From Russia’s perspective, Ukraine’s refusal to accept its terms to end the war is the main obstacle to peace.

According to Kyiv and many of its European allies, it is Russian President Vladimir Putin who is standing in the way of a truce deal.

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On Tuesday, a United States delegation flew to Russia for high-level talks with Putin that were held behind closed doors and lasted about five hours. The group included US special envoy Steve Witkoff and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Putin aide Yuri Ushakov called the meeting “very useful and constructive,” but admitted “a lot of work lies ahead”.

Ukraine’s desire to join NATO is a “key question”, he said, adding that “no compromise” had been reached on issues of territory.

Ukrainian officials find Russia’s position absurd, since Moscow launched a full-scale onslaught against Ukraine in 2022. They believe Putin has no real interest in peace, given the continuous bombing of Ukrainian cities.

“These negotiations did not end in success, as was expected, because they’re based on fundamentally different ideas about what is happening between the Americans and the Kremlin,” Ilya Budraitskis, a Russian political scientist and visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, told Al Jazeera.

“The offer of peace resting on the exchange of territories, which the Americans tried to sell as the key idea of this plan, does not really interest Putin. He is interested in changing the entire security structure in Eastern Europe.”

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Ukraine an ‘unreliable counterpart’: Russian analyst

But some in Russia back the Kremlin’s viewpoint, and use similar words while doing so.

“The Kyiv regime’s sabotage of progress toward a peaceful settlement, distortion of facts, and attempts to delay the inevitable have significantly complicated the negotiation process,” said Spartak Baranovsky, a political scientist and member of the Moscow-based Digoria Expert Club, a think tank whose views broadly align with those of the Russian government.

“The Ukrainian side refused to implement the Minsk agreements and then rejected the initial parameters of the peace agreement negotiated in Istanbul. It is truly difficult to establish a constructive dialogue with such an unreliable counterpart,” he told Al Jazeera.

The Minsk agreements were a series of treaties signed in 2014 and 2015 to end the war in Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists were fighting the Kyiv government. After the full-scale invasion of 2022, several meetings between Russian and Ukrainian delegates have taken place in Belarus and Turkiye, all of which failed to secure peace.

While the full details of this week’s meeting have not been revealed, there is a little optimism in Russia that the end of the war is in sight.

Tatyana, a Saint Petersburg businesswoman in her 60s who declined to give her full name to avoid backlash, blames Russia for the war but believes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s European allies have pushed him into prolonging the fighting.

“My God, what has the world come to when the only person who seems to be acting rationally in this situation is Trump, who is absolutely insane by his very nature?” she asked.

“Now the situation is much worse for everyone. A decision still needs to be made, but on the battlefield, the advantage is clearly on Russia’s side, which the crude American generals understand as well as anyone else.”

On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced that Russian troops had finally taken the strategic city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, ending a two-year siege. While Ukraine denied the city had fallen, its forces have struggled in recent months to halt Russia’s advance in several regions.

Among the proposed terms of an agreement being floated are that Ukraine should withdraw its troops from the parts of the Donbas region as yet unoccupied by Russia, which will become a neutral demilitarised zone but internationally recognised as Russian territory. Meanwhile, the Crimean Peninsula as well as the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, which have been under Russian or pro-Russian control since 2014, will be recognised as Russia as well. Ukraine’s armed forces are to be capped at 600,000 personnel, and Ukraine must abandon any aspirations of joining NATO, but its bid for EU membership will be considered.

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In return, Russia must promise not to invade any more European countries, which must be enshrined in its law. There is also a proposed amnesty for war crimes.

Last week, Putin acknowledged the plan “can be the basis for future agreements”, but added, “If Ukrainian troops leave the territories they occupy, then we will stop fighting. If they don’t, we will achieve our aims militarily.”

Over the weekend, Ukrainian negotiators reiterated to their US counterparts that giving up any territory was not on the table, sources told RBC-Ukraine.

Can Russia fight on for years?

“Putin perfectly understands that Ukraine is running out of time,” Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev, based in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera.

“Therefore, Putin is very confident in everything. He has time. He can fight for a year or two. The problem is rather with the West [and its will to fight]. Therefore, yes, he is ready to delay, not until Ukraine is tired and gives up, [but] until his conditions are met.”

Before Tuesday’s meeting, Putin upped the ante with a threat to Europe.

He warned that while Russia is not planning a war with Europe, “if Europe wants to and starts, we are ready right now”.

Budraitskis at the University of California, Berkeley said, “[Putin] will be preparing for this, just like before 2022, when he said that Russia was not going to attack Ukraine, implying the opposite”.

Despite their different outlooks, Inozemtsev and Baranovsky agree that Russia is capable of sustaining its war effort indefinitely.

“To keep fighting for years, at such an intensity, is not a problem at all,” said Inozemtsev.

“There were more problems at the beginning of the war than now, because we saw at the beginning of the war they needed mobilisation; now they pay them a fairly high salary and [new volunteers] are constantly enlisting. Additionally, they had problems with weapons, and especially active commentators wrote they will run out of shells in three months. In fact, munitions are being produced now more actively than before the war.”

Inozemtsev believes that now, “the Americans are very determined to either end this war or completely withdraw from any support for Ukraine.”

“I think that this has now been clearly conveyed to Kyiv,” he said. “And therefore, the Ukrainians will be in some way persuaded … the Ukrainians understand that the Europeans will not save them. In the sense that if now the Americans completely get out of this process, then, of course, Europe will have neither money, nor the determination to constantly support this cause for years.”

A deal could still be in Ukraine’s interest, Inozemtsev noted.

“If they are able to guarantee themselves 600,000 for the army and a break for at least a few years, then, in fact, this is the solution to the problem,” he said.

“Putin will always be a threat [and so] the main task of the West is to outlive [73-year-old] Putin. If there’s a break in the fighting for three to five years, then this is already nearing the end of his life, which naturally makes him less decisive.”

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Any potential peace deal and the lifting of sanctions will be beneficial to the Russian economy, but Inozemtsev and Budraitskis doubt that life will return to how it was before 2022. Society will remain heavily militarised and tightly-controlled, they predicted.

“There can be no peace, no return to a normal situation in which all these measures that correspond to a full-fledged repressive totalitarian dictatorship will be abolished, because we no longer have any direct external threat,” Budraitskis said.

“This is the design of Putin’s regime in Russia, how his power is arranged, that there is an endless war, where Russian elites are consolidated under the flag, there is repression against any dissenters inside the country… These are not some kind of extraordinary measures temporarily introduced only in wartime, but this is how he will continue to rule.”

He added that “war in any form” against Ukraine, Europe, the Baltic states or “anyone” is an integral motif of the “normality that Putin established” in Russia after 2022.

“Therefore, there will be a continuation of the war on different fronts in order for this regime to remain,” he predicted.

Some Russians have settled for the long haul already.

“Until America withdraws its occupation troops from the EU, the war will not end,” said Sergey Kalenik, a media consultant from Moscow.