Limited wars end in negotiations. Therefore, unless the Russo-Ukraine conflict takes a calamitous turn that engulfs us all, jaw jaw, as Winston Churchill said, will replace war war.

It is also true that the Kremlin needs a route out, otherwise its options are to retreat or escalate. The first is unlikely and the second dangerous. This is not appeasement, but realism. However, it must be tempered with a hard understanding of the hazards involved. The most significant is that, despite its performance in battle, Ukraine risks losing the peace. It is therefore vital to understand Russian thinking, and I worry that naïve Western governments do not.

The Kremlin treats ceasefires and negotiations as a part of conflict, not as something separate from it. They are highly skilled at hostile negotiations based on the use of aggression and power. In the Russian original, the ‘Kremlin School of Negotiation’ often has the word zhestkii – harsh or forceful – attached to it. It is a theory of negotiation based around manipulation, deprecation, flattery, uncertainty – and threat.

The Kremlin will try to split Ukrainian negotiators over Kyiv’s aims and red lines. They will do this to cause internal stress, both in Ukraine’s political leadership but in the armed forces as well, aimed to damage Ukraine’s martial spirit: “why fight if our leaders are selling us out?”

Ceasefires are clearly welcome but they will also present danger. The Kremlin will undoubtably use any pause in fighting to rotate forces, bring in tens of thousands of mercenaries currently being recruited, and to resupply.

If the Kremlin does not get what it wants, or thinks it can get more, it will suddenly make additional demands, feigning outrage based on an artificial pretext or provocation, and re-ignite a new phase of the conflict which it was planning all along. This has happened before in the sub-tropical region of Abkhazia in Georgia in the early 1990s where ceasefires and resupply were methodically used by the Kremlin as staging posts to victory. They will escalate up, take repeated concessions and then push for more, using psychological dominance and the threat of more bloodshed.

This is Vladimir Putin’s war, but naivety in misreading his intentions emboldened him. More Western naivety now will continue the war. At any ceasefire, Western arms must continue to flow into Ukraine at the maximum rate. Until peace is secured, we must assume that any pause is just that, a pause, not a cessation, of hostilities. This sounds callous. It is not. If the Kremlin plans to break any future ceasefires, it is they who will be overwhelmed on the break of that ceasefire. That must be made clear. After thousands of dead Ukrainian citizens, we need to end any illusions over the Kremlin’s morality.

A realistic and hard-headed approach now will help force the Kremlin to talk. If you want peace, prepare for war. Yes, Putin needs a route out, but not one that provides a victory that his forces failed to win on the battlefield, or enables future wars by disarming Ukraine now so that Putin can bleed it into submission using a series of small wars over the coming years.

Kyiv is winning the war, but it must also win the peace – and true peace will only come with a state that Ukrainians can defend. Our support to Kyiv must be realistic, but it must not sell Ukraine out.