Ukraine is finally setting the terms for Russia — so should the US

Opinion>Opinions - International The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill Ukraine is finally setting the terms for Russia — so should the US Comments: by Andrew Chakhoyan and Victor Rud, opinion contributors - 06/22/26 1:30 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Andrew Chakhoyan and Victor Rud, opinion contributors - 06/22/26 1:30 PM ET Comments: Link copied

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with East Timorese Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao during their meeting on the sidelines of the Russia-ASEAN Summit in Kazan, Russia, Thursday, June 18, 2026. (Kristina Solovyova, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Three things have happened recently that should focus minds in Washington.

First, Russia’s war came home, because Ukraine’s startling innovations are changing the universe of whats possible. Second, Ukraine has shattered the myth of inevitable Russian victory, recapturing territory and disrupting Russian military logistics with newly developed capabilities.

But the third change is subtler, and its consequences won’t be felt for a long time after headlines move on.

Kyiv has opened a new front where few Western leaders have dared to fight: the cognitive warfare where Moscow operated largely unopposed — at least until now. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote a letter to his Russian counterpart demanding a face-to-face meeting and an immediate ceasefire.

This was packaged as diplomacy and nominally addressed to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but it was obviously meant for a much wider audience. And it was a strategic masterstroke: Ukraine is now setting the agenda, and the Kremlin, at last, must respond.

On June 5, Putin was due to appear at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the Kremlin’s annual exercise in self-congratulation. The event was meant to project confidence, global relevance and that much-advertised Russian “stability.” Instead, smoke from Ukrainian strikes hung over the proceedings, and Putin found himself responding to a public challenge from the leader of the country whose existence Moscow denies.

Authoritarian systems rest on the appearance of total control. Russia can lose staggering numbers of troops — 1.3 million killed or badly wounded and counting — burn through equipment and impoverish its own regions, all in the service of imperial ambition. Human life has never been the measure of power in Moscow. A visible weakness at the center is what is intolerable.

Zelensky understood this. His note did not merely propose talks. It punctured the “dear leader” pose and went straight for the autocrat’s deepest fears.

“You cannot fail to notice it,” Zelensky wrote. “After 26 years in power, age is beginning to take its toll. And with time, the fatigue with you will only grow.”

For Putin, that line must have cut deep. Last September, caught on a hot mic in Beijing, he was heard discussing radical life extension with Chinese President Xi Jinping, including the possibility of living to 150 with the help of organ transplants. Zelensky aimed at the one force no tyrant commands: time.

Then came the sharper passage: “You will have to fight much harder for your own existence — not Russia’s, but your own. And this is not a threat from me or from Ukraine. It is a fact of Russian history that you know well: When Russia grows tired, change comes.”

Facing thousands of delegates, Putin referred to Zelensky several times as “the letter’s author,” as if saying the Ukrainian president’s name would itself concede too much. Putin wanted to telegraph confidence. But try as he might, he did the opposite. Attempting to laugh it off, the aging tyrant spoke of his age, and his words no longer mattered. Putin took the bait, and that was that.

Zelensky’s letter recalibrates the GPS for Washington. Phillips O’Brien’s sharp verdict on President Biden’s Ukraine policy, back in November 2024, was that he treated Russia’s war as “a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won.” Trump now treats it as a deal to be struck. Both approaches are oblivious to the fact that Moscow is not seeking peace. It is doubling down on revanchism, global disruption and war crimes in Ukraine. Washington keeps conceding the psychological initiative to Moscow, surrendering what George Orwell called “reality control.”

No surprise, then, that America keeps swinging between panic and hope, ricocheting from one Kremlin-made crisis to the next. Moscow chooses the time, place and circumstance. Washington reacts, having talked itself into caution before Moscow even finishes the provocation, asking again and again: What now? How do we respond?

Russia invades Georgia and gets a “reset.” It seizes Crimea and gets “deep concerns,” plus sanctions calibrated not to provoke. Moscow intervenes in Syria, rescues Bashar Assad’s regime and turns itself into a power broker in the Middle East — America reacts by contemplating the meaning of words “red line.” Russia partners with Iran, and the White House now has to account for Moscow’s interests as it’s trying to sort out the Persian Gulf.

Small wonder, then, that the same failed instinct reappears in Ukraine: find a salvific territorial “agreement” and call it peace. With a border that would stretch around the equator more than once, Russia scarcely needs more land, except to vaporize the humanity on it.

America’s interest is not a quick settlement that rewards aggression and licenses the next war. America’s interest is a durable peace that secures for a nation of 40 million the right to exist, its sovereignty, restoration of borders and a clear lesson that Moscow has avoided for generations: conquest does not pay.

It’s the least we can do for having stripped Ukraine of its nuclear and much of its conventional arsenal decades ago. In 2013, before Russia first invaded Ukraine, Putin said the quiet part out loud in a New York Times op-ed, no less: “If you have the bomb, no one will touch you.”

By chasing stability or another deal, America risks allowing the disappearance of a nation and establishing a grisly legacy. The better lesson comes from Ukraine, which is bringing the war back to the aggressor militarily, politically and psychologically.

Controlling the narrative and never ceding the initiative was Putin’s superpower. But a king without clothes can command the stage only until someone points and laughs.

Andrew Chakhoyan is an academic director at the University of Amsterdam. He previously served in the U.S. government at the Millennium Challenge Corporation and studied at Harvard Kennedy School and Donetsk State Tech University. Victor Rud is chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Ukrainian American Bar Association and is on the board of the Centre for Eastern European Democracy.