Wars can end practically overnight.

Just look at Syria, which was locked in a civil war for a dozen years. Having survived a succession of uprisings, Bashar al-Assad seemed on track to become a tyrant for life. Then, in the space of a couple weeks, his allies effectively deserted him, his army melted away, and he and his family had to decamp to the Kremlin.

Vladimir Putin is already in the Kremlin, so that’s one place he can’t escape to if things in Russia go south. Unlike Assad, he doesn’t face rebel armies (not yet, at least). But he should still be worried, given Russian losses on the battlefield, in geopolitics and throughout the economy.

How long will it be before Putin and Assad both have to leave town to take up residence in that last refuge of scoundrels, not patriotism as Samuel Johnson insisted, but Pyongyang?

That’s certainly not what Donald Trump meant when he said he would end the war in Ukraine on day one of his administration. He was not talking about helping Ukraine retake its occupied territory, precipitating a regime change in Russia and sending Putin into exile. That was the old Republican Party, which was anti-Russian to its core. The new MAGA party, with an illiberal agenda that overlaps with Putin’s, doesn’t have a foreign policy so much as an arsenal of threats.

No surprise, then, that Trump’s “concept of a plan” for ending the Ukraine war seems to consist only of simultaneous threats designed to push the two sides to come to the table and negotiate a ceasefire. The problem is that Putin is in no hurry to compromise. Oblivious to the implications of Assad’s defeat, Russia continues to press its advantage in Ukraine. In November, it seized nearly 11 square miles of Ukrainian territory every day.

But these gains have come at a huge cost—over 45,000 total casualties over that same period. The need to bring in 10,000 North Korean soldiers on the Russian side suggests that these casualties are taking their toll. Other signs of Russian desperation include the astronomically high signing bonuses, prisons empty because of dragooned conscripts, and all the Indians and Yemenis tricked into fighting in Ukraine. The Russian economy, meanwhile, is starting to buckle, with inflation running over 9%, the interest rate above 21% and rampant labor shortages resulting from all the young men in the army, in exile, or toiling in military industries.

Putin soldiers on, regardless. At the top of his wish list, he wants to kick Ukrainian troops out of the Russian territory it seized around Kursk. Next, he wants all of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces (Russia controls almost all of the former but only around two-thirds of the latter). Putin’s maximalist goal is to “denazify” the Ukrainian government by installing its own Kremlin-friendly regime and disarming the country so that it doesn’t pose any future threat to Russia.

The Ukrainians have dug in their heels in the hopes that Putin will eventually scale back to save his own regime. But even holding the line, much less regaining occupied territory, has become increasingly difficult. Ukraine is struggling so much with its own shortage of soldiers that Volodymyr Zelensky has been talking about trading land for peace (plus NATO membership). Such a ceasefire would cede territory (the Donbas, Crimea) to the Russians, but Ukraine would reserve the right to regain the land “in a diplomatic way” (whatever that means).

Despite his willingness to compromise on territory, Zelensky is not giving up. He’s getting another billion dollars in military assistance from the Biden administration as its going-away present. A $50 billion loan collateralized on the interest on Russian assets frozen in the West is on the horizon, with the United States already allocating its share of $20 billion. To bring in enough troops to stop Russian advances, the Ukrainian government may consider further lowering the conscription age.

Trump and his minions think they can force both sides to compromise on the disputed territory. That’s a perennial misunderstanding of the U.S. government.

After all, this war is not primarily about territory. It’s about ideology. Putin has an illiberal vision that puts Russia at the center of a new anti-Western axis that contests everything from international law to LGBT rights. Zelensky has been thrust into the somewhat uncomfortable position of representing Western values of democracy and human rights. Ukrainians have a more fundamental fear: that an occupying force will throw them in jail, destroy their culture, or execute them in cold blood as in Bucha and elsewhere.

Throwing Donald Trump into this mix is like setting off a bomb in the middle of a life-and-death struggle. Maybe, in the chaos and confusion after the explosion, everyone will throw down their weapons.

Or maybe they’ll just ignore the bomb thrower, pick themselves up, and fight on with renewed vigor. Neither side has reached the stalemate that the two Koreas experienced in the final two years of that war. So, don’t bet on an armistice taking place on January 21, 2025.

Trump’s concept of a plan

In the world according to Trump, Russia invaded Ukraine because America was weak. Thus, to resolve the crisis, America must be strong again.

That’s the essence of the plan from Trump’s envoy, Keith Kellogg. The United States will threaten to stop all aid to Ukraine to push it to the negotiating table. Then, to Russia, it will threaten to increase aid to Ukraine to get the Kremlin to negotiate. NATO membership for Ukraine would be off the table.

But Putin knows that plenty of Republicans, and the constituents who put them in office, just want the United States to stop sending money to Ukraine under any circumstance. So, Putin can safely resist the pressure and then sit back to watch the Republican Party tear itself to shreds over the issue.

Putin also knows how Kellogg really feels. “A war born in American weakness can only be ended by American strength,” Trump’s future envoy wrote in testimony to a Senate hearing last year. “That’s why the path to bringing these negotiations about is to enable Ukraine to defeat the Russian army in Ukraine … and provide Ukraine with the military armament it needs to [do so].”

That explains the Russian response to the plan so far. “Kellogg comes to Moscow with his plan, we take it and then tell him to screw himself, because we don’t like any of it,” Putin ally Konstantin Malofeyev told the Financial Times. “That’d be the whole negotiation.”

The Russians also know how Trump handled negotiations with the Taliban. In his eagerness to withdraw U.S. troops, President Transactional basically sold out the Afghan government and, in the words of his own national security advisor H.R. McMaster, signed “a surrender agreement with the Taliban.” With a deadline for U.S. withdrawal and no implementation mechanism to hold the Taliban to its promises, Trump set the conditions that led to the disaster the Biden administration had to deal with several months into its first year.

Having promised to end the war and stop sending money plus arms to Ukraine, Trump may well find himself in a similar diplomatic quandary vis a vis Ukraine in 2025. He might make promises to Kyiv that resemble what he promised the Afghan government and offer concessions to the Russians that are similar to what he gave the Taliban. Ukrainians, at least, know how that will end.

Actually, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting enthusiastic about an Afghan-like peace in Ukraine. A terrible peace has settled over Afghanistan: the peace of the morgue and the jail cell. And that’s precisely the kind of peace that occupied Russian territories in Ukraine currently “enjoy.”

What can Ukraine do?

The United States offered Ukraine the most armaments, but it wasn’t the only supplier in town. European allies have pledged to pick up the slack, with Germany leading the way. European leaders are reportedly trying to persuade the incoming Trump administration to keep supplying Ukraine for at least one more year.

One more year: that’s probably what Russia has the resources for. It’s increasing its military spending tremendously for 2025, but then the budget starts to fall over the next two years. If the Russian economy really goes off the rails as a result of the war, many Russian will abandon their love affair with Putin.

Zelensky’s land-for-peace deal is an interim option. Ukraine may have to settle for some vague promises of NATO accession and some current “security guarantees” in the form of weaponry (but not nuclear weapons) to deter another Russian invasion.

If Russia can be arm-twisted to negotiate—or persuaded by the promise of sanctions relief—Ukraine will probably have to swallow some kind of land-for-peace deal, as noxious as that will be.

After Russia seized Crimea and parts of the Donbas back in 2014, I compared Ukraine’s situation to that of Aron Ralston, a hiker who found himself trapped in a remote location with his arm pinned by a boulder. Ultimately, he decided to amputate his arm in order to survive.

“If Ukraine wants to move on with its aspirations to move closer to the West, it will probably have to submit to the knife as well,” I wrote. “Who knows: after many years of international isolation, lukewarm Russian support, and economic stagnation, the ghost limbs might themselves appeal for reattachment. This is not fair, of course. Russia has been playing a dirty game. But no one ever said that geopolitics is fair. The situation that befell Aron Ralston wasn’t fair either. But sometimes you have to do what’s necessary to survive, even if it means cutting away what you hold dear.”

Now, a decade later, the situation is more desperate and even more unfair. But Putin could very well be living on borrowed time, just like Assad for the last dozen years. Russia is not all-powerful (exhibit A: the implosion of its close ally Syria), and neither is Putin. The quagmire of Afghanistan set in motion the collapse of the Soviet Union; the quagmire of Ukraine may well spell the end of Putin’s “Russian world.” Then the residents of the Donbas and Crimea will beg Ukraine, safely settled in the European Union, to welcome them back.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.