A change in tone is detectable over the Ukraine war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called for direct engagement with Vladimir Putin, while the White House has signaled support for renewed direct negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow. The leaders of Europe’s major powers said on June 7 that they support talks and want a place for the continent at the negotiating table.
After more than four years of war, discussion is increasingly shifting to how the conflict might end.
That shift is understandable, not least because of the successes Ukraine is registering on the battlefield and far behind Russian lines. Yet the growing focus on ceasefires, negotiations, and security guarantees risks obscuring a more important question. The central challenge is not simply how to end the war. It is how to secure the peace that follows.
Wars do not end when the guns fall silent. They end when societies decide what the war meant. More than 50 years ago, strategist Fred Iklé warned that governments devote enormous attention to fighting wars and far less to thinking about how they end. The challenge confronting Ukraine, Russia, Europe, and the United States today is not simply how to stop the fighting, but how to shape the political conditions that follow it.
The next battle may not be over territory at all. It may be over memory. Every side will attempt to define what happened, who prevailed, and what lessons should be learned. The side that shapes those conclusions will exert influence long after the final shot is fired.
History suggests that the most dangerous outcome may not be victory or defeat. It may be ambiguity.
Clear victories establish facts. Clear defeats impose lessons. Ambiguous outcomes allow competing accounts to flourish—consider the poisonous Stab-in-the-back myth of Germany’s Weimar years. If Moscow, Kyiv, Europe, and Washington emerge from the conflict believing fundamentally different things about what happened and who prevailed, the foundations for future instability will remain. Unresolved questions of meaning are often more dangerous than unresolved questions of territory.
For Russia, the war was always about more than land. The Kremlin sought not simply to seize territory but to subordinate Ukraine politically, reassert dominance over its neighborhood, and demonstrate that military coercion remains an effective instrument of statecraft. Those objectives were political from the beginning, and they remain political today.
If Russia concludes that aggression produced meaningful gains despite enormous costs, the incentives that encouraged the use of force will not disappear. They will merely be deferred.
Of course, the post-war strategic communications challenge will depend heavily on how the war ends. Early in Russia’s full-scale invasion, I often framed the conflict in terms of who ultimately prevailed and how quickly the war was resolved. Different outcomes create fundamentally different requirements for peace.
A Ukrainian victory, a Russian victory, a frozen conflict, or an externally imposed settlement would each create different challenges. Some outcomes would require reinforcing deterrence and resilience. Others would require preserving identity, cohesion, legitimacy, or restraint. In every case, the military outcome would shape the political narrative, and the political narrative would shape the durability of the peace.
Much discussion focuses on reassuring Ukraine and sustaining allied cohesion. Those audiences matter enormously. But the most important audience may ultimately be within Russia.
Durable peace requires a shaping of Russian perceptions about the utility of force.
The question is not, therefore, simply a matter of who writes the ceasefire agreement, but of who writes the first and most compelling history of the war (there will be numerous and unconvincing bad versions, it almost goes without saying).
Following World War II, Allied leaders understood that military victory alone would not guarantee a durable peace. The Nuremberg Trials sought to establish accountability and delegitimize aggression, while the Marshall Plan helped create the political and economic foundations for a more stable Europe. The challenge was not merely defeating Nazi Germany but ensuring that the ideas and incentives that had produced catastrophe could not easily be repackaged into future grievance and revanchism.
The circumstances surrounding Ukraine are obviously different, but one lesson remains relevant: durable peace requires a broadly accepted understanding that aggression failed to achieve its political objectives.
Without that, ceasefires become pauses, settlements become opportunities for rearmament, and frozen conflicts become incubators for future wars.
As policymakers debate negotiations and security guarantees, they should keep a larger objective in mind. The goal is not merely to stop the fighting. It is to establish conditions under which renewed aggression becomes less attractive, less legitimate, and less likely.
That’s why the first post-war battle is always over memory as much as territory.
The question is not when the war ends. The question is what lessons endure after the guns fall silent.
David M. Cattler is a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a senior transatlantic security leader with more than 35 years of experience across the US government, NATO, and the Intelligence Community. Most recently, he served as Director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), and was previously NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security, the alliance’s senior intelligence official. Cattler is a graduate of the US Naval Academy and Georgetown University and was an MIT Seminar XXI Fellow.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
