TO CEASEFIRE OR NOT TO CEASEFIRE
- Paul Hansbury
- Mar 15
- 5 min read
At the beginning of this week, following talks between Ukrainian and US teams in Saudi Arabia, Ukraine agreed to proposals for a 30-day ceasefire. US envoy Steve Witkoff took the terms to Moscow, seeking Russia's agreement. After weeks of the US administration squarely siding with Russia on many aspects of the war in Ukraine, it suddenly looked quite different. In return for Ukraine's agreement to the ceasefire terms, the US lifted its 'pause' on weapons supply and intelligence sharing to Kyiv. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: 'the ball is now in [Russia's] court.'
Several commentators described the situation as a zugzwang for Vladimir Putin, an analogy to the game of chess. Putin found himself in a situation in which all the available moves looked likely to disadvantage him. Put simply, he had three options: agree, disagree, or demur.
The disadvantage in agreeing is that it is likely to reduce Russia's ability to achieve its war aims as I explain below. The disadvantage of rejecting the ceasefire is that Russia, which has long insisted that Ukraine is the obstacle to peace, will look bad if it outright rejects the deal on the table. The Kremlin's claims that it wants peace would look far less credible. The third option, haggling over the terms, is therefore an effort to fudge the issue as much as possible but will quickly look like an effort to hoodwink gullible people into thinking an agreement is near.
As of this writing, the third option is the one Putin has chosen. Russian officials have said they are considering the proposals and Putin himself that he 'agrees' with the idea of a ceasefire. He could hardly say otherwise. He added, however, that there were 'nuances' to address before a ceasefire could be signed. Such prevarication, then, sounds like a rejection of the ceasefire terms to most of us and an effort to hoodwink us into believing otherwise.
It is also an effort by Putin to push the onus back onto others. The US refused to countenance any of Ukraine's conditions, and it will galvanise Donald Trump's critics if he then bends to Russia's demands and alters the proposed ceasefire terms in Russia's favour. In the meantime, Russia fights on in Ukraine.
Why Putin fights
To make sense of Putin's decision-making here, I turn to bargaining theory as applied to war. In a 1995 article, the scholar James Fearon writes: 'The central puzzle about war... is that wars are costly but nonetheless wars recur.' The question Fearon goes on to address is a very important one: why do state leaders choose to fight wars rather than negotiate a settlement in a dispute.