month, would not match the claimed rate of loss.

The third development is the strategic bombing campaign in both directions.

Ukraine has struck eight Russian refineries in seven days, including facilities at Ufa, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Yaroslavl and Ryazan, with the aim of reducing Russia's energy supply and export revenue. Russia has retaliated against Ukrainian cities and the power grid. In the week ending Nov 6th it launched about two thousand three hundred and fifty drones and more than eighty missiles, with a peak on Nov 3rd of three hundred and seventy drones and seventy-six missiles in a single night. As winter begins, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian families face outages. The grid has become both a battlefield and a bargaining chip, and Kyiv hopes to discuss a maritime and energy ceasefire in Abu Dhabi.

The fourth development concerns sanctions and the American domestic debate.

On Oct 9th Mr Trump invited Russia to sell about 1.8 million tonnes of diesel on the world market by the end of the year, a gesture widely read as a reward for engagement. But eleven days earlier the president had signed legislation, named after Senator Lindsey Graham, that allows Washington to sanction countries buying Russian oil. The Financial Times reported that four diesel-laden tankers sent in the hope of finding American buyers could not find anyone willing to accept the legal risk, a report the Kremlin dismissed as false. Senator Richard Blumenthal has warned shippers that only Congress can make such an arrangement legally valid. The episode shows how the executive's promises of relief collide with a legislature that is hostile to them and is about to become more so.

The fifth development is European preparation.

The United Kingdom and France are jointly leading Exercise Koalicja in Poland from Nov 9th to 22nd, involving about two thousand eight hundred troops from eleven nations. It is the first major exercise of the Multinational Force Ukraine, the military arm of the so-called Coalition of the Willing, and it aims to prepare NATO members to provide security guarantees to Ukraine after a settlement. Europe, in other words, is building the instruments that any lasting peace would require, even as it is kept at arm's length from the table.

Finally, there is a humanitarian track that offers the most realistic prospects of progress.

Mr Umerov has said that the agenda covers "key questions related to ending hostilities and moving closer to peace". Kyiv hopes to expand prisoner exchanges and to lay groundwork for an eventual meeting of leaders. A recent six-day ceasefire in the town of Oleshky, which First Lady Melania Trump helped to broker and which both delegations marked at an event at the White House, suggests that small, local arrangements are possible. Mr Arakhamia has said that he does not expect a breakthrough in the first round but is more hopeful about the second, and that merely resuming talks is an achievement.

Latest Facts and Concerns

The facts that matter most to the balance of the talks are the following.

First, the Kremlin has not changed its demands.

As recently as the days before the talks, it reiterated that Ukraine must withdraw from the Donbas for the war to end. Second, an American official has said that both sides have privately shown some flexibility on a possible territorial exchange, and that any territorial deal would likely come last, after security guarantees and other questions have been settled. Third, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told reporters that the process has "a ways to go". The gap between the president's language and his own secretary of state's language is itself a data point.

The principal concerns can be set out in turn.

The first is sequencing. If territory comes last, as American officials suggest, Ukraine will be negotiating security guarantees and humanitarian steps first, while Russia keeps its leverage over the one issue it cares most about. This ordering may be sensible in theory, but it also lets Moscow bank concessions on the early items and then stall on the final one.

The second concern is leverage.

In the first year of the Trump administration, the most important American pressure was applied to Kyiv, through threats to reduce intelligence sharing and arms deliveries, rather than to Moscow. Mr Trump's recent statements that Ukraine may end up in a "different shape" and his private meeting with Mr Dmitriev do nothing to reassure Ukrainians that the pattern has changed. A settlement that is perceived as a Ukrainian capitulation would not be stable. It would invite a second invasion once Russia had rebuilt its forces.

The third concern is Europe.

Mr Putin's insistence on a separate American channel, and on excluding Europeans from the room, is not a procedural quibble. It is an attempt to recast the war as a bilateral question between Washington and Moscow, to be settled over the heads of the continent that will bear the long-term costs. If American officials accept this framing, they weaken the very allies whose forces would police any ceasefire.

The fourth concern is time itself.

Mr Putin does not have to conclude anything. A process that continues keeps open the prospect of sanctions relief, divides Western opinion and gives Russia time to adapt. Even if the battlefield has turned against him in 2026, the passing of the American election cycle and the possible fatigue of European publics offer other advantages. A dilatory strategy is cheap for him and expensive for those who need a result.

The fifth concern is the new American politics.

A Democratic Congress will probably be sceptical of any deal that appears to reward aggression, and it will hold hearings. The president's envoys may therefore want the cover of a signed document before January. But a hurried agreement that cannot survive congressional scrutiny, and that Ukraine and Europe cannot accept, would be worse than no agreement, because it would burn time, credibility and goodwill.

Dr. 🆎 draws attention to a further dimension that is often missing from public debate. Modern wars, he argues, are increasingly decided by the speed at which each side can process information and adapt its tactics, and the drone and missile exchanges of the past few weeks show how quickly the technology is evolving.

Ukraine's ability to find and hit refineries hundreds of kilometres away, and Russia's ability to saturate air defences with hundreds of drones a night, are products of systems that learn. In such a contest, a pause that allows one side to rebuild its stocks and refine its algorithms is not neutral. He warns that any ceasefire without strong verification would be exploited in this way, and that the sophistication of artificial intelligence in targeting and surveillance makes meaningful monitoring both more necessary and more difficult.

Cause-and-Effect Analysis

The logic of the present moment can be traced as a chain of causes and effects, in which each link strengthens the next. The chain begins in Washington. A heavy defeat in the midterm elections, together with the approach of a Democratic Congress, creates a political deadline for the president and his envoys. The deadline produces a preference for speed and for announcements, since the appearance of progress is itself a political asset. That preference leads to public statements that promise a deal, however vaguely, and to pressure on the weaker party at the table to make concessions that will allow something to be signed.

On the Russian side, the effect of this pressure is to reduce the cost of delay. Mr Putin can read the American calendar as easily as any analyst. He knows that a president who wants a quick result will be tempted to offer incentives, such as the diesel arrangement of Oct 9th, in exchange for little more than attendance. He knows too that a Democratic Congress will complicate any sanctions relief, which gives him a reason to extract what he can before January. The rational Russian strategy is therefore to engage visibly, to concede on humanitarian issues of low strategic value and to hold fast on territory and on the status of Europe.

This strategy has costs, and the costs are rising. The slowing front means that Moscow cannot easily improve its position by force, and the refinery strikes put a visible strain on the energy sector from which the state draws much of its income. A rational leader in this position would value a pause, both to stop the erosion of his economy and to rebuild his army. This is the second-order effect of American haste. A rapid ceasefire on the existing lines, with no robust guarantees and no verification, would freeze Russian occupation of about a fifth of Ukraine while allowing Russia to recover. In practice, it would convert a stalemate in which Moscow is losing momentum into a pause in which Moscow regains it.

For Ukraine, the chain of effects is different. Kyiv depends on American intelligence and on European money, and it cannot afford to be seen as the party that spoils the diplomacy. This explains the instruction to approach the talks with an open mind. But the constraint creates a trap. If Ukraine participates and accepts the framework, it risks being drawn into concessions it cannot sell at home. If it resists, it risks being blamed by Washington for prolonging the war. The only way to escape the trap is to improve its bargaining position on the ground and in the air, which is exactly what its strikes on Russian refineries and its defence of the front are intended to do. In this sense, the military and diplomatic tracks are not separate. Each success on the battlefield buys time and credibility at the table.

For Europe, the effect of being kept out of the room is to accelerate the construction of its own capabilities. Exercise Koalicja, the planning for a reassurance force and the demand to participate in talks on European security are all responses to the possibility of being presented with a settlement. Mr Zelensky's remark that issues concerning Europe's security must be discussed with European participation is, in this reading, a call for the continent to claim its place before the terms are drafted. Europeans, however, face their own constraints, notably the cost of sustaining support and the difficulty of agreeing among twenty-seven members. If Europe cannot present a united front, Moscow will exploit the divisions.

There is also a feedback loop between technology and diplomacy, which Dr. 🆎 considers underappreciated. Advances in drones, electronic warfare and automated targeting shorten the interval in which a ceasefire can be exploited. If a pause lasts several months, he says, each side could field new generations of systems that make the next round of fighting deadlier. The same technologies could, in principle, help verification, through satellite imagery, sensor networks and pattern analysis, but only if the parties agree to share data and accept inspection. He adds that the proliferation of cheap, powerful tools for autonomous operations lowers the barrier for smaller groups to cause harm, and that a long war leaves behind a large pool of trained operators, surplus weapons and grievances. Planners of any settlement, he argues, should treat the risk of spillover into organised crime, terrorism and even the misuse of biological research as a design problem, not an afterthought. A peace that ignores this risk may end the fighting while exporting its dangers.

Finally, there is a reputational chain.

Every announcement of a deal that does not materialise reduces the credibility of the next one. The president has made similar claims at least three times. Repeated claims teach every stakeholder to discount the headline, and a process in which no one believes the headline rewards patience, and patience is Mr Putin's most abundant resource.

Future Steps

If the aim is a durable peace rather than a quick announcement, a number of steps follow from this analysis. They are addressed to different stakeholders, but they work best in combination.

The first step is to decouple the American domestic calendar from the diplomatic one.

Washington should be explicit, in private and in public, that it will not trade substantive concessions for the sake of a pre-January result. This would remove the incentive for Moscow to run down the clock and would reassure Kyiv. It would also protect the president from the charge that he sacrificed an ally for a headline. A modest agreement that holds is worth far more than a grand one that collapses.

The second step is to settle the sequence of issues in a way that does not hand Russia free options.

Humanitarian measures, including broader prisoner exchanges and the return of civilians, are sensible first steps and should proceed quickly. An energy and maritime ceasefire is also a rational early objective, since it protects civilians and lowers the risk of an uncontrolled spiral. But such measures should be tied explicitly to progress on the harder questions, with agreed timelines and with consequences for non-compliance. Otherwise, each early success becomes a reason to delay the rest.

The third step is to build credible verification.

Any ceasefire needs monitoring that does not depend on the goodwill of the party most likely to violate it. This means an agreed mix of satellite and aerial surveillance, ground sensors, and a presence of neutral or allied observers, supported by data-sharing arrangements and by artificial intelligence tools that can detect violations quickly.

Dr. 🆎 argues that the monitoring system should be designed with the same care as the weapons it is meant to restrain, with human experts in the loop to interpret ambiguous signals and with clear protocols for escalation.

The fourth step is to bring Europe into the process in a way that recognises the facts.

Europeans will supply much of the money for reconstruction, much of the force for any reassurance mission and much of the political legitimacy for sanctions relief. They cannot be treated as spectators. A structure in which European security advisers meet in parallel and are consulted before, rather than after, decisions is a minimum.

The fifth step is to make the cost of delay visible for Moscow.

This does not require new gestures so much as consistency. The sanctions architecture, including the legislation that threatens buyers of Russian oil, should be enforced rather than waived. Support for Ukraine's air defence and long-range strike capabilities should continue, because they are the main source of leverage. If the Kremlin concludes that time is working against it, the incentives will shift. If it concludes that time is working for it, no formula of words will change its behaviour.

The sixth step is to prepare, in parallel, for the possibility that talks fail.

A responsible policy in Washington, Kyiv and European capitals would include contingency plans for a hard winter, for protecting the energy system, for supplying air defence interceptors and for sustaining public support.

The seventh step is to protect the integrity of the process from domestic politics.

Congress, in particular, has a legitimate role in scrutinising any deal and the envoys who negotiate it. Transparency about the role and interests of those envoys would strengthen, rather than weaken, the credibility of the talks. Any agreement that has bipartisan support in Washington is far more likely to last than one that is seen as a personal triumph for a single administration.

Conclusion

The talks in Abu Dhabi will take place in the shadow of two clocks. One is the American political calendar, which is pushing the president and his envoys toward a quick announcement.

The other is the Russian economic and military clock, which, according to many independent indicators, is running faster than the Kremlin's rhetoric admits. The art of the negotiation is to ensure that the second clock is not stopped by the first.

It would be a mistake to read the situation as one of weakness on the Ukrainian side and strength on the Russian side.

The front has largely stalled, Russian refineries are burning and sanctions legislation is limiting the Kremlin's room for manoeuvre. Ukrainian forces, though stretched, are holding and striking back, and Europe is preparing instruments for a lasting peace. These are real sources of leverage. But leverage is useful only if it is used, and it will be wasted if the principal mediator prizes the appearance of success above its substance.

For that reason, the most valuable contribution that stakeholders can make in the coming weeks is not to rush, and not to sabotage, but to insist on sequencing, verification, European participation and consistent pressure.

A peace that locks in aggression would not end the war. It would postpone it, and it would teach every revisionist power that patience pays. A peace that is slower, harder and better anchored would offer the Ukrainian people, and the continent they live on, something much more valuable than a headline.

Dr. 🆎 closes with a reminder that the lesson of every recent conflict is that wars end when the cost of continuing is greater than the cost of compromise for the leaders who decide. The task of diplomacy is to raise the first and lower the second without letting either side believe that it can wait for the other to blink. In Abu Dhabi, the party in the greater hurry is not the one with the most to lose from failure, and that is precisely why the world should watch what is agreed, and what is merely announced, with the greatest care.