Putin's New Hardline? UPDATE

Response to Alexander Mercouris' Comments of 21 January

Yesterday, January 21st, the always interesting and informative Alexander Mercouris responded on his podcast to my article of the day before disagreeing with his interpretation that a new hard line had been adopted by Moscow in response to the apparent drone assassination attempt on President Vladimir Putin on 28 December 2025. In that article I argued that Putin’s speech to new ambassadors did not contain

any new hard line but rather repeated longstanding Kremlin positions and that no new hard line had appeared either by way of an articulation of a new position or by any new political or military actions. In his podcast yesterday, Alexander brought in the comments of Putin’s foreign policy advisor Yurii Ushakov, who has spoken of Putin’s intention to “revise” Russia’s position in the negotiations to end the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. Alexander also dug into one particular phrase in Putin’s speech to the new ambassadors.

Regarding Ushakov’s statement of Putin’s plans to revise the Russian position, this does seem to indicate an intent to revise Russia’s negotiating position. It is impossible that any revision would be a softening of that position given the Western-Ukrainian escalations of late. However, intent does not make a policy, no less an implemented one. As yet we have no articulation or practice of a new hard line, though we may very well see one.

Regarding Alexander’s interpretation of Putin’s words, here are the operative sentences he unpacked: “Russia has repeatedly taken initiatives to build a new, reliable and fair architecture of European and global security. We offered options and rational solutions that could suit everyone in America, Europe, Asia, and all over the world. We believe that it would be worthwhile to return to their substantive discussion in order to consolidate the conditions on which a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine can be achieved – and the sooner the better.“ I would argue again that this is a reiteration of a new position with perhaps the exception of one nuance, as Alexander noted. Moscow has long opposed NATO expansion and, as I noted in my article disagreeing with Alexander’s reasonable expectation of a new hard line, has proposed solutions for creating a comprehensive security architecture for Europe that would address the security interests of both Russia and the West. This is absolutely correct. The nuance seems to emerge with Putin’s tying a return to talks on this larger issue to a resolution of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. The key phrase regards the need to return to this larger issue “in order to consolidate the conditions on which a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine can be achieved.“ If by this Putin means that an agreement on a new security architecture for Europe must precede, is a condition for a settlement of the war, then, indeed, this would be a major shift and hardening of Putin’s line.

But here two caveats are in order. First, Russia’s repeated nearly ad nauseam assertion that a peace agreement requires ‘addressing the root causes” of the conflict has long made this point on the need for an agreement on the larger European security issues of NATO expansion and the West’s withdrawal from various treaties achieved between Moscow and Washington at the end of the Cold War (ABM, INF, Open Skies). Second, I am not sure that Putin meant than an agreement on broader European security is a new precondition for a peace settlement for Ukraine. In reality, and as I have argued should be, the peace process sponsored by US President Donald Trump has been operating on two tracks de facto, if not de jure. Washington and Moscow have been discussing restoration of diplomatic and normal trade relations and presumably security issues such as the soon to expire New START. On the other track are the indirectly trilateral talks between Washington, Moscow, and Kiev. These two tracks are indeed interconnected, as Putin is well aware, by the issue of NATO expansion which has appeared in various formulations in the various treaty proposals or initiatives, with the Russians demanding its cessation, in particular to Ukraine, and with the Ukrainians rejecting to forego the right to join the Transatlantic alliance or demanding NATO Article 5-like security guarantees.

Although I do not consider the sum of the Ushakov and Putin statements as proof of an imminent or already adopted new hard line in Moscow, I do not exclude out of hand that one may in fact be here or on the way. There are simply some nuanced differences in the interpretations and levels of certainty held to by Alexander and myself. For me, the words emphasized by Alexander are certainly important signals that could portend precisely what Alexander expects, but they also may not be such signals. Moreover, declared intent does not make a policy.

The most important issue in all this is that if a new hard line emerges from Moscow — one that requires a larger security architecture agreement or serious structured negotiations on this extremely complex issue as a precondition for an agreement on Ukraine — the Kiev is doomed to defeat. The Ukrainian defense fronts, army, regime, and even state will not survive the year or more that such Russia-Western security talks would need to come to an agreement, if an agreement is possible at all, given the Europeans’ constant efforts to scuttle any agreement on Ukraine and prolong the war until Trump leaves the White House. In other words, if this becomes Putin’s new hard line, then he has in effect doomed peace talks to failure, whether he prefers this or not.