Мир. Сигналы для заключения мира

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Selling Peace to Ukrainians, Russians

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Selling End of War as Victory to Ukrainians

Interestingly, the Russian side has not been alone in pondering whether and how the end of hostilities can be sold to the public. In conversation with students of the Serhiy Nyzhny Kyiv School of Government posted on YouTube in early May, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, former commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces and current ambassador to the U.K., offered his views on this subject. “So victory, for both Russia and Ukraine, is increasingly a question of how to sell the outcome as victory. Someone will gain territory and people and call that ‘victory’; someone will lose almost everything yet still try to sell it as ‘victory’ to their people. That’s the current problem.” Zaluzhnyi—who has led some of the recent Ukrainian polls on potential candidates for the next president of Ukraine—further explored what could be publicly framed as a victory even as a military triumph remains unattainable in his May 22 commentary for Ukraine’s NV.ua outlet. The general wrote: “such a war for survival on one side, and the imposition of achieving the goal of this war of destruction at the cost of enormous losses on the other, poses a threat to the existence of both Ukraine and Russia... This is a war of attrition, where survival means victory.”

Can Expanded Mediation Help Sell the Peace? 

Thus, it seems that at least some Ukrainian and Russian officials believe it is time to think on how ending the war could be sold to their compatriots.4 That peace would have to be sold to respective publics follows from recent opinion polls that show while a majority of Ukrainians and Russians support talks on peace, they disagree on the conditions for it, with Donbas being the biggest apple of discord. For instance, a nationwide telephone survey of 1,600 respondents in Russia conducted by Russian Field on Feb. 5–14, 2026, found that majorities believe “mandatory” terms for a peace deal should include recognition of Donbas as Russian territory (75%), Ukraine’s refusal to join NATO (71%) and lifting of sanctions (70%). In contrast, a mid-January 2026 poll of Ukrainians by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology showed 57% of Ukrainians categorically reject the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from Donbas even in exchange for security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe.

How to reconcile Russians’ and Ukrainians’ views on these hard issues is something that experts such as Thomas Graham, Peter Slezkine and Joshua Shifrinson and Edward Joseph have recently pondered. Whether some of their ideas would be implemented depends, to a large extent, on the political will of Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin,5 whose negotiators reportedly appeared to makeprogress earlier this year,6 and who have recently spoken of seeing the “beginning of the end” of the war and the conflict “coming to an end,” respectively. The chances that their visions of this end can be reconciled in ways both men can sell to their compatriots as a victory are slim, but not non-existent. Perhaps these chances could be increased if, given that the U.S. mediation of the conflict has stalled, EU mediators join the negotiating process under the leadership of someone who, unlike the current American mediators, is well versed in dealing with heads of state.

https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/selling-peace-ukrainians-russians

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