by Stefano Caprio

Proposals and ideas about ending the war are multiplying, but for Putin, any negotiations with Trump would only be an intermediate stage in an ongoing process. For Ukraine the situation is becoming increasingly grim, not only due to the uncertainties of Western aid but also to the decreasing participation of Ukrainians in the war effort.

Proposals and ideas on how to end the war between Ukraine and Russia are now multiplying after the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the event that ended the "electoral world war" for this year, one of the variants of the hybrid war of politics and propaganda.

From the developments of the past few days, it is not easy to understand whether Vladimir Putin would accept a solution through peace negotiations, or choose instead to raise the stakes to a higher and increasingly destructive level.

The use of US long-range weapons by the Ukrainians has led Putin to approve a "new nuclear doctrine”, which can be summarised in a single sentence: “We will take out all Ukrainians and their allies", reinforced by showing off a non-nuclear "hypersonic missile", one of the tsar's favourite toys, launched against the city of Dnipro.

While these threats are ostensibly part of the war rhetoric, Putin has not stuck his nose out of his bunker since early November. The Kremlin repeats that it is ready to start negotiations on the condition that the Ukrainians leave the occupied territories in the Kursk region, while Zelensky repeats that the attack on Kursk is the guarantee of the start of negotiations, which both sides intend to conduct from a "position of strength".

In fact, after the surprise attack on Russian territory, Putin's counteroffensive has proven decisive and fierce, with the help of the Akhmat battalion of Chechen volunteers and the arrival of thousands of soldiers from North Korea.

Yet, despite three rash assaults against the Ukrainians, the Russians have not yet managed to fully recapture the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces still control an area of about 600 square kilometres. While Putin demanded the entire territory of the occupied regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine be handed over, now he repeats that negotiations will only begin with the liberation of Kursk.

That said, with Russia intensifying its missile attacks with Iranian Shaheds against Ukraine’s main cities – Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa – peace seems less likely every day.

In the Donbass, the Russian offensive also continues at full speed, with Russian forces one step away from conquering yet another "strategic point", Kurakhovo, which would give them access to one of the most important cities in the Donetsk region still held by the Ukrainians, Pokrovsk.

Until 2016, this provincial capital was called Krasnoarmiisk, in honour of the Red Army, which the Russians would like to reimpose once it is “liberated”:

From here, Russian forces could try to break through in another Ukrainian region, that of Dnepropetrovsk, pushing further the project of “denazification”, conquering the whole of Malorussia (Little Russia), amid the great enthusiasm of Russian propagandists who speak of Ukraine’s inevitable collapse, abandoned by its Western allies.

For the Ukrainians, the situation is becoming increasingly grim, not only because of the uncertainties of Western aid and Trump's future choices, but also because of the ever-decreasing participation of ordinary Ukrainians in defence, with almost 10,000 soldiers deserting the battlefield in recent months. Ukrainian journalist Volodymyr Boiko reports that some 93,500 people are under investigation for desertion since the start of the Russian invasion in 2022.

Russia’s war industry has been reorganised in the last six months, since economist Andrey Belousov was put in charge of the Ministry of Defence. In the coming year, Russia’s defence industry is expected to produce 30 per cent more artillery rounds than all EU countries combined, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrey Sibiga said in recent meeting in Kyiv with Josep Borrel, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

The end of the war, in Putin's mind, can only come with the end of Ukraine; any negotiations with US President-elect Trump would only be an intermediate stage in an ongoing process. While no one can foresee its conclusion, it is a "perpetual war" against the entire West.

A very important factor in this is precisely the management of the defence sector by Belousov, the "orthodox-patriotic" minister who took over from the veteran Sergei Shoigu, who has been in the Russian cabinet since the Yeltsin years, and is now secretary of the Security Council, while all his associates in the ministry he headed for 20 years are now in jail for corruption and embezzlement.

Belousov had been dealing with military issues since the start of the Ukraine invasion, when he was First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia in charge of the economy, and conducted stress-tests to figure out how to counter inevitable Western sanctions, to steer the Russian economy towards a global war.

Even before, in 2013, as the Dossier Centre documented, he dealt with “the administrative aspects of various weapons-related issues,” and assisted the operations of Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner company.

Now the minister is being compared to historical figures like Generalissimo Aleksandr Suvorov, who paved the way for the Russian victory against Napoleon, alternatively to Pyotr Stolypin, a prime minister in the early 20th century who showed the oath towards “patriotic reforms" even to Mussolini and Hitler, or even the American fictional hero who stood up to the powerful, namely John Rambo, Russified into Rambovich.

The new Defence Minister has carried out a great "clean-up" at the Russian Ministry of Defence since the arrest in April of its former Deputy Minister, Timur Ivanov, opening a probe that has already involved more than 20 high-level officials.

In their place, he has appointed, unexpectedly for the defence sector, mostly figures from various branches of the state administration, people like Putin's cousin, Anna Tsivileva, a privileged member of the group of great Russian oligarchs, who is now the secretary general of the ministry.

Since 2023, Tsivileva has also led the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation, on the orders of her relative, Tsar Putin, to support participants in the special military operation in Ukraine.

Beginning last June, Belousov started to appear in military uniform at meetings of the Security Committee, with an affected resemblance to generals. Eventually, the Kremlin felt the need to clarify that "the civilian rank of first-class state councillor is comparable to that of army generals." One of the paradoxes of the war is that the minister has several relatives who live in Kyiv, where his uncle, Ukrainian army general Alexander Belousov, is buried.

The two sides of the family do not communicate, except with the bombs Russia continues to drop on the homes of the defence minister’s relatives. This is not unusual, the extended family of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, is in Russia, in the city of Vladimir, which has not been touched by Ukrainian bombs, for now.

It seems that the Russian Ministry of Defence is preparing a plan to divide Ukraine by 2045, with a Russian part, a pro-Russian part, and an “undecided” part.

Recently, the Duma (the lower house of the Russian Parliament) approved the budget for the years 2025-2027, further boosting war spending, which already exceeds 40 per cent (over 120 billion dollars), above all doubling the funds allocated to Tsivileva’s Defenders of the Fatherland, to cover all the needs of soldiers at the front and their families,  as well as veterans who return home to become the country's new leaders, to be trained for leadership roles in regional and federal administrations.

It does not matter that food prices jumped by 20 per cent, municipal services by 10 per cent, petrol by 5 per cent; taxes on profits are up, for small and medium-sized firms, for gas, oil and coal companies, on alcohol, cigarettes, and sugary drinks.

A third of Russia's entire budget comes from exporting gas and oil, with the latter sold at US$ 70 a barrel, which will be increasingly difficult to do as other oil producers crank output, which will bring the price down to US$ 40.

The war is costing Russia more and more, with inflation forcing the central bank to raise interest rates and cost-of-living parameters. Under the circumstances, it would seem logical to find a solution to stop this mad race towards the destruction of the economy and society.

Russia, however, is never able to stop, halt or go back, in the boundless spaces of the taiga to reach a non-existent border; instead, it will go forward again, in one way or another, with or without Trump, to find its Ukraine (borderland), even at the cost of losing its soul.

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• russia
• moscow
• putin
• ukraine
• war
• belousov
• tsivileva