By Maria Popova

June 6, 2026

There is dissonance in the air over the Russia-Ukraine stalemate these days.

On one hand, we have President Volodymyr Zelensky’s open letter to Vladimir Putin, a document that invites the Russian president to a face-to-face meeting to end the war.

On the other, we have the smoke rising from yet another Russian oil depot, this time near St. Petersburg, the latest eloquent reminder that Ukraine’s capacity to strike deep into the Russian interior is accelerating.

Moreover, striking St. Petersburg during “Putin’s Davos”, the city’s premier annual economic forum vindicated Zelensky’s claim that Moscow’s May 9th victory parade had only gone ahead with his permission.

The combination and juxtaposition of diplomatic overture and kinetic fury have reignited optimism that we’ve reached a turning point; that Moscow might be ready to face reality and abandon its maximalist goals of Ukrainian capitulation to Russian demands.

Such optimism is misplaced.

To be sure, the evidence of Russia’s strategic defeat is mounting, visible to anyone willing to look past the Kremlin’s bluster. The Russian military advance, which Putin constantly touts with confidence, has effectively ground to a halt since late 2025.

As Ukraine has developed its drone production and forces, the arithmetic of attrition has turned against Russia; Russia is now losing troops at a rate that monthly recruitment drives can no longer offset. The capture of Donbas, supposedly a minimum definition of Russian victory, remains a mirage.

Even the vaunted land corridor to Crimea is choking. Ukrainian drone operators have almost severed the crucial logistics highway in the occupied south, putting the strategic asset into what Ukraine’s Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov calls a “logistics lockdown”.

Perhaps most damagingly, Moscow cannot even capitalize on the lifeline of high global energy prices, because Ukrainian deep strikes have systematically degraded the country’s oil refining capacity. In May alone, Ukraine hit eight out of Russia’s 10 largest refineries.

It is tempting to look at this scorecard and conclude that the war will soon wind down. Even U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is hardly a starry-eyed cheerleader for Kyiv, recently articulated this view. While admitting that Russia cannot achieve its maximalist goals militarily, Rubio concluded that the war “can only end with a negotiated settlement”.

Rubio’s assessment of Russia’s military failure is correct, but his prescription is flawed. It relies on the assumption that Vladimir Putin is a rational actor operating within a system that allows for reverse gear. He is not.

Political scientists and economists have found ample evidence that autocrats like Putin succumb to an information isolation trap, surrounded by sycophants who feed them curated realities. This would explain why Putin might truly think that the Russian army is winning in Ukraine as we speak.

But the problem runs deeper than one man’s delusion. Even if Putin sees the battlefield map clearly, he is unlikely to cut his losses and retreat to a “middle ground.”

The regime he has built rests on a foundation of imperial revanchism. For a quarter-century, the Kremlin has cultivated the idea that Russia’s greatness is defined by the subjugation of its neighbours, the creation of a “Russian world” that incorporates states with Russian speakers, regardless of their sovereign preferences, the destruction of the European Union, and the demise of US hegemony on the world stage.

Like Nazi Germany or the late Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia is not a candidate for reform or ‘reset’. It is an ossified structure that can only break, not bend.

Indeed, these goals were spelled out in presentations at the St. Petersburg forum by Kremlin insiders.

To compromise now by withdrawing from some occupied Ukrainian lands or by accepting a sovereign European Ukraine would be an admission of failure that Putin shows no signs of swallowing.

The Kremlin’s unserious, canned response to Zelensky’s open letter is telling. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov quickly rejected Zelensky’s offer to meet on neutral ground. Putin reaffirmed that Russia would continue pursuing its military objectives and told journalists that when he meets Zelensky to sign a peace treaty, he will say “Thank God it is all over”—a statement that telegraphs Putin’s position that he’ll only see a Zelensky who is suing for peace, not negotiating.

As ever, Russia apparently expects to achieve victory through manipulation and bullying, not compromise.

We must stop projecting Western diplomatic logic of cost-benefit analysis onto an autocracy whose state identity defines greatness as imperialist expansion and whose economy and society are now organized fully around waging war.

Like Nazi Germany or the late Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia is not a candidate for reform or “reset.” It is an ossified structure that can only break, not bend.

The oligarchs are no more likely to force the Kremlin to compromise today than they were in the first days of the 2022 invasion. Russian society may be showing signs of war fatigue but there are no signs of burgeoning mass anti-regime mobilization.

The fact that the last, most promising, charismatic opposition leader was poisoned in a Siberian prison may have something to do with that, as might the unprecedented dissent-containment capabilities of the 21st-century surveillance state. The existence of a significant proportion of Russians who support their country’s foreign aggression is also an important factor.

The uncomfortable truth is that this war is unlikely to end at a negotiating table in Geneva or Istanbul. It will end when the cost of imperial ambition becomes unbearable for the Russian elite and the broader society.

Since no Western army, nor even the Ukrainian one, will march on Moscow to enforce Putin’s surrender, the defeat must be internal. It must be driven by a collapse of the regime’s capacity to function.

We are not there yet.

The moment will come when economic despair and military exhaustion outweigh the passive acceptance of the status quo. When the deep-seated belief among Russian elites and the Russian population in the historically inaccurate trope that “Russia always wins” can no longer be sustained.

Zelensky tried with his open letter to subtly push this point, but Russian elites are unlikely to hear him just as the Russian people did not hear his February 2022 plea to them to refuse to participate in Putin’s widening war.

Change will be imminent when Russian hope in a turnaround on the battlefield is extinguished, and the Russian army slowly retreats from the Ukrainian territories it occupies. So, we should not be looking for a change of heart in the Kremlin, but for signs of a systemic failure of the state that supports it.

Until then, hopes for a “negotiated settlement” serve only to prolong the bloodshed. Russia will not take an off-ramp; it needs to be defeated.

Policy Columnist Maria Popova is the Hiram Mills Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and Co-Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal. With Oxana Shevel, she recently published a book titled Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States.