Why Russia isn't interested in ceasefire

From the Hill / Yahoo!News:

"Opinion - Why the Kremlin isn’t interested in a ceasefire in Ukraine

Ilan Berman, opinion contributor, July 9, 2025

 

...“I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” Trump told reporters in late May. The same day, he posted on Truth Social that Russia’s leader “has gone absolutely CRAZY.” Since then, although the administration has continued to press Moscow for some sort of compromise with Kyiv, more of its officials now seem to grasp that Russia has no real interest in de-escalation.

But why, precisely? After all, the Kremlin has already expended enormous blood and treasure in its efforts to dominate Ukraine, and is continuing to do so. Russian battlefield casualties are estimated to have hit 1 million, making its campaign against Ukraine more costly than all of the country’s post-World War II conflicts combined.

Still, the Kremlin has persisted in its war of aggression, for both ideological and practical reasons.

Ideologically, recent years have seen the revival of Russia’s dreams of Eurasian empire and concerted attempts by the Kremlin to revise its borders outward — and to do so at the expense of its nervous neighbors. Underpinning all of this is an expansionist ideology that sees both territorial gains and conflict with the West as inevitable. Or, as one-time Kremlin insider Vladislav Surkov put it earlier this year, “The Russian world has no borders.”

That helps explain Russia’s ongoing aggression toward Ukraine — and its objectives in the current truce talks. “The Istanbul talks are not for striking a compromise peace on someone else’s delusional terms but for ensuring our swift victory and the complete destruction of the neo-Nazi regime,” Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, recently proclaimed on Telegram, referring to the Ukrainian government.

The second reason for Russia’s militarism is economic. Growing evidence suggests that in the face of sustained international sanctions, the Kremlin has retooled the country’s economic sector, prioritizing military industries (while neglecting others) and making its armed forces the focal point of national development... This has helped make Russia’s war machine the engine of its national economy, and locked the state into a sustained campaign of militarism.

Increasingly, European officials see the writing on the wall. In a recent speech in London, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned that Russia could be ready to attack a NATO treaty nation within five years, and that the bloc needed “a quantum leap” in collective defense as a response. “Danger will not disappear even when the war in Ukraine ends,” he said. 

Those words are a grim acknowledgment of Russia’s revisionist ideology, which views Ukraine as simply the first in a series of inevitable conquests. It is also a sober recognition that, in a real sense, Putin now requires ongoing war in order to keep his regime afloat...

The corollary is that, unless Moscow is stopped in Ukraine, it will inevitably need to be stopped somewhere else — and at potentially far greater cost to the U.S. and its European partners."