More than four years into the Russia-Ukraine war, the central question is increasingly not who can gain another town or stretch of territory, but whether either side can achieve its underlying political objectives. Political scientist Dr Nicolai Petro argues that Russia, Ukraine and Europe's leaders remain locked into fundamentally incompatible visions of European security leaving military escalation easier to imagine than a durable settlement.
INR Report: Based on an interview with Dr Nicolai Petro by Lena Petrova for World Affairs In Context.
Dr Nicolai Petro, a Senior Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy and professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island, approaches the Ukraine conflict from a perspective increasingly absent from much day-to-day war coverage: not which side gained territory this week, but what each participant ultimately believes victory is supposed to achieve.
Petro's argument is that the strategic objectives themselves are the problem.
Russia, he says, continues to seek Ukrainian neutrality, security arrangements for predominantly Russian-speaking populations in territories Moscow claims, and ultimately a European security architecture in which Russian security interests are acknowledged. Ukraine's leadership, by contrast, seeks to preserve the country as an independent state closely integrated into Western and NATO strategic structures.
Those positions are not merely different. In Petro's assessment, they collide directly.
Ukraine as NATO's Eastern Bulwark
One of Petro's most provocative arguments is that the Ukrainian government's strategic objective has become preserving Ukraine as what he describes as an "anti-Russian bulwark" — an anchor for European and NATO interests capable of containing Russia.
Petro argues that this leaves Kiev with extraordinarily limited options. Ukraine must either defeat Russia sufficiently to preserve that strategic orientation, or secure a settlement that allows it to resume the same trajectory later. He sees little evidence that the present Ukrainian leadership is prepared to accept a peace settlement accommodating Russia's core security demands.
That distinction matters because a ceasefire is not necessarily a settlement. If the geopolitical conditions that contributed to the conflict remain unresolved, Petro argues, stopping the shooting could simply postpone another confrontation.
Europe and the Search for an Endgame
Petro is equally critical of Europe's strategy.
He argues that Washington and European capitals can no longer automatically be treated as pursuing identical objectives. In his interpretation, European leaders remain committed to Ukraine as part of a military, political and ideological effort to contain and ultimately transform Russia. Petro goes further, characterising this as effectively a militarised regime-change strategy and warning that destabilising Russia could itself produce enormous security risks for Europe.
His economic argument is also significant. European leaders increasingly speak of building a military capability less dependent upon the United States, but Petro questions whether Europe's economic and demographic position can sustain the required expenditure — particularly without the competitively priced Russian raw materials that previously supported parts of European industry.
The question therefore becomes not simply whether Europe wants greater strategic autonomy, but whether it can afford it over decades.
Was a Different European Security System Possible?
Petro places today's confrontation within the much longer argument over the post-Cold War security order.
From Moscow's perspective, he says, NATO remained fundamentally a military alliance designed to contain Russia even after the Soviet Union disappeared. Petro points particularly to Vladimir Putin's 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, interpreting it as containing both a warning against renewed containment and an offer to develop a broader European security framework.
He notes that Russia also promoted a greater role for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe as a possible non-military framework for European security.
Petro's contention is that those alternatives were ultimately rejected. He interprets NATO's insistence that Russia could have no veto over alliance decisions as, in practice, an unwillingness to negotiate Russian security concerns as part of a common framework. That is Petro's interpretation rather than an uncontested historical conclusion, but it is central to understanding his analysis of how the current confrontation developed.
Instead of delivering the expected post-Cold War "peace dividend", he argues, the dividing line between Russia and the West progressively moved eastward.
What Would Russia Accept?
Despite the enormous human and material costs of the war, Petro says Moscow's publicly stated fundamental demands have remained relatively consistent.
As he describes them, they include Ukrainian withdrawal from the four eastern regions claimed by Russia, recognition of Ukrainian neutrality, no membership of a military bloc and no foreign military bases on Ukrainian territory. He distinguishes foreign bases from foreign military assistance, which he says is not necessarily excluded by the Russian position.
Petro also identifies language, religious and minority protections for Russian-speaking Ukrainians as part of Moscow's demands. Importantly, the interview presents these as Russian conditions and Petro's interpretation of them, rather than independently established justification for Russia's invasion.
Petro nevertheless believes mechanisms could theoretically be negotiated, including through European guarantees concerning minority rights and Ukraine's prospective relationship with the European Union.
A Military Solution May Be Harder Than It Appears
Petro is sceptical of predictions that Russia will simply conquer Kiev, Odessa or the entirety of Ukraine.
Modern cities containing hundreds of thousands or millions of inhabitants would be extraordinarily difficult to capture and occupy militarily without immense destruction. He therefore regards sweeping territorial conquest as a far more demanding proposition than continuing the current campaign.
This reinforces the central contradiction of the conflict.
If Ukraine cannot realistically defeat Russia outright, while Russia cannot easily occupy Ukraine's largest cities, then neither maximalist military outcome offers an obvious or inexpensive conclusion.
The alternative is negotiation — but negotiation requires political concessions that the respective governments may currently regard as more dangerous than continuing the war.
The Deeper Problem: Two Incompatible Visions of Europe
Petro ultimately sees Ukraine as part of a much larger unresolved question dating from the collapse of the Soviet Union: is Russia to be incorporated into a broader European security system, or permanently contained outside it?
He argues that Western political thinking continues to interpret modern Russia heavily through the experience of the Soviet Union, while contemporary Russian leaders understand their country's interests through a much longer historical framework.
Whether one accepts Petro's conclusions or not, this reframes the war in an important way.
If the conflict is fundamentally about territory alone, changing the front line might eventually settle it. But if it is a struggle over Ukraine's geopolitical orientation and Russia's place in the European security order, territorial changes alone cannot resolve the underlying dispute.
Does This Affect New Zealand?
Yes. New Zealand may be geographically distant from Ukraine, but it is not insulated from the consequences of a prolonged confrontation between Russia and the Western alliance.
For Wellington, the significance extends beyond deciding whether one agrees with Moscow, Kiev, Washington or Brussels. A prolonged European conflict affects global defence priorities, diplomatic alignments, energy and commodity markets, sanctions regimes and the international institutions on which smaller trading nations such as New Zealand depend.
There is also a broader foreign-policy question. New Zealand has traditionally emphasised both a rules-based international system and an independent foreign policy. Petro's argument highlights the tension that can emerge when defending established international principles becomes intertwined with an open-ended geopolitical confrontation for which the major powers themselves have no mutually acceptable end state.
The most important question may therefore be the simplest: what does victory actually look like?
If NATO and Europe cannot define a realistic political destination, if Ukraine cannot achieve its objectives without defeating a much larger nuclear-armed neighbour, and if Russia cannot secure its objectives without imposing conditions unacceptable to Kiev and its European supporters, continuing the conflict does not by itself resolve the contradiction.
It merely postpones the point at which somebody will eventually have to negotiate it.
Source: World Affairs In Context — Lena Petrova interview with Dr Nicolai Petro, “NATO vs. Russia - How the West Created an Unwinnable Proxy War in Ukraine,” published 29 August 2026. The supplied transcript identifies Petro as a Senior Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy and professor at the University of Rhode Island.
Independent reporting. Original context. Credited sources.