Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Nikolai Karpitsky. Trilateral Peace Negotiations on Ukraine: Participants Seem to Be from Different Parallel Worlds



The trilateral negotiations between Ukraine, Russia, and the United States on settling the war concluded on January 24, 2026, in Abu Dhabi. The parties agreed to continue the talks on February 1. But is peace possible if the sides fundamentally fail to understand one another – because they think differently and inhabit different worldviews?

The participants in the negotiations perceive reality differently

Before the war, Europe believed it was living in the same world as Russia – a world in which wars of conquest were impossible. On this assumption, it did not prepare for war and even helped Russia grow stronger. Europeans proceeded from the idea that wars are meaningless because property rights and borders are determined not by force, but by legal recognition.

For a modern, civilized person, it does not matter whose soldiers are present in a given territory: its legal status does not change as a result. If someone seizes another’s property by force, they still do not become its owner. In Russia, however, a different notion prevails: whoever has force owns the territory and everything on it. Hence, for example, the widespread belief that the United States fought in Iraq for oil. When I asked how that could even be imagined – after all, American soldiers themselves cannot pump oil; it would first have to be purchased – people simply did not understand the question. For them, the very idea that ownership does not depend on military presence was incomprehensible.

This difference in perception became clearly evident in 2014. Most Russians believed that Crimea became Russian because Russian troops were stationed there. From the standpoint of international law, this is not the case: legally, Crimea remains part of Ukraine, and only Ukraine has the right to make legitimate decisions concerning it. A telling example is that of Alexander Butyagin, a Russian archaeologist from the Hermitage Museum, who conducted excavations in Crimea without Ukraine’s permission and later traveled to Poland, where he was arrested on December 10–11. It never even occurred to him that, under European law, he was committing a crime.

Even after the occupation of Crimea and part of eastern Ukraine, Europe for a long time regarded what was happening as an anomaly and continued to believe that an agreement with Russia was possible. After all, even the USSR recognized the principle of the inviolability of borders in 1975, and the last attempt to annex another state – the Iraqi seizure of Kuwait in 1990 – ended in severe punishment.

Russian public consciousness, however, remains largely archaic. In it, force is more important than law, and therefore the aggressive ambitions of the Russian authorities are understandable, while Europeans’ faith in the rule of law is not. In this worldview, Russia has the right to any territories that ever belonged to it, and if it can send troops there, the territory is considered its own – regardless of international law.

Negotiations: A Search for Solutions within the Legal Framework, a Venue for a Deal, or the Legitimation of the Aggressor’s Gains?

Europe’s profound misunderstanding of Russia’s position led to its diplomatic defeat in February 2015 – the signing of the Second Minsk Agreements with the participation of France and Germany. Under these arrangements, Ukraine was supposed to hold elections in the occupied territories before regaining control of the border, and then legalize the pro-Russian armed formations it had previously repelled by force. France and Germany insisted that there was no alternative to the “Minsk format,” failing to understand that this was not a political dispute within the framework of law, but the seizure of a country in the barbaric, medieval sense of the word.

Today the question arises: what can Ukraine actually negotiate with Russia, which recognizes neither Ukrainian identity nor Ukraine’s right to exist? In reality – only a ceasefire, because the parties’ conceptions of peace are so different that agreeing on a full-fledged peace treaty is impossible. But even a ceasefire is not on the table: Russia continues its offensive, and the United States has done nothing to force the war into a positional stalemate, without which ceasefire negotiations are impossible. Worse still, the current U.S. administration has its own vision of the world order – different from both the Russian and the European ones – which has turned the prospects for agreements into a mirage.

Russia’s vision of the world order has rolled back to the Middle Ages: the world is ruled by violence and cruelty. The European approach is the opposite – it is based on law and values that matter more than expediency. Donald Trump’s worldview is also archaic, but not to the same extent: it more closely corresponds to the logic of the nineteenth century. Trump does not perceive values as foundational; he believes that the world order rests on deals based on advantage and that stability is ensured by the dominance of the strongest power. He does not want wars and tries to force the parties into agreements through pressure, seeing this as grounds for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Europeans do not understand Trump, and he does not understand Putin: can negotiations be effective?

Discussions about the terms of peace are taking place between parties that perceive reality differently. European leaders do not understand Trump and believe that he is destroying the world order. Trump, for his part, is convinced that he is proceeding from self-evident truths and believes that he understands Putin. But this is a mistake: Putin’s reality is even more archaic than Trump’s.

This misunderstanding is clearly visible in concrete examples. Europeans cannot grasp the meaning of a “Peace Council” led by Trump with a one-billion-dollar entry fee, especially when similar tasks are already performed by the UN. To them, it appears to be a substitution of international institutions with personal dominance. For Trump, however, international structures cannot stand above national ones, and the “Peace Council” is simply a deal-making club in which the host sets the rules and charges for entry.

Europeans are also perplexed by Trump’s claim to Greenland – the very fact of which calls NATO’s internal logic into question. Trump is convinced that the world rests on the right of the strong, and that his claim to Greenland, as the leader of the most powerful country, should be self-evident. He considers it unfair that only Putin, and not European leaders, acknowledges this. Within this logic, his demonstrative friendliness toward Putin becomes understandable: if Europe is a competitor in the Arctic, then Russia is a military counterweight to Europe, useful for pressure and deal-making.

Perhaps the strangest episode was Trump’s taking of the Nobel medal from María Corina Machado. This provoked ridicule, but Trump sincerely believes that the medal belongs to him and that this should be obvious to everyone, since it is precisely his strong leadership that, in his view, stops wars. Therefore, he feels obliged to take the medal so that no one has any doubts about it.

Ukraine proceeds from European values and a legal world order. Trump operates within an archaic nineteenth-century worldview; Putin’s is medieval, rooted in the era of the Muscovite Tsardom. What, then, are the chances of successful negotiations under such conditions? Some may exist, but the overriding priority remains the strengthening of Ukraine’s defensive capacity.
 




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