The West Plans a Freeze. 

Moscow Prepares a Funeral

In Washington and Brussels, the dominant metaphor remains the Korean peninsula. The war in Ukraine is treated as a future line on the map, a demarcation zone, a fortified frontier that can be stabilized, financed, and supervised for decades. The assumption is simple. The Ukrainian state survives, the front hardens, and the conflict becomes a management problem.

The language coming from Moscow describes a different reality. There the war is not about freezing a line. It is about dismantling a structure. What Western capitals discuss as a long-term containment scenario, Russian officials and strategic commentators increasingly treat as a terminal phase.

From that perspective, the West is negotiating with a political entity that Moscow already considers finished.

Recent statements by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, combined with the broader tone of Russian strategic discourse, suggest a consistent internal logic. In this logic, Ukraine has crossed the point of systemic viability. The question is no longer how to divide territory or where to place the border. The question is how to manage the consequences of a state that, in Moscow’s assessment, no longer functions as a sovereign actor.

Western policy continues to assume the opposite. It is built on the idea that Ukraine can be rebuilt, integrated, and preserved. Russian assessments increasingly describe the country as a political and economic organism kept alive only through external financial injections. In that interpretation, Ukraine is not a subject of international politics but an object of geopolitical maintenance.

This difference in diagnosis explains the sharp tone of Lavrov’s recent remarks about the OSCE. When he says the organization has been “Ukrainized,” he is not simply accusing it of bias. He is signaling that Russia sees the current European security framework as fixated on preserving a structure that, in Moscow’s view, has already collapsed. In this narrative, the OSCE is no longer a platform for managing Europe’s future but a mechanism for prolonging the afterlife of a failing state.

The diplomatic rhetoric that follows serves a practical function. When the Zelenskiy government is described as a “terrorist regime,” the wording is not only propagandistic. It creates a legal and political frame in which negotiations become conceptually impossible. You do not sign strategic agreements with actors defined as terrorists. You neutralize them.

From that standpoint, a ceasefire is not a step toward peace. It is a pause that allows the West to rearm a hostile proxy. The acceptable outcome is not a frozen line but the elimination of the threat as a political structure.

The same logic appears in Moscow’s warnings about possible Western troop deployments. When Lavrov frames French or British forces as an intervention, he is drawing a legal boundary. Once those troops enter Ukraine in an official capacity, they cease to be advisors or guarantors. They become combatants in a conflict that Russia increasingly describes as existential. The message is simple. Those forces would be treated accordingly, and Moscow is preparing the diplomatic and military groundwork for that possibility.

From this standpoint, Western policymakers face a very narrow corridor of choices, none of them strategically pleasant.

One option is a managed retreat. The West accepts that Ukraine in its current form cannot be preserved. The narrative of the 1991 borders quietly disappears from official language. Russia consolidates control over the industrial east and south, while a reduced western state gravitates toward its nearest European neighbors. The existing European security architecture gradually erodes, and new arrangements emerge under the influence of Moscow and Beijing.

The other option is escalation. The West refuses to accept Ukraine’s collapse and intervenes directly. Moscow has already signaled how it would interpret such a move. Not as assistance, but as an existential intervention. In the Russian strategic calculus, this war concerns national survival. In the Western calculus, it remains a difficult policy problem. This asymmetry of resolve creates a dangerous dynamic. One side is prepared to climb the escalation ladder much faster than the other expects.

In official diplomatic language, this outlook appears in Lavrov’s statements about the illegitimacy of the Ukrainian government and the dangers of Western military presence. In the writings and commentary of several Russian strategic thinkers, the logic extends further. There the Ukrainian war is treated not as an isolated conflict, but as one episode in a broader global restructuring.

Within that broader discourse, the United States is portrayed as a power facing structural limits to its hegemony and therefore seeking external resources to sustain it. In earlier phases, pressure was directed primarily at adversaries. Now, according to this interpretation, the burden is shifting toward allies.

Europe’s energy break with Russia is cited as the clearest example. The continent abandons a stable supply structure, accepts higher costs, and becomes more dependent on American energy and security guarantees. In return, it receives neither strategic autonomy nor economic relief. The arrangement resembles a transfer of resources rather than a partnership.

In this narrative, the same logic extends to the Indo-Pacific. Allies are expected to bear the costs of confrontation with China while Washington retains strategic control. The result is what some Russian analysts describe as a new form of globalization. The earlier version promised shared prosperity under a unified system. The emerging version offers a struggle for survival within a system of tightening resources.

Within that framework, the war in Ukraine becomes more than a regional conflict. It is treated as a central episode in a broader redistribution of power and resources. Countries aligned with the United States are seen as moving closer to the systemic center, where pressures are greatest. Those aligned with Russia and China are portrayed as attempting to construct an alternative structure.

European public opinion adds another layer to the picture. Recent surveys show a sharp rise in negative attitudes toward the United States across major European countries. In several of them, majorities now favor a more independent course, even at the cost of weakening the transatlantic alliance. The political class understands this shift, but translating sentiment into policy remains difficult.

At the same time, military deployments continue along NATO’s eastern flank. Germany plans to station thousands of troops and dozens of tanks near the Belarusian border by 2027. The security architecture is being reinforced even as its political foundations grow more uncertain.

All of this feeds into a single conclusion circulating in Moscow. The conflict in Ukraine is not an isolated war. It is the epicenter of a structural shift in the global order. Negotiations about peace are, in reality, negotiations about a new security architecture.

In Western capitals, the planning horizon still revolves around reconstruction, guarantees, and stabilization. In Moscow, the horizon looks different. There the discussion is about containment, reconfiguration, and the consequences of systemic collapse.

The West is planning for a frozen conflict.
Moscow is preparing for a funeral.