After nearly five hours of talks Tuesday between U.S. and Russian negotiators about ending the war in Ukraine, no breakthroughs emerged.

According to a Russian negotiator, President Vladimir Putin was critical of the proposals. Before the talks, the Russian leader even said he was willing to wage war with Ukraine’s European allies, which have been supporting it financially and militarily.

“We are not planning to fight with Europe, but if Europe suddenly starts a war with us, we are ready,” Putin said.

So what could force Russia to end the conflict? Absent pressure like stronger sanctions, it comes down to the economy and the battlefield, analysts say. While Russia faces challenges, neither situation is dire enough to give the United States significant leverage in the talks, President Donald Trump’s third effort to broker peace.

“There are points where Putin’s probably feeling under pressure, but none of them have reached any kind of juncture that he feels he has to make a decision or has run out of options,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who ran Russian and European affairs at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration.

Before the talks, Putin stressed that Russia had the economy and the armed forces it needed to continue fighting. On Wednesday, Yuri Ushakov, the foreign policy aide who participated in the meeting, doubled down on the idea of military strength, saying recent battlefield successes “positively impacted” the course of the discussions. Russian soldiers, through their military exploits, were facilitating a peaceful resolution, he said.

The Russian elite repeatedly echo such claims.

Fyodor Lukyanov, a leading foreign policy commentator, wrote an opinion article in the state-run Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper after the most recent U.S. peace proposal emerged. Military force was the main means to achieve Russia’s goals, including “unlocking national economic opportunities,” he wrote.

Earnings from oil and gas that pay for the war have fallen, and new American sanctions against Rosneft, a state company, and Lukoil, the country’s two largest energy producers, were imposed in October.

While the government harvested almost $10 billion in taxes from oil and gas producers that month, according to Finance Ministry figures, that was notably down 27% from the same month a year earlier. Sanctions were a contributing factor, amid lower crude oil prices and a stronger ruble.

But Russia still pockets enormous sums from its energy industry, despite Western efforts to corral the shadow fleet of tankers that transport such exports.

Falling oil revenue is “likely to be a constant toothache that sets into the Russian war effort,” said Clifford Kupchan, chair of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based political-risk analysis group.

Still, Kupchan noted, to sharply lower Russia’s income would require much stronger sanctions, including the unlikely prospect of blocking sales to China, Russia’s largest energy customer, or Ukraine inflicting significant damage on exports.

A banking crisis might also pressure Putin, but so far, his adept team of economists has smoothed the war fallout.

Huge government spending on armament production in the initial years of the war sent inflation skyrocketing. To tame it, the central bank imposed high interest rates.

The prime rate has come down to 16.5%, though some of Russia’s most significant companies are struggling to repay loans. Russian Railways, a state monopoly, has had particular problems, with over $50 billion in debts as freight numbers tumbled.

Consumers are also wrestling with the high rates, one reason sales of big-ticket items like cars are plummeting. Russia’s largest automaker, AvtoVAZ, which produces Lada vehicles, said it would shift to a four-day workweek and slash production by 40%.

State-run television allows for some grumbling about these issues.

Andrei Bezrukov, a professor at Moscow State Institute of International Relations, said on an influential Russian talk show Sunday that, “sadly, it’s accountants who run the country and its economy” and that they have no long-term strategic plan.

But Russians are unlikely to take to the streets over the economy, noted Konstantin Sonin, a Russian economist at the University of Chicago.

On the military front, Russia has been inching forward, especially in southeastern Donetsk province. Russia claimed Monday that it had seized the strategic town of Pokrovsk, an assertion that both Ukraine and Russian military bloggers contested.

Gains come at a terrible human cost, but that does not seem to affect Russia’s calculations in peace talks. Putin has staked his legacy on the outcome of the war.

High payments to soldiers mean new recruits replace the nearly 30,000 lost each month, analysts said. Front-line units have dented Ukraine’s advantage in deploying drones by infiltrating small teams to kill the operators, military analysts said, but then lack the concentration of troops and tanks needed to seize significant territory.

Still, seemingly fine with a grinding war of attrition, Putin repeatedly asserts Russia is winning.

“The pace of the offensive has been the same for the past year and will continue that way,” said Dmitri Kuznets, a military analyst for Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Neil MacFarguhar/Nanna Haitmann
c. 2025 The New York Times Company