The US president thinks the Kremlin desires more territory but what it actually craves is a veto over Ukraine’s future

Owen Matthews

24 February 2026

The Ukraine war enters its fifth year today. That grim milestone is made all the more disheartening because Kyiv’s allies have failed to understand what Vladimir Putin is fighting for. If the war is to be ended any time soon – and more importantly, if peace in Europe is to be secured for future generations – the West has to understand its adversary and his demands.

First, America. Donald Trump believes that what Putin wants is territory, and that if he gets an extra sliver of Donbas the peace deal will be done. In fairness, the reason the White House believes that is because the Kremlin has consistently pretended it is so. In addition, Moscow has been trying to bamboozle Trump into pressuring Ukraine to capitulate by inventing a fantastical $14tn (£10.3tn) mega-deal on minerals and dangling false promises of untold riches in front of envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the presidential son-in-law.

But what Moscow really wants – what it has always wanted – is political control over Ukraine. Not just a bit of territory but a legally binding architecture for permanent interference in the country’s political life. What the Kremlin seeks is a mechanism for interference in Ukrainian language policy, media, the Orthodox Church, historical memory, and elections. A truly independent, democratic Ukraine free to make alliances with the West is, to Putin’s mind, a fundamental and existential threat to the security of Russia.

That is not a new principle. As early as 2008 William Burns, then US ambassador to Moscow and later CIA director, warned in a classified cable to Washington that Ukraine’s Nato aspirations were “an emotional and neuralgic” issue for Russia, a “raw nerve”. Burns noted that Putin feared “encirclement”and presciently warned that Moscow “would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face”. Eighteen years later Burns’ nightmare scenario is still unfolding, extinguishing thousands of lives for the sake of what Putin perceives to be his country’s national security.

The irony is, of course, that Putin’s war has not extinguished Ukraine’s independence but rather reinforced it. With the Russian-speaking regions of the east now mostly under Moscow’s occupation, the remaining 81 per cent of Ukraine has become more homogeneously Ukrainian and more passionately anti-Russian.

After four years of bombardment, massacre and war crimes, the chances of a pro-Moscow government ever coming to power in Kyiv – which happened and could have happened again – is now zero. Putin’s anti-Midas touch has produced the exact result he most wanted to avoid.

Nonetheless, the Kremlin is still pushing for some means of salvaging its lost influence over what Putin calls, apparently without irony, “a brotherly people”. In recent negotiations in Switzerland, the Kremlin has explicitly modelled its security guarantor demands on the 1960 Cyprus arrangement, in which it retained the right of armed intervention. Turkey exercised that right in 1974, annexing a third of the island. Russia envisions something similar – a legal pretext for future military intervention, suspended over Ukrainian society as a permanent threat not to stray too far westward. And that, it goes without saying, is something Kyiv will never willingly accept.

At base, Putin went to war not because, as some imagine, he wanted to recreate the Russian empire. Rather, it was first and foremost to keep Ukraine out of Western military alliances. In that context Boris Johnson’s recent call for British and French boots on the ground right now is the one thing absolutely guaranteed to crash the peace process. It is also likely to provoke Russia into even more devastating escalation, including attacks on those Nato peacekeepers. By the same token, Europe’s continued insistence that the solution is for Ukraine to fight on and on is also a dead end.

Both sides are trapped. Every time Ukraine shows flexibility, Russia raises its demands rather than reciprocating. Ukraine, fearing any agreement struck today will soon be forgotten, holds out for the most binding security guarantees possible – including some kind of Article 5-style agreement with Washington, as well as EU membership. But the root cause of the deadlock is that Putin has not lost sight of his key political goal. The one thing he will not tolerate is a free, pro-Western Ukraine. And that is the deal-breaker that explains why negotiations have taken on the same grinding, inconclusive character as the fighting itself.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/24/trump-no-idea-what-putin-wants-ukraine-war-land-power/