‘Peace in Ukraine is impossible while Putin remains in power’

A deal between Russia and Ukraine to end their war with each other is impossible while Vladimir Putin is alive and in power, a former British ambassador to Moscow has said.

Sir Laurie Bristow, who served as British ambassador to Russia between 2016 and 2020, said the idea that Putin could be persuaded to stop fighting in exchange for territorial concessions was a “fantasy”, and that Western leaders must accept that Moscow’s position would not change as long as he is in office.

Sir Laurie, who later headed the UK mission in Kabul during the evacuation from Afghanistan, also said British and other Western governments should face up to the scale of that disaster.

“Specifically on Russia, it is: understand the nature of the problem,” he told The Telegraph’s Battle Lines podcast when asked how he would advise the Prime Minister if he were still a diplomat.

“The key to thinking about how the war might end is first of all do away with fantasies. There is not a deal to be done with Russia where you trade some Ukrainian land for some other Ukrainian land and somehow Putin’s happy and goes home. That isn’t going to happen.

“What [Putin] wants to do here is essentially assert the rights as he sees them of a great power to a sphere of influence – essentially an empire in central and eastern Europe – and that cannot be reconciled with our interests.

“The second fantasy to do away with is that this conflict is resolvable while Putin is in office. By which I think I mean while Putin is alive. For the conflict itself to resolve, Russia has to fundamentally change and that will not happen [while Putin remains in post].”

Why Europe needs to continue arming Ukraine

Nearly a year of efforts by Donald Trump’s White House to broker a ceasefire and peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv have so far failed to end the war.

A summit between Putin and Trump in Alaska in August ended without progress being made.

In November, the White House produced a 28-point peace plan that strongly aligned with Russian demands. It has since been rewritten after pushback from Ukraine and its European allies, including the UK, but there is no sign of an agreement being reached soon.

Russia has indicated that it will not compromise on several demands, including that Ukraine never be allowed to join Nato and that it surrenders parts of the Donbas region not currently occupied by Moscow’s forces. Last week, president Volodymyr Zelensky indicated that he could find an alternative to Nato membership but has ruled out surrendering land.

Sir Laurie, for his part, said Putin’s own public statements made clear that he was not interested in compromise.

European leaders, including Sir Keir Starmer, instead must accept they will have to continue to arm Ukraine in order to deter Russia from pressing ahead “not because we want the war to continue but because we want it to stop”, he said.

“If the Americans decide their interests are elsewhere, our interests are still in European security and there is no escaping from that. This is fundamentally about the UK’s security,” Sir Laurie added.

Leading Britain through foreign-policy crises

Sir Laurie served for 32 years in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and led Britain’s response to some of its most severe foreign-policy crises in recent decades.

He was in post when the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, used the Novichok nerve agent in an attempt to kill Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, triggering a crisis in UK-Russian relations.

In 2021, he was appointed British ambassador to Afghanistan, and was in Kabul when the country’s government collapsed and the Taliban seized power that summer. Alongside the Army, he was involved in overseeing the chaotic evacuation from Kabul airport.

Speaking about his experience in Afghanistan, he said it would be a mistake, and an insult to the many British soldiers who served there, to pretend that the UK’s presence there ended in anything other than a disaster.

“There is the fact that in 20 years, we didn’t manage to do what we set out to do in Afghanistan and the place is now back in control of the Taliban. And the price of that failure includes, on our part, 457 dead British soldiers. There are some facts to be faced here about what failure actually looks like,” he said.

“150,000 British servicemen and women served in Afghanistan. And I’ve had some of them ask me what was that all about? So I think we do have to be clear with ourselves about the price paid by our people for what happened there.

“The youngest of the soldiers doing that [evacuation] operation was 18 years old. The youngest of my staff, who were all civilian volunteers, was 25. There is [also] a really important point there about public service. What it takes for young people to go into that kind of environment and get out people who they have never met and do not know,” Sir Laurie added.

The lesson from the disaster of Afghanistan for policy makers today is: “You may not want it to be happening, but it is. So what are your choices? That is the thing to focus on here.”