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“Russia cannot lose”

Dmitri Trenin on the Ukraine Proxy War and Why the West Won’t Win

Ian Proud, Oct 14, 2026, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/russia-cannot-lose?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=220332256&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

I bumped into Dmitri Trenin for the first time in eight years at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow. He was sat behind me during a session and we renewed our acquaintances. When I was based at the British Embassy in Moscow, Dmitri was Director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre. He was one of the most valued interlocutors for the Embassy, and seen as a person who always offered a balanced Russian perspective on world events. He is now the President of the Russian International Affairs Council, and I was pleased that he agreed to talk to me on my Peacemonger channel.

Trenin offered a clear-eyed view from Moscow of why the Ukraine war has lasted so long and why a diplomatic settlement remains so difficult. He framed the conflict as existential for Russia. From the Kremlin’s perspective, this is not a limited dispute with Ukraine but a proxy war waged by the West, which has invested hundreds of billions of dollars into the war effort.

Russia, he said, cannot afford to end the fighting without achieving the core objectives it set out with: securing the territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, upholding its constitutional obligations after the 2022 referenda in those oblasts, and establishing a security arrangement that prevents Ukraine from becoming a permanent platform for pressure against Russia.

Trenin stressed that Russia does not aim to conquer the whole of Ukraine or invade Europe. Indeed, in an article published early in the war he made the case for Russia not seeking to conquer all of Ukraine and so tie itself into a costly insurgency in the west, while permanently damaging prospects for normalisation with Europe.

He pointed to the years before 2014, when Moscow largely accepted a sovereign Ukraine within its Soviet-era borders, and to the early 2022 talks in which Russia was prepared to accept Ukrainian neutrality and discuss the status of the Donbas, along the lines earlier set out in the Minsk Agreements.

In his telling, Russia’s position hardened in response to Western and Ukrainian actions, not because of a pre-existing plan to absorb more territory in Ukraine.

Security concerns, particularly over NATO expansion and the treatment of Russian speakers and Russian culture in Ukraine, remain central to Putin’s calculus.

The interview also highlighted the very different stakes for the other parties. For the Biden administration the war was cast in ideological terms—democracy versus authoritarianism. For Donald Trump, Trenin argued, it is one piece of a broader effort to rebalance U.S. power and reduce commitments to allies. For Europe, however, the conflict has become existential in a different way.

Trenin said European elites are using the image of a Russian threat to hold the European Union together, justify remilitarization, and brand political opponents as pro-Russian. He described talk of an imminent Russian invasion of Europe as hollow propaganda that serves domestic political purposes more than it reflects actual Russian intentions.

On the question of NATO, Trenin returned to the proposals Russia made in late 2021: permanent Ukrainian neutrality, written into the Ukrainian constitution and international agreements, with no NATO bases, exercises, or military cooperation. He also noted Russia’s earlier call for NATO military infrastructure to be pulled back to 1997 lines.

Any lasting European security arrangement, he suggested, would eventually require some form of military-technical equilibrium and mutual assurances, but that discussion remains secondary to the outcome of the current war.

Looking further ahead, Trenin was cautious but not wholly pessimistic about relations with individual European countries. He said the ball is largely in Europe’s court. If political changes in Germany, France, Britain, and elsewhere weaken the current supranational approach and restore a greater role for national interests, a basic transactional or “neighborly” relationship could become possible.

He does not expect a return to the Greater Europe ideas of the 1990s and 2000s; too much has changed. But he argued that nationalism and the interests of individual states will eventually reassert themselves across Europe, as they have elsewhere in the world.

The conversation reinforced an assessment I’ve held for some time that the war in Ukraine will ultimately be decided by the inescapable mathematics of attrition and whether Europe’s political direction shifts back towards the sovereignty of its members.

Trenin’s account makes plain why Russia will not walk away from the war in Ukraine and why it expects the confrontation with Europe to outlast the fighting itself. As Trenin said to me when we met in Moscow, ‘the relationship with Europe is over’. It was clear during the conversation that that split was as regrettable to him, as it is to me.

October 20, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Russia, Ukraine, weapons and war