September 10, 2026 - FreedomPerson
I want to make an argument that is uncomfortable but, I believe, analytically necessary: the Russia-Ukraine war continues not simply because peace is difficult, but because its continuation — in its current configuration — is politically advantageous for influential groups in all three major parties to the conflict.
This is not a conspiracy thesis. It requires no secret coordination between Moscow, Kyiv, and Washington. What it requires is something more mundane and, in many ways, more troubling: the alignment of separate, self-interested political logics that each, independently, produce the same outcome — continued war.
My central claim is this: ending the war would impose greater political costs on the decision-making elites of Russia, Ukraine, and the United States than allowing it to continue. And because those elites are the ones who must actually negotiate and implement any peace, that asymmetry matters enormously.
The September 2026 visit of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner illustrates the dynamic precisely. Senior American envoys traveled first to Moscow, then to Kyiv. Meetings were held; signals were sent; the process was visible. And then nothing changed. Fighting continued. Washington proceeded to discuss further military support for Ukraine. The visit was not a failure of diplomacy — it was an accurate expression of where the incentives of all parties actually stand.
To understand why, we need to look at each party separately — and then, crucially, at how their separate logics lock together.
Russia: When Peace Is the Threat
For the Russian regime, ending the war does not represent a return to normalcy. It represents the opening of an accounting — one that those in power have strong reasons to avoid.
Consider what the war currently provides. Social mobilization remains at an emergency pitch, which suppresses the fragmentation and political competition that characterize peacetime. Economic deterioration — and it is real and accelerating — can be attributed to Western sanctions and wartime disruption rather than to structural policy failures. Security restrictions and political repression are legitimized by an existential framing that peacetime cannot sustain. The military-industrial complex receives resource flows of historic scale, cementing its political weight within the system.
Most importantly, the war defers the most dangerous question for any regime that initiates a catastrophic conflict: why was this done, and what did it cost?
The paradox of Russia's position is this: the country is becoming poorer, technologically weaker, and demographically more damaged with each passing year. By any national metric, the war is a disaster. Yet for the specific group that controls the state, continuation may be politically safer than conclusion. The moment a settlement is reached, accountability becomes a live political question. Soldiers' families, displaced communities, an exhausted economy — all of these demand answers. The war, while it lasts, suspends that demand.
Winning and ending are not the same political event, and that the regime may have stronger incentives to manage the war than to conclude it on terms that would force a political reckoning.
Ukraine: The Accountability Paradox
Ukraine's situation is structurally different, but the logic of political self-preservation operates similarly.
For Ukraine as a country, ending the war is an existential necessity. The human cost, the destruction of infrastructure, the demographic hemorrhage — all of this makes prolonged conflict catastrophically damaging. I have no doubt that the Ukrainian population wants peace.
But a country's objective interests and its political system's incentive structure are not the same thing. And for the current political system in Ukraine, peace creates acute risks that war, paradoxically, suspends.
Martial law means the normal electoral cycle is frozen. Emergency executive powers remain concentrated. The enormous wartime state apparatus — built around foreign financial support, centralized decision-making, and military-time information controls — continues to function. These are not symptoms of authoritarianism; they are the normal features of a country fighting for survival. But they are also features that serve the political stability of whoever currently holds power.
When the war ends, all of this changes. Elections return. The public — which has paid an enormous price — demands to know what that price purchased. If peace can be framed as "we saved the country against all odds," the current leadership survives politically, perhaps stronger than before. But if peace involves significant territorial concessions, hundreds of thousands of casualties, and lasting economic damage, the political competition over who bears responsibility will be fierce and destabilizing.
I am not asserting that President Zelensky wants endless war to remain in power. That would be a reductive and unfair reading. What I am saying is that the political logic of any wartime leader creates rational incentives to avoid the accountability moment that follows a contested peace — and that this logic influences decisions, even when it operates beneath the level of conscious calculation. This is not unique to Ukraine. It is visible in virtually every prolonged modern conflict.
The United States: Asymmetric Stakes
Of the three parties, the United States has, in my view, the most structurally comfortable position — and that is precisely what makes its role in prolonging the conflict worth examining most carefully.
Russia is consuming its own military capital at a rate that would have seemed impossible before 2022: personnel, armored equipment, ammunition stocks, economic reserves, and long-term technological capacity. Ukraine is absorbing and destroying Russian conventional military potential that would otherwise pose a direct threat to NATO's eastern flank. And Europe, frightened by the proximity of large-scale war, is fundamentally reorganizing its defense posture.
That reorganization is the key point. European defense spending has risen sharply across NATO. And critically, a significant share of that spending flows toward American defense products. The United Kingdom committed £100 million to procurement of U.S. military equipment, including Patriot systems. The current American administration has explicitly conditioned its security commitments on European rearmament. Washington approves arms transfers to Ukraine — transfers substantially financed by European allies.
The pattern that emerges is striking:
- Russiapays in people, equipment, and economic potential
- Ukrainepays in territory, lives, and the destruction of its national infrastructure
- Europepays in money and rising defense budgets
- The United Statesconverts all of this into strategic influence, anchored through arms sales largely financed by others
This is not simply about Ukraine. It is a reorganization of the European security market around American military infrastructure - arguably the most consequential shift in transatlantic defense architecture since the end of the Cold War. And it is a reorganization that the existence of the conflict is accelerating.
Cost of the war's continuation is far lower for the United States than for any other party - and that this asymmetry shapes American diplomatic behavior in ways that are rarely stated openly. The September Witkoff/Kushner visit can be read not as failed diplomacy, but as an accurate expression of this asymmetry: Washington genuinely explored the possibility of a deal, but the price of not reaching one was, for American interests, quite manageable.
The System as a Whole: Why These Logics Lock Together
This is the part of the analysis that is most often missing from public discussion, and it is the part I consider most important.
The three incentive structures I have described are not merely parallel. They are mutually reinforcing. Each party's behavior, driven by its own internal political logic, validates and enables the behavior of the others — and together they produce a stable equilibrium that is very difficult to exit.
Russia's refusal to accept terms that would trigger domestic accountability gives Kyiv reason to maintain maximalist positions, since any compromise with an intransigent Russia reads domestically as capitulation. Ukraine's maximalist positions give Washington reason to continue arms support, which is politically popular and strategically productive. Continued American support gives Russia's regime justification for its wartime mobilization framing. And so the cycle reinforces itself.
No single party needs to consciously sustain this loop. Each is simply responding rationally to its own circumstances. But the aggregate result is a system with strong internal resistance to the kind of compromise that peace requires.
This is what distinguishes the current war from conflicts that end relatively quickly: all three major parties have political reasons to accept the continuation of fighting as preferable to the uncertainties of a contested peace. That does not make peace impossible. But it does mean that the visible diplomatic process — visits, statements, frameworks — is operating against structural headwinds that the diplomacy itself rarely acknowledges.
What Would Actually Change This
An honest analysis requires asking what could shift these incentives — because without that, the argument becomes fatalistic.
In Russia, the most plausible shift is economic deterioration severe enough that the regime's elite calculus changes: at some point, the costs of war begin to threaten the positions of those who currently benefit from it. We are not there yet, but the trajectory is real.
In Ukraine, the shift would require either a military breakthrough that changes the accountability calculus entirely, or a political transition that produces leadership with a different relationship to the peace-and-accountability equation.
For the United States, the shift would require either European political resistance to the current arrangement — unlikely in the near term given genuine security concerns — or a domestic American political shift that makes the costs of the war's continuation more salient than they currently are to American voters.
None of these shifts is imminent. Which is why, in my assessment, the diplomatic process we are currently observing is more likely to manage the conflict than to end it — at least in the near term.
I am not saying that the war is good, or that any party is acting irrationally. I am saying that the political systems of Russia, Ukraine, and the United States are each producing incentives — independently, through their own internal logic — that make ending the war more politically costly than continuing it, at least for those who hold power.
The war continues because, for those who must end it, the price of peace is currently higher than the price of war.
That asymmetry — between what populations pay and what decision-making elites risk — is the real engine of prolonged conflict. And no amount of diplomatic choreography changes it until the underlying incentive structures shift.
The Witkoff/Kushner visit demonstrated this with unusual clarity. Good faith diplomacy and structural incentives against resolution are not mutually exclusive. They can, and apparently do, coexist.
