The Kremlin continues to demonstrate its commitment to its original war demands for a peace settlement in Ukraine, particularly those that aim to destroy the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), ahead of the next round of the US-Ukraine-Russia talks in Abu Dhabi.
The Russian MFA stated on February 2 that Russia must examine all peace proposals to assess if they are “acceptable for Russia” and if they comply with Russia’s war goals and objectives.
The MFA claimed that Ukraine is trying to avoid discussions about the “White House plan,” which the MFA claimed is based on the understandings Russia and the United States allegedly agreed upon at the August 2025 Alaska Summit. Kremlin officials have repeatedly exploited the lack of clarity about the outcome of the 2025 Alaska Summit to claim that the United States and Russia had agreed to end the war based on the original Russian demands.
The MFA claimed that the Alaska Summit specifically discussed the alleged “root causes” of the war (a phrase the Kremlin often uses to discuss its original war aims from 2021 and 2022) and named NATO expansion and possible Ukrainian NATO membership as a “chief” root cause. Russia issued ultimatums to the United States and NATO in December 2021 before launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, demanding “security guarantees” for Russia, such as halting the deployment of forces or weapons systems to member-states that joined NATO after 1997.
These demands amounted to the destruction of the current NATO alliance and a radical restructuring of the security architecture in all of Europe – a core Russian grand strategic goal that Russian President Vladimir Putin maintains to this day.
ISW continues to assess that the Kremlin has been signaling that any peace deal that does not address Russia’s demands of NATO and the West outside of Ukraine will not satisfy Russia, nor lead to a lasting peace that can normalize Russian-European or US-Russian relations.
