A Credible Off-Ramp for Ukraine—Built on Russia’s War Exhaustion and a Security Deal That Holds

On a cold morning in 2026, a teacher in Moscow counts rubles at the checkout and quietly puts back the fruit. Her husband is away again—another rotation, another set of rumors, another month of making do. The television still speaks in the language of inevitability and strength, but the shops speak in prices. Four years after Russia widened its assault on Ukraine into a full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, the war has become what wars of attrition always become: a machine that consumes people, money, and future until even the state that promised quick victory starts to feel its own limits.

That is what makes this moment different—and dangerous. A grinding front line can look “stable” on a map while everything behind it destabilizes. Russia’s leaders remain trapped by incentives to project success, because an “unsuccessful” ending is not merely a strategic setback; it risks elite fracture, public anger, and a reckoning with lives lost. Ukraine, meanwhile, cannot trade away sovereignty for quiet. And the rest of the world watches energy markets, food prices, migration pressures, and nuclear risk fluctuate with each escalation.

There is a path out, but it starts by being honest about what the war has already done.

The war’s hidden front line is inside Russia—and it’s widening

The clearest story of a long war is not always told by tanks and trenches; it’s told by households and hospitals. In Russia, the human toll is carried by soldiers and families first: the uncertainty of mobilization notices, the long-term care of the wounded, the sudden absence of working-age men. Labor shortages deepen as manpower is pulled into the military and defense production—or simply leaves. Estimates in public reporting vary and are politically contested, but even the range itself is revealing: inflation figures are often cited around 7–9%, while casualty totals differ sharply depending on source, with some Western and Ukrainian assessments running into the hundreds of thousands killed or wounded. Whatever number one trusts, the direction is unmistakable: this war is expensive in bodies, and it is paid for over years.

Sanctions and wartime spending have produced a kind of “military Keynesianism,” but it does not reliably reach the average family. Defense output can swell while real living standards sag. Regions far from Moscow feel it as higher prices and fewer workers; cities feel it as tightened budgets, stress on services, and a new class of veterans needing treatment and reintegration. Even where propaganda holds, arithmetic does not: the longer the war runs, the harder it becomes to hide opportunity costs—schools not repaired, clinics understaffed, housing unaffordable, consumer goods quietly deteriorating in quality or availability.

For Ukraine, the story is more direct and more brutal: cities rebuilt only to be struck again, families split across borders, children growing up with sirens as a metronome. Western support has kept Ukraine standing, but “standing” is not the same as winning a durable peace. The world’s interest is not only moral; it is practical. A long war in Europe ripples into grain corridors, shipping insurance, gas prices, refugee policy, and the credibility of international law.

So the question is not whether Russia is “feeling the effects.” It is whether the rest of us will use those effects—this exhaustion, this strain—as leverage for a settlement that Ukraine can live with and Russia can accept without immediately trying to overturn it.

The key insight: peace becomes possible when an off-ramp is paired with enforcement

Wars often end when leaders can tell a story that makes stopping survivable. That does not mean rewarding aggression; it means designing an exit that changes incentives faster than the battlefield can. Russia’s growing strains create a window—but only if paired with two hard realities.

First, Ukraine needs security that does not evaporate with the next election cycle or diplomatic mood swing. Second, Russia needs a face-saving pathway that reduces the regime’s fear of collapse, because a cornered nuclear power is a hazard to everyone, including Ukrainians.

This is why the most workable solution is a phased peace framework that couples a verifiable ceasefire with a long-term security arrangement for Ukraine and a tightly conditional, measurable sequence of economic steps for Russia—relief that is earned, not gifted.

It would not be a single grand bargain signed in a blaze of cameras. It would be a managed process that treats compliance like a contract: step, verification, benefit; violation, reversal.

How it could unfold, season by season, without illusions

Imagine the first move happening not in a triumphal capital but in a pragmatic one—Riyadh, Ankara, Vienna—brokered with the involvement of states that can talk to both sides, such as Turkey and key Global South powers. The early agenda is deliberately narrow: a time-bound ceasefire along current lines, monitored by satellites and drones and on-the-ground inspectors where feasible. It is paired with reciprocal constraints designed to reduce the temptation of immediate escalation—limits on certain strike categories, clearer rules on critical infrastructure, rapid-reaction channels to defuse incidents.

In Moscow, the ceasefire is sold as “strategic stabilization,” a pause to protect Russian lives and reset the economy. In Kyiv, it is sold as a defensive necessity—an interval in which Ukraine strengthens, recovers prisoners, restores power, and deepens its integration with Europe. Neither narrative needs to be morally symmetrical; they need to be politically usable.

Then comes the difficult center of gravity: money and security. Here, the two strongest ideas should be fused rather than treated as rivals.

One approach emphasizes targeted social stabilization inside Russia: direct, auditable support for families of mobilized soldiers, wounded veterans, pensioners, and those most exposed to inflation and labor-market disruption. The warning is correct: broad stimulus is easy to steal and hard to measure. The better instrument is targeted relief—delivered transparently, tied to measurable conditions, and designed to reduce the domestic pressure that makes leaders lash out abroad.

Another approach emphasizes macro-level bargaining: staged sanctions adjustments and the structured use of frozen assets to finance Ukraine’s reconstruction. This is ethically and legally contested terrain, and the details matter. But the logic is unavoidable: reconstruction is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar project, and the war’s instigator cannot be insulated from costs while Ukraine foots the bill alone.

In practice, the deal would link these tracks. As ceasefire compliance is verified over months, specific sanctions are suspended in reversible ways—think licensing, escrowed export revenues, and tightly monitored financial channels rather than an open-ended “reset.” The aim is not to refill a war chest; it is to reward de-escalation and make re-escalation expensive.

At the same time, Ukraine’s security must be made credible without creating a tripwire for automatic war. If NATO membership remains politically blocked, alternatives must be real, not rhetorical: long-term defensive support, integrated air defense, sustained ammunition production, and legally anchored commitments by a coalition of states. Call it an “Israel-style” framework if one must, but the substance is what matters: Ukraine must be hard to invade again.

The most important proof would not be speeches. It would be the mundane evidence of a war ending: casualty curves dropping, prisoners returning, demining accelerating, insurance rates falling in the Black Sea, grain exports normalizing, power stations repaired without being hit again the next week.

What success looks like by 2030—and what it prevents

A successful outcome does not require friendship between Russia and Ukraine. It requires predictability, deterrence, and a border that is not rewritten by artillery.

By 2027, success would look like a ceasefire that holds through at least two winters, monitored and enforceable. By 2028, it would look like Ukraine rebuilding its grid and housing at scale, with European investment arriving not as charity but as the bet of a continent that believes the lights will stay on. By 2030, it would look like the Black Sea functioning less like a chokepoint and more like a trade route again—grain moving, shipping calmer, food-price spikes less frequent.

Inside Russia, success would look quieter: fewer families living in fear of the next mobilization; veterans receiving real medical care rather than patriotic slogans; inflation returning to tolerable levels; an economy less warped by permanent wartime emergency. None of this absolves the invasion. But it reduces the likelihood of the next one.

And globally, success prevents the scenario we flirt with each year the war continues: a miscalculation that escalates beyond Ukraine, a nuclear-alert spiral, a wider energy shock, a deeper fracture between “rules-based” rhetoric and the lived reality of impunity.

The call to action: stop treating peace as a slogan and start treating it as engineering

Peace here is not a candlelit vigil. It is engineering: verification mechanisms, sequenced incentives, security guarantees that survive politics, and economic tools designed to change behavior rather than signal virtue.

Western governments should prepare a serious phased framework now, not after another year of attrition. Neutral and non-aligned states should be invited not as decoration but as stakeholders in enforcement and monitoring. Ukraine’s partners should fund defense production and reconstruction planning in parallel, because deterrence and rebuilding are the two pillars that make any ceasefire more than a pause. And Russia should be offered the one thing that can move a risk-acceptant leadership: a credible off-ramp that reduces the costs of stopping—while making the costs of restarting unbearable.

Four years into this war, the world does not need another declaration of steadfastness. It needs a structure that turns exhaustion into an end.