Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine changed the course of history. It did so most directly, of course, for the Ukrainians subjected to this brutal act of aggression. But the war also changed Russia itself far more than most outsiders grasp. No cease-fire, not even one brokered by a U.S. president fond of his Russian counterpart, can reverse the degree to which Putin has made confrontation with the West the organizing principle of Russian life. And no cessation of hostilities in Ukraine can roll back the extent to which he has deepened his country’s relationship with China.
As a result of the war, Putin’s Russia has become much more repressive, and anti-Westernism has only become more pervasive throughout Russian society. Since 2022, the Kremlin has conducted a sweeping campaign to quash political dissent, spread pro-war and anti-Western propaganda domestically, and create broad classes of Russians that benefit materially from the war. Tens of millions of Russians, including senior officials and many of the country’s wealthiest people, now view the West as a mortal enemy.
For three years, U.S. and European officials showed remarkable resolve in countering Putin’s aggression. But they also, at times unwittingly, played into Putin’s narratives that the West resents Russia and that its conflict with the country is existential. Western leaders’ strategy was marred by an absence of a coherent, long-term approach to Russia paired with rhetoric that could suggest it had a grander design than it did. In 2024, for example, Kaja Kallas—then the prime minister of Estonia and now the EU’s top diplomat, as the vice president of the European Commission and the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy—stated that Western leaders should not worry that NATO’s commitment to a Ukrainian victory could cause Russia to break apart. The Kremlin’s propaganda machine eagerly circulated this statement to prove that dismembering Russia is the West’s endgame.
U.S. President Donald Trump has disrupted the transatlantic alliance’s unity by seeking a swift end to the war. But even if Trump’s overtures to Putin yield a superficial thaw in the U.S.-Russian relationship, Putin’s fundamental mistrust of the West will make a genuine reconciliation impossible. He cannot be sure that Trump will successfully push Europe to restore ties with Russia, and he knows that in 2028, a new U.S. administration may simply make another policy U-turn. Few American corporations are lining up to get back into Russia. And Putin will not divest from his strategic relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The Kremlin will continue to embrace Chinese technology (including tools of digital repression), maintain its reliance on China’s markets and financial system, and deepen its security ties with Beijing, even if that puts it on a collision course with Washington.
The distastefulness of Trump’s appeasement strategy could nonetheless push other leaders, particularly in Europe, to double down on a containment approach or even display outright hostility toward Russia. But that, taken alone, would be a mistake. Putin’s regime will almost certainly not collapse from within. Deterrence must therefore remain the cornerstone of Western policy, and especially European strategy, at least in the near term.
Someday, however, Putin will be out of the picture. Even if, as is likely, Russia’s next leaders arise from his inner circle, they will have more flexibility in crafting the country’s trajectory—and some practical motives to correct course. Although its people are not restive, Putin’s Russia is internally weak. The most obvious way for Putin’s successors to improve the country’s position would be to rebalance its foreign policy. So even as Europe’s leaders shore up deterrence against Russia, they must start preparing to seize the window of opportunity that will open with Putin’s exit from the stage.
They must come up with a vision of a new kind of relationship with Russia, one shorn of the illusion that to become a solid economic and strategic partner for the West, the country must transform as completely as West Germany did after World War II. They must propose specific terms for a peaceful coexistence, such as arms control strategies and forms of economic interdependence that preclude weaponization by either side. And European leaders (as well as U.S. politicians who do not share Trump’s pro-Putin inclination) should begin communicating that vision by making all their Russia-related communications clearer—even, for instance, their announcements about increasing their countries’ military budgets.
Not everyone in the Kremlin shares Putin’s anti-Western obsession. In private, many Russian elites admit that the war in Ukraine was not only a moral crime but a strategic mistake. The easier it is for such pragmatists to imagine a better relationship with Western countries, the likelier they will be to prevail during the inevitable infighting that will follow the end of the Putin era. Changing the West’s message to Russia is not only good preparation for the future; it is also good policy for the present. If Western leaders stop reinforcing the Kremlin’s narrative that they are determined to foment open-ended confrontation with Russia, that could, in turn, diminish the appeal of populists on both the far right and the far left who claim that the defense-industrial complex is bent on making war forever.
But if, instead, Western leaders continue to suggest that it is useless even to discuss a more mutually beneficial form of coexistence with Russia, they risk setting the Kremlin’s future leaders on a dangerous path, feeling that they have no choice but to perpetuate all of Putin’s postures, including his dependence on China. Some in the West may feel that the past three years have taught them that they have very little ability to shape Russia’s trajectory. But they have tools they have not yet fully used—ones they would be unwise to surrender.
CONFLICT OF INTERESTS
During Putin’s first two stints in the Kremlin—between 2000 and 2008—Russia’s GDP nearly doubled thanks to ballooning commodity prices, an inflow of Western investment, market reforms, and an entrepreneurship boom. Compared with Russia’s dictatorial tsarist and communist eras and its chaotic decade after the Soviet Union fell, the country had never been so prosperous and so free at the same time. Although economic growth tailed off in the 2010s, the social contract remained largely intact.
Over the course of the war in Ukraine, however, the Russian economy and the social contract that economy propped up have undergone substantial changes. In Foreign Affairs in January 2024, the economist Alexandra Prokopenko described the situation the Kremlin faced as an “impossible trilemma.” The Kremlin needed to fund an increasingly costly war, maintain citizens’ living standards, and safeguard Russia’s macroeconomic stability—goals that could not be achieved simultaneously.
But Putin solved the puzzle. He chose to focus on funding war: between 2025 and 2027, the Russian government plans to spend about 40 percent of its state budget on defense and security, shortchanging other priorities such as health care and education. War has been good, economically, for a majority of Russians. After dipping slightly in 2022, Russia’s GDP grew by 3.6 percent in 2023 and by another 4.1 percent in 2024, thanks to defense spending. Major economic downsides from the war, such as double-digit inflation, began to emerge only in late 2024. Even after the guns fall silent in Ukraine, Russia’s economy will remain heavily militarized. The defense industry will have to replenish the military’s colossal loss of equipment, and Putin has embarked on an expensive military modernization plan.
If the war in Ukraine restarts or continues, Russians’ economic situation may become much bleaker. But that scenario is unlikely to generate serious pressure for regime change. The more the Russian economy has come under duress, the more Moscow has moved to strengthen repression. The Kremlin has criminalized criticizing the war and the Russian military, and it has launched high-profile legal cases against prominent and little-known dissidents alike. The regime has also dramatically expanded the number of people it officially deems “foreign agents” and its attacks on organizations considered “undesirable,” presenting war critics with a stark choice: exile abroad or prison at home. Police and security forces have every incentive to pursue such cases because officers are rewarded for the number of enemies they expose.
Even after the guns fall silent in Ukraine, Russia’s economy will remain militarized.
As Putin rendered the cost of criticizing his war prohibitive, he simultaneously made it a vehicle for wealth redistribution. Its prime beneficiaries, of course, have been members of his entourage and their patronage networks. Some of them have taken advantage of the departure of foreign and multinational corporations from Russia by buying depreciated assets or simply confiscating them, generally with the support of powerful insiders, such as the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Beyond the superrich, however, are tens of thousands of other opportunists who have benefited from war, such as the entrepreneurs who make money from sanctions-busting. Further down the totem pole, hundreds of thousands of white-collar professionals—particularly in IT, finance, and business services—are benefiting from higher salaries as their dissident peers emigrate and their skills become scarcer.
Finally, Putin has purchased support by buying off men mobilized to the front, workers in military plants, and their family members. According to the Kremlin, in June 2024 about 700,000 Russians were on the frontline. The average Russian soldier’s salary is now close to $2,000 a month, twice the national average and four times the overall average in the dozens of regions that have contributed the most conscripts. Since the start of the invasion, over 800,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded; the government has sent up to $80,000 to their families for each casualty or death. The Kremlin’s financial outlays have thus created a large group of people who owe their material advancement—and their career prospects—to an unjust war. In 2024, the Kremlin launched a program to train and place veterans in public-sector or government work.
War has also become a means for Russian public-sector workers to achieve upward social mobility. Civilian bureaucrats have a new career springboard: working in the occupied territories hastens their promotions. For the hundreds of thousands of Russians employed in counterintelligence and law enforcement, catching Western and Ukrainian agents and neutralizing antiwar activists and journalists is now a way to climb the career ladder. All this has made the Russian bureaucracy much more political. Even in formerly relatively pragmatic institutions such as the central bank, Western-trained technocrats are becoming warriors who fight Western sanctions.
Long before the full-scale war in Ukraine, and thanks to Putin’s repression, Russian society suffered from inertia and learned helplessness. But in recent years, the Kremlin has pursued extensive social engineering to embed distrust of the West in the Russian psyche. In September 2022, it introduced into all schools weekly propaganda sessions that teach pro-war narratives disguised as patriotism lessons. The state has become more interventionist in entertainment and culture, forcing independent-minded musicians, artists, and writers into exile; labeling dissident writers “extremist”; and organizing show trials of liberal intellectuals who opposed the war. Taking inspiration from the Chinese Communist Party, the Kremlin has sought to build a digital iron curtain, outlawing Instagram and Facebook and throttling YouTube, which nearly half of Russians over the age of 12 had previously used daily.
Of course, a black swan event could blow up this “Fortress Russia.” The recent, sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria demonstrated that even the most brutal regimes may be more fragile than they appear. But the outright fall of Putin’s regime remains unlikely. If the cash it needs to buy off potential critics starts to evaporate, that can be compensated for by more state brutality.
WAR DANCE
The war in Ukraine did not temporarily divert Russian foreign policy. It has changed it for good. Russia’s foreign policy has become subordinated to three goals: building alliances to support its war effort, sustaining an economy targeted by sanctions, and taking revenge on the West for its support of Ukraine. Russian officials have made major new investments in partnerships with regimes and entities willing to impose additional costs on the West, particularly North Korea, Iran, and Iranian proxies such as the Houthi militia in Yemen.
If the war ends and the United States lifts its sanctions, the Kremlin might temporarily halt some of its most audacious anti-American activities, including providing weapons to U.S. foes such as the Houthis. But it will retain the capacity to resume those activities once the Trump team is out of the door. The Kremlin has also worked to maintain and expand its ties to developing countries around the world by heavily discounting Russian commodities and boosting exports to India and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Most notably, Russia has decisively turned toward China. Before the war, the two countries were locked in a state of asymmetric interdependence, in which China had more leverage but Russia hedged its bets by maintaining trade, financial, and technological ties with Europe. Since 2022, however, Putin has accepted a much deeper dependence on China in exchange for Beijing’s war support. The Kremlin has managed to prosecute the war for three years thanks only to the flow of critical weapons components from China. The Russian economy has remained afloat because China now buys 30 percent of Russian exports, up from 14 percent in 2021, and supplies 40 percent of its imports, up from 24 percent before the war. Beijing also affords Moscow a yuan-denominated financial infrastructure with which to conduct foreign trade.
Russia has gambled that this dependence will pay off. Because Beijing is Washington’s primary opponent, strengthening China is, in the Kremlin’s view, a strategic investment in the demise of American global primacy. For that reason, Russia now supplies China with weapons designs it hesitated to share before 2022. It has encouraged its labs and universities to contribute to the Chinese innovation ecosystem, initiating joint Chinese-Russian projects in the natural sciences, applied mathematics, IT, and space. The number of Russians who work for Chinese companies such as Huawei has mushroomed. Moscow supplies China with cheap commodities such as oil and gas via land routes, securing Beijing’s access to resources in the event of a maritime blockade, as well as uranium for China’s nuclear weapons program.
BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES
During his 2024 reelection campaign, Trump promised to “un-unite” China and Russia. In a sense, as president, he appears to be trying to do so with his warm overtures to Putin. But no matter what efforts Trump makes, Russia under Putin will never be a country that does not pose a threat to Europe and the United States. Europe will need to keep working to deter the Russian regime’s capabilities—and prepare to do it with far less U.S. support. European leaders should still frame this endeavor as a transatlantic one, best pursued through NATO or, if Trump’s team will not engage, with a team of senior U.S. allies that includes foreign policy practitioners, military leaders, and American defense industry leaders.
The first priority is to scale up defense production. Analysts sometimes present this as a straightforward challenge, but it is not. If policymakers turn toward shoring up Europe’s security without simultaneously addressing the continent’s own anemic economic growth, they will only embolden populists who argue against increased defense spending and call for appeasing Putin.
Europe and the United States must also counter Russia’s so-called shadow war. Moscow has developed a variety of ways to undermine democracies’ security and politics, including acts of sabotage, targeted killings, online disinformation, and interference in elections. The Kremlin is proud of these inventions, and its use of them will likely persist past any cease-fire in Ukraine. No framework with Russia for managing hybrid-war escalations exists; one must be developed. The United States, as well as Europe, will need to make generational investments in counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and fighting organized crime; the organic emergence of radical Islam and far-right extremism in Europe has created a ripe environment for the Kremlin to exploit.
Alongside strengthening deterrence, however, Western leaders, and particularly European ones, must start conceiving of a different approach to Russia. The country that Putin’s successors will inherit will almost certainly be profoundly imbalanced thanks to years of military overinvestment, waning access to cutting-edge technologies, excessive reliance on China, and the way that the war in Ukraine exacerbated already adverse demographic trends. Given how thoroughly Russia’s military, intelligence, and law enforcement elites have invested in the war in Ukraine and prospered from it, Putin’s successors will have little immediate incentive to make a clean break with the past. Not even the most pragmatic Russians will want an adversarial relationship with China. But a sizable pragmatist faction within the Russian elite understands that the war in Ukraine was a disaster and may well want to gradually unwind the most toxic aspects of Putin’s legacy—but only if they know that the door could open on the Western side.
SOFTEN THE GROUND
Changing the West’s message to Russia—and making that new message coherent—will be a tall order, and not only because Trump has shattered the transatlantic alliance’s unity. Within Europe, different governments hold different views on Russia. But European policymakers and American politicians who do not want to follow Trump’s approach can start by concretely imagining the contours of a more stable security relationship.
If events proceed along their current trajectory, NATO and Russia will soon both be armed to the teeth with conventional weapons, including tanks and drones, as well as strategic ones, such as hypersonic nuclear missiles. The risks that emanate from this scenario are familiar from the Cold War, and so is the remedy: arms control with robust verification mechanisms and communications channels for managing incidents. If Western and Russian negotiators can build sufficient trust, the next step would be to ink agreements that impose cuts on conventional and strategic weapons arsenals (similar to the U.S.-Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which is set to expire in 2026, or the Treaty of Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which NATO and Russia suspended in 2023). Both sides could discuss ways to limit their interference in each other’s domestic politics if Russia is ready to put its efforts to subvert democracies to rest.
Economic interdependence was once a source of prosperity for both Russia and the West. By the time of Putin’s departure, Europe is likely to have fully unwound its reliance on Russian commodities. If it has, then resuming imports of some Russian raw materials would not threaten Europe’s independence; it would further diversify European supply chains. Restoring trade ties would also benefit Russia by reducing its dependence on the Chinese market.
A forever war between Russia and the West is not inevitable.
No substantial rapprochement between Russia and the West can occur, however, without addressing the criminal war Putin launched against Ukraine. Even if Moscow and NATO begin arms control talks on missiles, for instance, no substantively new equilibrium can be established as long as a threatened Kyiv is still building them. Any future project to restore full economic ties with Russia will need to generate funds for Ukraine’s reconstruction or even for some form of reparations.
Moscow, of course, is unlikely ever to accept that word’s presence in any official document. But a special tax on Russian commodities sold to Europe, for instance, could generate funds for Ukraine for an agreed number of years. Or international actors could establish a fund for Ukraine’s reconstruction into which Russia pays a certain percentage of its GDP for a certain period. The faster the Russian economy grows, the more money Ukraine will get, creating incentives for the EU to buy Russian commodities and invest in the country.
Many European countries will want to involve Ukraine when crafting any strategy toward Russia after Putin. For many in Kyiv, a permanently weakened or even destroyed Russia may seem like the best eventual outcome. But such an outcome would hardly serve Europe’s interests, given the danger posed by the collapse of an enormous neighbor whose territory teems with weapons of mass destruction. NATO membership for Ukraine is anathema to Putin now, and his successors may turn out to be just as hostile to it. But more pragmatic Russian leaders may finally appreciate that having Ukraine in NATO is a lesser threat to Russia than a vengeful Ukraine unbound by the alliance’s rules and discipline.
TURN SIGNAL
To present this new vision to Russians, Western countries must urgently revive the communications channels they let wither during the war. It must be made clear to the Russian people and elites alike that the Kremlin wants to isolate Russia from the West, not the other way around. Artists, scientists, intellectuals, and athletes who did not circulate war propaganda should not be canceled simply for being Russian, and Europe needs to adjust its visa policies, which currently make it almost impossible for Russians to travel to the continent.
In public messaging, Western leaders and officials must tirelessly stress that they do not oppose Russians, only Putin’s disastrous policy choices. They should argue that these choices have made Russians themselves less prosperous and secure. Western officials also need to restore a more sustained contact with the Kremlin bureaucrats and foreign-policy elites who will become the backbone of Russia’s state apparatus after Putin. They can do so first at international forums, where discussions with Russian interlocutors will serve existing common interests, such as preventing unintended provocations at sea and in the air. Obviously, many Russian interlocutors will be attempting to collect their own intelligence. But that is hardly a new risk.
Imagining Russia after Putin may seem too distant and abstract, especially after efforts to oust him failed—including, most prominently, the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s 2023 mutiny. Thinking about ways to reconnect with Russia could even seem divisive. The unity that the West achieved on Ukraine before Trump’s reelection was an achievement. Now, with a pro-Putin president in the White House, European unity may seem even more precious. But many European countries, particularly those on NATO’s eastern flank, simply do not want to think about any kind of détente with the Kremlin even after Putin’s departure.
Yet they must. Western leaders need to face and address the concerns of their own citizens, many of whom do not want a costly open-ended confrontation with Russia. And imagining a pragmatic relationship would not be a mere intellectual exercise. It could be a tool to urge Russia toward a transition. Even if Putin would never react warmly to Western overtures, their existence could fragment his regime after he leaves. Putin has not groomed a successor because he fears the erosion of his power. If he eventually designates one, that person will be much weaker than he has been, creating space for rival political forces to jockey for influence. Even if no all-out succession battle erupts, Russia’s post-Putin transition may resemble the period in the 1950s after Stalin’s death, in which the emergence of de facto collective leadership allows for a turn toward liberalization and pragmatism.
The recent change in U.S. leadership caught Europe unprepared. So will a sudden changing of the guard in the Kremlin unless the West more actively imagines what its relationship with Russia could be after Putin. A forever war that cycles between cold and hot is not inevitable. But if Western leaders postpone discussing a different vision, they risk abetting Putin’s efforts to make confrontation with the West a permanent legacy.
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