“What war does is it basically teaches you lessons,” said Andrew Kydd, a UW–Madison professor of political science. “War teaches the hard lesson that one or possibly both sides have overestimated their chance of winning and underestimated the cost of fighting.”
Three years after Russia invaded Ukraine, the war there continues its bloody grind, with hundreds of thousands of casualties sacrificed for incremental changes in the front lines. But the conflict entered a new phase in 2025, as U.S. leaders have begun to pressure Ukraine by threatening to cut off support, adding to the war’s hard lessons.
On March 11, the UW Now Live hosted a conversation about the Ukraine war, with Kydd and political science professor Yoshiko Herrera joining host Mike Knetter of the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association. Kydd and Herrera are both members of the UW’s Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia, which studies the history and politics of the countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union.
Both guests noted that the conflict has been harder and bloodier than anyone expected and that while a ceasefire might happen anytime, the prospects for lasting peace are slim.
Kydd, who specializes in the study of bargaining theory, laid out the four possible directions that the situation may move in: continued fighting, temporary ceasefire, armistice, and peace treaty. A peace treaty — that is, a permanent peace and normalizing of relations — “is unlikely in the present Ukrainian-Russian case because both sides still have very maximal goals, and neither side wants to compromise in principle on these goals.”
However, he thinks a temporary ceasefire or even an armistice — an indefinite cessation of fighting without any formalized agreement between Russia and Ukraine — is possible. “The fact that the two sides don’t trust each other doesn’t mean an armistice can’t be signed,” he said. “In fact, I would say that armistices usually get signed in precisely those conditions.”
The chief obstacle to that, however, may not be Ukraine, as President Donald Trump has suggested, but rather Russia. “Russia’s policy is very uncertain at this point,” Kydd said. “There’s no sign of [Russia accepting a ceasefire] yet in the Russian media.”
Herrera added that Ukrainians might reject a ceasefire because the conflict has increased their sense of national identity. Among Ukrainians, opposition to Vladimir Putin’s Russia has grown stronger since February 2022.
“Ukraine, number one, wants to maintain its statehood, and it wants to be an independent democratic state,” she said. “It does not want to live under Putin’s rule. It wants to be able to have elections to choose leaders and to have rule of law. [Ukrainians] don’t want to be under a personalistic dictatorship. And I think Ukrainians now acutely understand the dangers of living under a dictatorship like Putin’s.”
She described the status of the war and said that both Russia and Ukraine face difficult obstacles. Russia still occupies a great deal of Ukrainian territory, and Ukraine wants all of it back. Russia has formally annexed parts of Ukraine, including land that it hasn’t taken and hasn’t been able to wrest from Ukrainian control. The battle lines have changed little in the last year, but Herrera was reluctant to describe the conflict as a stalemate.
“There was a lot of fighting, a lot of action, a lot of destruction going on,” she said. And “even though the battle lines along the front are relatively similar to what they were a year ago or even two years ago, there have been some really important changes. The biggest change obviously, is the new U.S. administration, the Trump administration.”
Herrera then described the Trump administration’s efforts to change the state of the war, including threatening to cut off military and intelligence support and pressuring Ukraine into signing a deal to give the U.S. access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals. These efforts have come without input from European governments, and the biggest change in the war might not be between Russia and Ukraine but between the U.S. and its European allies.
“There has been sort of an earthquake in European capitals with regard to reliance on U.S. support for their security,” she said. “It’s not a new position that the United States has asked European states to pay more for their defense to contribute more to NATO. Indeed, this was an explicit demand by President Trump, even from his first administration. But what’s different was the speech Vice President J. D. Vance gave in Munich, in which [he] embraced far right parties, especially within Germany. These things have awakened Europeans to the idea that they are not necessarily able to rely on the United States.”
