The Offer Ukraine’s Allies Shouldn’t Make

Vladislav Inozemtsev, a new fellow at Chatham House, published a column with a telling title: “Ukraine’s allies should make an offer to Russians before September’s ‘elections’.” The gist of the offer is this: Russians vote against Putin’s United Russia party in the upcoming September parliamentary elections, in exchange for a halt to strikes on Russian energy infrastructure. The idea sounds bold and is presented as low-cost and “sophisticated,” but on closer inspection, it proves deeply problematic.

In essence, it asks Ukraine to give up a working lever of pressure on Russia at the very moment it has begun to produce measurable results, while getting nothing in return. That is not the only problem. Below, I highlight the most serious of them.

Erasing Ukraine’s Agency

In Inozemtsev’s proposed arrangement, the parties are the Russian population and Ukraine’s allies, who are supposed to “ensure that Ukraine terminates its attacks on energy infrastructure.” This phrasing turns Ukraine into the object of a promise made by others, rather than a party to the offer itself, separating it from Europe and the west, and rendering its own strategic interests an afterthought.

The offer asks Ukraine to give up a working lever of pressure on Russia at the very moment it has begun to produce measurable results, while getting nothing in return.

In other words, Inozemtsev operates from a “Russia first” premise. It reflects a projection of geopolitical determinism that prioritises normalising relations with Russia at the expense of its neighbours’ security. The list of evidence for how poorly this approach has worked is long: the 2008 Bucharest NATO summit; the west’s tepid response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia that same year; Barack Obama’s 2009 “reset” with Moscow; the deepening energy dependence on Russia through the Nord Stream pipelines; and, more recently, Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine into unacceptable concessions. Little suggests that repeating the same pattern yet again will produce a different result.

Ukraine Gets Nothing

Under Inozemtsev’s proposal, Ukraine pays a concrete, immediate price — halting strikes on Russian energy infrastructure — but the text never explains what it gets in return. Russia, for its part, is asked to give up nothing real: no reciprocal pause in its own strikes, no commitment to enter talks. All the author asks for is an illusory, hypothetical electoral signal from a Russian population that has no real agency.

Structurally, this is the same logic of unequal exchange as the Budapest Memorandum: something concrete and real is traded for something ephemeral, with no enforcement mechanism attached. But even that comparison is too generous to Inozemtsev’s proposal. Back in 1994, Ukraine at least received — on paper, and ultimately unenforced — assurances of territorial integrity and sovereignty from the signatories. Under Inozemtsev’s initiative, Ukraine will be owed nothing at all.

Wrong Signal

Once it became clear that the Russian “special military operation” had turned into a protracted war of attrition, the Kremlin bet on outlasting its opponents. Moscow is convinced that whoever can endure the costs longer will win the war, and the Kremlin is banking on the west blinking first and asking for talks. As far back as the summer of 2022, when discussing the prospects of New START negotiations, deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev described relations with the United States as entirely frozen and argued that Moscow should not be the one to thaw them. He expected Washington itself to “come running or crawling” and ask for negotiations, so that it would then treat the resulting talks as a rare favour. Any move by Russia towards the US, in his telling, would look like weakness.

Within this framework, a public offer to halt strikes on Russian oil refineries that asks in fact nothing of the Kremlin in return would be read in Moscow as a sign that Ukraine’s allies can no longer sustain their support at current levels. The mere fact that such an “offer” appeared in public would reinforce the Kremlin’s confidence that its strategy is working.

Widespread Anti-Western Distrust

The idea of using elections in Russia’s authoritarian system as a channel and indicator of protest is not new. Alexei Navalny’s team pursued a similar logic through its “Smart Voting” strategy, urging Russians in the 2019–21 local and 2021 parliamentary elections to vote for any candidate with a realistic shot at winning, as long as it wasn’t the United Russia nominee. The effect turned out to be quite limited. According to experts, Smart Voting’s endorsement added only about 5% to a candidate’s result. Many of the strategy’s ‘winners’, moreover, turned out to be not genuine opposition figures but representatives of loyalist parties such as the Communist Party or the LDPR, while a number of the ‘independent’ candidates were quietly Kremlin-aligned.

A public offer that asks in fact nothing would be read in Moscow as a sign that Ukraine’s allies can no longer sustain their support.

Part of the problem was deep public distrust of whoever was making the pitch. Even with Navalny’s considerable name recognition in Moscow, his unfavourability rating remained extremely high, at 61%. One of the most effective tools Kremlin-controlled media used to damage his image was branding him a “State Department agent” acting on “western orders.” The label worked because it drew on a view of the west that was already deeply negative in the Russian public mind. Wartime conditions have only reinforced that perception. According to Levada Center polling, 66% of Russians believe relations with western countries will always be defined by distrust. Coming explicitly from the west, Inozemtsev’s offer is thus an even weaker bet than Smart Voting.

Dismantling a Working Lever

In recent months, Ukraine has sharply escalated its strikes on Russian energy infrastructure. According to Poland’s Rochan Consulting, at least 194 successful strikes on Russian oil refineries have been recorded since the start of 2026 — eleven times more than over the same period last year. The Financial Times estimates that more than 40% of Russia’s nominal refining capacity has been knocked out.

This has created real problems for the Russian economy. In June 2026, gasoline prices in Russia rose by 19.9%, and fuel shortages have been reported in most Russian regions and occupied territories. The Russian government has been forced to tighten export restrictions and has even announced fuel imports to keep domestic prices in check. The Institute for the Study of War separately notes that the strikes on refineries are also affecting Russian military logistics.

These Ukrainian successes appear to have made an impression on the US administration. Even Donald Trump, whose diplomacy has been built around “swift deals” with the Kremlin and pressure on Kyiv, has to some extent come to treat the growing impact of Ukrainian drone attacks as a step toward real negotiations. At the NATO summit in Ankara on 8 July, 2026, Trump called the enhanced strikes on Russian refineries and military facilities “an escalation that can help lead to an end” of the war. Against this backdrop, Inozemtsev’s proposal to trade away a working lever of influence for a condition he himself rates as having “negligible” odds of success is difficult to explain.

An Inconsistent Analysis

Inozemtsev’s text is internally contradictory. He offers a detailed and persuasive account of just how closed and tightly controlled Russia’s electoral system is, concluding that the outcome will simply be whatever the Kremlin wants it to be. Against this, he sets little more than his own belief that a message from abroad can trigger political change inside Russia. But if the election result is determined by the Kremlin regardless of how people vote, then trying to influence the vote through an outside message has little chance of making a difference. At the very least, one would expect a comparable precedent from a similarly authoritarian system, but the column offers none.

Notably, the optimism about Russian society underlying Inozemtsev’s proposal contradicts his own, much earlier diagnosis. In a landmark 2010 essay, Inozemtsev described Russian society in unambiguous terms as structurally incapable of self-organisation, lacking shared goals or a unifying purpose. At the time, he placed his faith only in top-down modernisation led by an enlightened leader, Dmitry Medvedev, whom he called “unquestionably the most sensible person on Putin’s team.”

It’s worth noting that Inozemtsev wrote this during a comparatively mild period, when independent media still existed, and foreign travel and information flowed freely. Although conditions for collective electoral action in Russia have only deteriorated over the sixteen years since, Inozemtsev now makes a considerably more optimistic bet on that same population’s capacity for coordinated protest voting. By this logic, each further step in Russia’s authoritarian consolidation should make his diagnosis even more optimistic, so that the more complete that consolidation becomes, the more convinced Inozemtsev should be that Russian society is ready for democracy.

To sum up, Inozemtsev’s initiative is essentially a one-sided concession, devised without Ukraine and only for Ukraine to pay for, in exchange for an ephemeral condition. Notably, he is also at odds with the position of his own Chatham House colleague, John Lough, who argued in November 2025 that Ukraine’s best defence lies in intensifying its strikes on Russian oil refining. Inozemtsev, by contrast, now proposes turning a halt to those strikes into a bargaining chip for pseudo-influence over the outcome of elections to a parliament that has long ceased to be a place for actual decision-making, or even genuine debate. And at what point does this Sisyphean pursuit of a “Russia first” accommodation stop being mistaken for a viable strategy?

Views expressed in ICDS publications are those of the author(s).