Since early 2025, the United States has made significant diplomatic efforts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. Negotiators have met in Abu Dhabi, Berlin, Geneva, Istanbul, Paris, and Riyadh; envoys have shuttled to Moscow and Miami. Those efforts deserve credit. But activity is not strategy—and, as demonstrated by the massive strikes across Ukraine and Russia in recent weeks, it has yet to produce results.
To make real progress toward peace, Washington should apply lessons from decades of international mediation experience. Although all conflicts are unique, past negotiations show that getting the process right is essential, and they offer insights about which approaches tend to work and which do not. If talks are well organized and parties have a sense of ownership, agree on the process, and build personal relationships, negotiations are more likely to succeed. Without those conditions, efforts to end the fighting are apt to falter, and the strategic, economic, and human costs will continue to mount.
For any process even to begin, the parties must, of course, be willing to engage. Although Kyiv has said it wants a cease-fire and negotiations, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent rhetoric—he called Ukraine’s government a “junta” in May—and the intensifying attacks on Ukrainian cities suggest that he is not in a talking mood.
Yet Putin is under the most significant economic, military, and political pressure since he launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022. His forces advanced by less than half a square mile per day in June 2026—a reduction of more than 90 percent from their rate of gain in June 2025. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s increasingly effective long-range drone strikes are disrupting Russia’s energy sector and reducing state revenues. Kyiv’s attacks on refineries and logistics infrastructure are affecting everyday life in major cities. With public sentiment showing signs of strain, the Kremlin faces a more difficult task in delivering a strong result for the ruling party in September’s Duma elections. None of this means that Putin will choose negotiations over fighting. But given the pressure he is now under, that possibility should at least be tested.
A well-designed process is the best way to gauge Putin’s intentions—and to shape them. That is because leaders pursue negotiations not only when they are struggling to achieve their military objectives but also when they see a credible alternative to war. A serious process can help the parties envision how a negotiated outcome could address their core interests and concerns. Without one, peace is a distant abstraction.
NOT A SOLO ACT
Mediating a full-scale war is among the hardest undertakings in international affairs. When hostilities intensify and become protracted, hatred, resentment, and the desire for revenge make war self-sustaining. Leaders typically come to see themselves as locked in an existential struggle against a malign and implacable enemy. They tend to treat negotiations as a futile distraction or a step that could undermine their political standing at home.
To even have a chance at overcoming such obstacles, mediation requires sustained and continuous efforts by a highly capable team. That means assembling a group of individuals whose primary job is ending the conflict and who have professional expertise and deep knowledge of its history and dynamics. Mediation also often involves more than one third party. Successful processes have featured a lead mediator working alongside supporting states or organizations. France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom formed the contact group that backed the U.S.-led negotiations that ended the Bosnian war in 1995. Chile, Cuba, Norway, and Venezuela all played a role in the 2016 talks that concluded the Colombian government’s half-century war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known by its Spanish acronym, FARC). In Ukraine, by contrast, Washington has largely gone it alone. European allies, Gulf partners, and Turkey have been involved, but only at the margins.
At minimum, European governments, as major stakeholders in both Ukraine’s future and the security of the continent, should be involved as parties to the talks. Given their deep mediation expertise, they should cosponsor the process alongside Washington. Europe is not short of officials with relevant experience. Jonathan Powell, the British government’s chief negotiator during the Good Friday talks, now serves as the British national security adviser. Washington could enable European participation by establishing a contact group—perhaps modeled on the body that supported the Bosnian peace agreement—in which key European governments hold defined roles and responsibilities, not merely observer status. Such a structure would achieve greater diplomatic coherence and help marshal resources, expertise, and political support as required.
DESIGN MATTERS
There is no standard template for a successful negotiation. But almost all past cases share one attribute: the parties are invested in it. Any peace process will face inevitable setbacks and sabotage attempts, and so the parties must be committed to talks to get them over the line. Ownership is also critical for the eventual outcome to endure. By some accounts, nearly half of all peace agreements fail within five years. A Russian-Ukrainian settlement would face even longer odds given incompatible territorial claims, the legacy of the failed Minsk agreements (which were intended to end the 2014–21 phase of the conflict), and the broader NATO-Russian rivalry. When parties help shape the process, they have a stake in its success and are more likely to protect what it achieves. Parties pushed into a process by others might go through the motions but are likely to lack the commitment required.
Experienced mediators therefore promote the parties’ agency, along with a sense of responsibility for success. They look to secure their agreement on the process itself. The Northern Ireland talks in the 1990s faced multiple challenges: cease-fire breakdowns, disputes over implementation, and repeated efforts by dissident groups to derail negotiations. But the parties were committed to the process, which enabled them to overcome those obstacles. None of this has occurred in the Russian-Ukrainian case, except in fragments—and the result has been an effort without commitment, coherence, or momentum.
Mediators should work with the parties to agree on a process that commands their support. Ideally, they should capture those understandings in a document. Consider the 2012 General Agreement in Colombia, which established guidelines for future negotiations, an agenda, and ground rules that gave the talks structure and stability. That initial document laid the foundation for the 2016 peace accord.
PUT IT IN WRITING
A process agreement should establish the frequency and location of talks. The best practice is to convene regularly in the same place, which simplifies logistics. And negotiations tend to work best when all parties are at the table, working from or toward a single text. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal talks are a case in point; they involved repeated rounds in Vienna, an eight-day marathon in Lausanne, and a final, extended round back in Vienna that produced the agreement.
By contrast, talks on the war between Russia and Ukraine have been convened intermittently, in multiple locations, and not once with all the relevant actors (Kyiv, Moscow, Washington, and key European states) at the table. They have also never centered on a single text. Instead, different combinations of the four have discussed separate draft texts: one between Ukraine and the United States, another between Europe and Ukraine, a third between Russia and Ukraine, and a fourth between Russia and the United States.
For a multiparty conflict covering such a wide variety of relationships and issues, different texts will no doubt be required. But if issues covered in the U.S.-Ukrainian agreement turn out to be unacceptable to Russia or the Europeans, that could undermine the whole process. In principle, of course, Russia should not have a say in what Washington and Europe offer Kyiv, including the nature of Western security guarantees. But without Moscow’s eventual acceptance, the war will continue. Likewise, any agreement on U.S. sanctions relief would not be effective without EU and British support.
A process agreement could also set out a road map for talks and a sequenced agenda. This would provide direction and coherence and assure each side that the issues it cares about will not be overlooked. In Colombia, the agenda addressed political, agrarian, and socioeconomic reform for the FARC; for the government, it created a pathway toward a definitive end to the conflict, including disarmament and verification mechanisms. In the Russian-Ukrainian talks, no mutually agreed agenda appears to exist. To construct one, mediators will have to incorporate what each party considers essential. For Kyiv, that list likely includes respect for its sovereign rights, security guarantees, military capabilities sufficient to deter Russia, and funding for reconstruction. Moscow is likely to insist on, among other things, Ukraine’s exclusion from NATO, limits on external military presence and support, and sanctions relief.
Ground rules and guiding principles matter, too. The parties should agree, at minimum, on the format and objectives of the talks, the mediators’ roles, the status of representatives, how the agenda is set, how decisions are reached, and how confidentiality and public communications are handled. Such rules played an important role in both the Northern Ireland and Colombian processes. In the former case, the parties adopted a “sufficient consensus” rule for decision-making, enabling votes against part of a proposal without blocking its passage as a whole. In the latter, they committed to the principle that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.” But few such understandings appear to exist in the Russian-Ukrainian case. Accomplished mediators sweat these details because mistakes in the setup, logistics, or procedures of talks can derail the substance.
BUILD TRUST QUIETLY
A well-run process serves two purposes: it creates working relations between the parties, and it enables progress on the disputes that divide them. Engagement between warring parties rarely extinguishes mistrust. But it can create mutual expectations of conduct—that is, predictability in how the parties deal with each other and seriousness about exploring negotiated outcomes.
The most reliable means to foster those expectations is also the simplest: sustained, confidential dialogue between the parties themselves. It is difficult to name a successful peace process that did not depend on discretion in its early stages. In Northern Ireland, for example, years of backchannel talks paved the way for later breakthroughs. Yet every diplomatic effort to end the war between Russia and Ukraine over the past year and a half has involved a media circus. The bilateral channel used to exchange prisoners of war, by contrast, has remained almost entirely out of view and has produced meaningful results.
Mediators deliberately nurture relationships between key individuals on all sides. In 2005, for example, former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari brought Indonesian officials together with exiled Acehnese separatist leaders to end a decades-long insurgency in Aceh, a province on Sumatra. He cultivated ties among the lead negotiators by encouraging direct dialogue and leaving time for informal conversation at the government manor outside Helsinki where the talks were held. Such connections make agreement possible, and they equip the parties to manage future disputes through dialogue—arguably, a more powerful bulwark against renewed hostilities than anything committed to paper. Washington and its partners can do much more to strengthen personal ties between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators. To that end, mediators could carefully frame discussions and calibrate their pace. They could also create opportunities for informal engagement.
tricks of the trade
Once the parties are in the room, the mediation literature suggests several approaches that could help Russian-Ukrainian talks succeed. The United States has tried to reconcile the parties’ stated positions and demands, for example by proposing specific territorial arrangements and presenting them as take-it-or-leave-it packages. Instead, it needs to encourage the parties to address their underlying interests and concerns. Doing so can defuse zero-sum framing and give each side reasons to stay at the table. Crucially, it also raises the odds of compliance, since the two sides are far more likely to abide by an agreement they see as serving their fundamental interests.
The classic illustration of this approach was U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s mediation between Israel and Egypt over the Sinai Peninsula after the Yom Kippur War. The two sides were deadlocked over which would control the peninsula until Kissinger recognized that Egypt’s core interest was sovereignty and national pride while Israel’s was security. This insight allowed for a successful bargain: Israeli withdrawal in exchange for demilitarization, monitoring, and U.S. security assurances. For Russia and Ukraine, the analogous deadlock concerns control over the Donbas. Mediators should try to address the interests underlying those positions, not the positions themselves.
Parties need to own the substance as much as the process. Thus far, Washington has come up with proposed solutions and then presented them to Kyiv and Moscow. The 28-point plan leaked in November 2025 and the subsequent attempts to get Kyiv to cede control of the Donbas exemplify the approach. But parties tend to resist arrangements designed by others, and when they are pressured into accepting them, their adherence lasts only as long as the pressure is sustained. Pressure, in turn, is hostage to the mediators’ attention span—which is almost always short. Mediators should instead help the parties develop their own proposals.
The talks have also treated key issues separately: territory in one channel, security arrangements in another, and so forth. Although it can be useful to drill down on specific issues, negotiations often benefit from expanding the agenda and considering items alongside one another. Putting everything on the table creates more room for tradeoffs, allowing each side to concede on low-priority items in exchange for gains it values more. This approach makes a negotiated outcome more attractive, reduces the risk of deadlock on any single issue, and—by increasing what each party gains from the agreement—strengthens the incentives to comply with it.
Finally, mediators look for ways to mitigate or end hostilities even as political disputes persist. They do so not only for humanitarian reasons but also because effective cease-fires create conditions more conducive to diplomacy. At present, Ukraine and its Western backers support an immediate cease-fire and subsequent peace talks, while Moscow, viewing military pressure on Kyiv as its most effective source of leverage, wants a political settlement before any cease-fire.
To bridge that gap, the parties could seek a more limited set of political commitments covering Ukraine’s alignment and other key security issues for both sides sufficient to secure a cease-fire. Those commitments should be included in a framework agreement, signed by all sides, which outlines the core elements of an eventual peace and enables a cessation of hostilities. The framework would also set the structure for future negotiations. Painstaking talks on a final settlement could then proceed, in the absence of fighting.
THE LONG GAME
The mounting costs of the war—the destruction, loss of life, and risk of escalation—more than justify sustained diplomacy to secure a durable peace. Achieving a negotiated end will depend on many factors. But efforts to get there should reflect insights from decades of international mediation.
Concretely, this means establishing an effective mediation team, taking a multilateral approach that includes European governments, and securing the parties’ agreement on the structure, ground rules, and agenda of talks before they get to the substance. It also requires a shift toward helping the parties develop their own proposals and building relations between negotiators through regular, sustained, and confidential dialogue. Mediators should encourage them to focus on underlying interests, widen the agenda to create tradeoffs, and seek an interim framework to halt the fighting.
Even the best-run peace processes can fail. A mutually acceptable end to the war may remain unreachable. Convening the parties during the present escalation will be difficult, and it would be naive to expect rapid results. But as losses, costs, and risks accumulate, the incentives for alternatives to fighting will grow. The United States has taken on the role of mediator: it should draw on hard-won lessons about what helps talks succeed.
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