Tectonic Realignment 

The world is steadily returning to a logic of spheres of influence, in which the right to speak belongs only to those who possess real power and the willingness to use it. The United States, Russia, and China are dividing the planet in precisely this manner today, conducting a complex, multi-layered bargaining process across the entire perimeter from Taiwan to Venezuela and from Iran to the Arctic.

The war in Ukraine continues. Talks about peace have dragged on for months, alternating between meetings in Davos, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates, and long stretches of tense diplomatic silence. From the outside, the process may appear to have reached a classic impasse. The territorial stumbling block, Moscow’s demand for full control over the Donetsk region, looks insoluble. Zelenskiy refuses and hardens his rhetoric. The front, though with difficulty, is holding. The rear, despite blackouts, has not collapsed. As a result, a war of attrition continues its work of slowly destroying Ukraine. Russia, while openly interested in dismantling Ukrainian statehood, is not interested in depopulating the country or eliminating its productive capacity.

Donald Trump, who promised to end the conflict in a single day, failed to do so even after a year of his presidency. A man who once spoke about peace and laid claim to a Nobel Prize compelled the pseudo-opposition figure Machado to hand over her statuette to him and is now prepared to initiate several new conflicts. One is reminded of a line from the Russian cult film Brother 2, which observed that in America everything is simple except money. Behind meetings and conversations that appear pointless, and whose outcome becomes less attainable the closer one seems to get, a hard and unsentimental bargain is underway.

The dialogue is not merely ongoing. It is expanding, multiplying its formats as if accumulating critical mass for a qualitative shift. It ranges from relatively closed Russian-American groups discussing business projects and frozen assets, to direct contacts between foreign ministers and negotiations conducted by Trump’s envoys in the Kremlin, and further to the so-called Peace Council, which Trump views as a more effective version of the United Nations under American auspices. Large and small platforms are being prepared for a deal. This is not a deal about Ukraine alone, but a comprehensive agreement on the division of spheres of influence in the spirit of a new Yalta. Ukraine represents only one element in this arrangement, though a highly significant one.

Here the logic articulated by Trump himself in his remarks about Greenland, Canada, or Venezuela becomes relevant. Land is not yours if you cannot defend it. The inverse proposition follows naturally. Land becomes yours if you are able to take it and hold it by force. If Washington treats the absorption of Donbass, and possibly other historical territories of Novorossiya, by Russia as an inevitable outcome, then waiting while incurring massive political and economic costs makes little sense. Given clarity about the destination, it appears more rational to reach an agreement now and extract maximum benefit elsewhere on the global chessboard. This is precisely the direction in which Kiev is being pushed, discreetly but persistently.

The hard bargaining is not directed solely at Zelenskiy, whose subjectivity in these negotiations is approaching zero, reducing him to an irritating manager of other people’s assets. The main dialogue is taking place directly with Moscow, and it is comprehensive. The agenda is blunt and explicit. Venezuela is your partner. What if we remove Maduro and reformat power there. Venezuela remains a partner only as long as it belongs to itself. Otherwise, it becomes ours. Iran is your partner. What if the ayatollah regime fractures under internal pressure and we step in with our own rules. Tehran remains a partner only as long as it can maintain internal stability and seek protection from Russia and China. If it cannot, the field once again opens to the strongest. The United States is laying its cards on the table quickly, assembling a vast puzzle of a new world order.

Within this global configuration, Russia may be capable of moving beyond its current claims limited to Donbass. The West is demonstrating an inability to keep Ukraine entirely within its orbit, with the possible exception of several western regions. The rest of Ukraine belongs to Russia’s historical space, even if part of its population does not yet recognize this.

That recognition must mature. It is developing not only in the crucible of the special military operation. The processes likely to unfold in Ukraine after the end of active hostilities, including social collapse, intensifying intra-elite conflict, and the disintegration of interregional ties, may prove more destructive to Ukrainian statehood than the situationally unifying idea of resistance to aggression.

This is why the issue of postwar reconstruction, or more accurately reconfiguration, of Ukraine occupies such a prominent place in the negotiations. The United States seeks business contracts and access to resources there, including and perhaps primarily through unfrozen Russian assets. Russia seeks to reclaim this territory as an integral part of itself, of its civilization and its economy. The clash between these two fundamentally different approaches, one transactional and the other civilizational, explains why the negotiations are so prolonged and detailed.

The world is steadily returning to a logic of spheres of influence, in which only those with real power and the willingness to apply it retain a voice. The United States, Russia, and China are dividing the planet accordingly, conducting a complex and multi-layered bargain from Taiwan to Venezuela and from Iran to the Arctic. In this game, Russia can secure advantages if it maintains a clear understanding of the boundaries of its sovereign zone of interests and of its real capacity to defend them.

In this context, the war in Ukraine is not an isolated conflict, but the epicenter of a tectonic shift. Peace negotiations are in fact negotiations over a new architecture of European and global security, the very architecture Moscow has spoken about for many years. It must now be constructed not through dialogue with a weakened Europe, but through an unfamiliar and sharply pragmatic conversation with Trump’s America, where every concession must be backed by power. The central question at this stage is not whether a deal will be reached. It will. The question is what price will be paid, and in what currency, for this new, fragile, and extremely dangerous peace.