This was Russia today Tuesday, February 17, 2026

Howdy, folks. Today, I take up a recent essay by political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya, who warns that the “traps” of the Russia–Ukraine war remain too great for a diplomatic breakthrough in 2026. Read on for news about Poland’s war reparations claim against Russia and Zelensky’s hard line on the Donbas. Please note: In my last newsletter, I called the analytical platform War on the Rocks a “blog.” My apologies for the error. Yours, Kevin.

Ukraine needs a ceasefire. Russia needs a different Ukraine entirely. That gap is why 2026 won’t bring peace, argues Tatiana Stanovaya.

Writing for Carnegie Politika, political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya argues that renewed diplomacy — including direct talks in Abu Dhabi and Geneva — will not end the war in Ukraine this year. The reason, she writes, is structural: each major party faces its own “trap” — a set of contradictions that makes a genuine settlement impossible as long as the Kremlin regards any outcome that ignores Russian interests as an existential threat.

Ukraine’s trap is the most immediate. Kyiv needs a ceasefire, but Moscow’s precondition — Ukrainian withdrawal from the Donbas — is politically untenable for any Ukrainian government. Meanwhile, Russia calculates that military victory is a matter of time and therefore has no incentive to soften its demands. Ukraine risks getting mired in endless ceasefire negotiations while Russia continues to pound Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Moscow designs these tactical pauses to signal flexibility to Washington while denying Kyiv any real chance to recover.

Russia’s trap is subtler, but no less constraining. Beyond territory, Moscow wants a fundamentally transformed Ukraine: one stripped of its national identity, its Western military partnerships, and its capacity for independent defense. These demands — banning Ukrainian nationalism, restoring the Russian Orthodox Church’s influence, and gutting the Ukrainian army — are so far beyond what Kyiv could accept that even a coerced agreement would likely unravel into sabotage and renewed escalation, much as the Minsk Accords did a decade ago. Stanovaya also identifies traps for the United States, which risks declaring a hollow diplomatic victory that quickly collapses. Europe, meanwhile, lacks both the will to confront Russia and the readiness to engage it seriously on questions of continental security — and so remains sidelined.

Western analysts who cite Russia’s mounting economic pain as evidence that a deal is near are, Stanovaya writes, missing the point: The Kremlin does not view a negotiated settlement that ignores Russian interests as a mere defeat, but as annihilation. As long as Putin remains in power, mass protests fail to materialize, and the Russian budget can fund the war at some level, the fighting will continue. What the current diplomatic activity is most likely to produce, she concludes, is not peace but a simulation of peace — a ceasefire in name, a settlement on paper — all while destruction continues in Ukraine and strategic antagonism between Moscow and Washington goes unresolved.

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News you don’t want to miss today

🇵🇱 Poland prepares war reparations claim against Russia ⚖️

Warsaw is compiling a legal case to demand compensation for atrocities committed during decades of Soviet rule, paralleling its ongoing €1.3-trillion (roughly $1.5-trillion) claim against Germany for World War II damages.

• A historic reckoning: While a government-backed institute investigates the economic and social costs of “Soviet systemic supremacy,” the initiative risks inflaming tensions with Moscow at a time when Poland is already facing intensified Russian hybrid attacks. | Financial Times

🕊️ Zelensky draws a hard line on Donbas territory 🗳️

President Zelensky warned that the Ukrainian public would flatly reject any peace deal requiring a unilateral withdrawal from the eastern Donbas region to hand it over to Russia.

• The referendum reality: While Zelensky told U.S. mediators that voters might accept freezing the conflict along current battle lines, he made clear Washington “shouldn’t try to force him to sell a vision of peace his own people would see as an ‘unsuccessful story.’” | Axios

🕯️ Police filmed everyone. Nobody hid. At Alexey Navalny’s grave, on the second anniversary of his death, his mother stood in the freezing cold and listened. | On the second anniversary of his death, mourners and foreign diplomats braved sub-zero temperatures to lay flowers and share messages of gratitude with his mother, even as Russian police recorded and monitored the entire gathering.

😘 ‘No Z.’ Disappearing filters. Soldiers in uniform. Code words. ‘Traditional values.’ How war transformed dating in Russia. | Russians are navigating a landscape of coded language and isolation, seeking to identify shared political stances and avoid dangers in a society increasingly fractured by the invasion of Ukraine and repressive domestic laws.

🛜 Russia’s parliament passes law allowing FSB to order communications blocked under conditions set by Putin | The State Duma passed legislation granting the Federal Security Service the unilateral power to demand that telecom operators cut off Internet and cellular access for any reason determined by the president.

🐸 Russia formally rejects Navalny poisoning allegations, arguing that frog toxin falls outside chemical weapons watchdog’s remit | Moscow has dismissed accusations from five European nations that Alexey Navalny was killed with a frog-derived neurotoxin, contending that the substance falls under the jurisdiction of a biological weapons treaty rather than the chemical watchdog’s mandate.

⚖️ How do you force Russian conscripts into combat? Threaten them with deployment if they won’t steal for you, then threaten them with prison after they’ve been charged. | Russian military officials allegedly coerced several servicemen into stealing and processing 4.6 tons of copper cable from a base near Kronstadt by threatening them with immediate deployment to the front lines in Ukraine.

☦️ God, guns, and grain: Bloomberg maps Russia’s steady expansion across Africa | Beyond its military and resource interests, Moscow is leveraging the Russian Orthodox Church, educational centers, and labor recruitment programs to cultivate a “friendly great power” image and bypass Western economic dominance across more than 30 African nations.

⚖️ A California man tried to beat a weapons smuggling sentence by donating the evidence to the Russian military. A Moscow court sent him to prison for four years. | After purchasing Kalashnikov accessories in Moscow and attempting to fly to Istanbul, Robert Mao donated the parts to the Russian military, hoping to mitigate his responsibility for failing to declare the equipment at customs.

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