Timothy K. Blauvelt
In the spring of the fifth year of Russia’s war in Ukraine, amid indications that Russia is losing momentum on a battlefield that has transformed into a drone-dominated “kill zone” and at a time when the Ukrainian Armed Forces are demonstrating an increasing capacity for deep strikes within Russia, the 34th Assembly of the Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy took place in Lesnye Dali outside of Moscow on May 22–24, 2026, under the banner of “Time of Decisions: Russia in an Irreversibly Changed World.” The council, known by its Russian acronym SVOP, is considered one of Russia’s leading foreign policy organizations and serves as the a convener of the Valdai Discussion Club. The SVOP annual assemblies bring Russia’s top foreign policy analysts and influential figures from academia and industry together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government officials to discuss sensitive issues in Russia’s international relations in the Chatham House Rule format, under which participants can disseminate the contents in a general form without attribution, and recordings and transcripts are not permitted.
An exception to the Rule was the address to a plenary session of the Assembly by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on May 23. Lavrov observed that “our friends, our neighbors, and our adversaries and enemies are paying close attention to how things are going in the special military operation,” using the official Russian term for the war in Ukraine, abbreviated in Russian as SVO. “The first order task of our diplomacy,” Lavrov continued, “is to do everything in order to create the essential conditions on our front of action, conditions to allow for the maximally effective, triumphant and result-bearing actions of our servicemen in the SVO.” Lavrov emphasized the important role of policy experts in the war effort, referring to those present at the assembly as “in the circle of those with colossal experience and who work to achieve the goals of the SVO,” such that “this should be called a special military operation of political scientists – SVOP,” a play on the organization’s name that received much attention in the Russian press.
Maintaining his typically hard-line stance, Lavrov referred to the war as one of “aggression of Ukraine against Russia prepared by the West, followed by the continued attempt to weaken our country and displace it from among the key world players.” “Only fulfilling all of the goals of the special military operation,” Lavrov asserted, “will allow Russia to increase its influence in the whole world, the attractiveness of Russia as a civilization, as a partner and comrade who always fulfills that which to which it has agreed.”
According to the reports on the assembly, however, the most gripping and actively discussed session was a debate held the previous day, on May 22, about whether Russia should continue its war in Ukraine or instead cut its losses and agree to a settlement. Entitled “Will to Peace or Will to Victory? Society and War,” the panel of six experts was split into two teams, for and against continuing the war.
The starting point for the discussion appears to have been a recent article by one of the panel participants, Higher School of Economics professor Vasily Kashin, in the SVOP-associated journal, Russia in Global Politics, on May 21 entitled “The Iron Prose of Reality.” Kashin in the past has been an outspoken supporter of the war, arguing that Russian victory is inevitable, and the Canadian government has sanctioned him.
In this new article, which has received international attention, Kashin maintains that the invasion was necessary to prevent Ukraine from becoming an even larger threat to Russia in the future with greater economic potential. He then argues that, given the changed nature of the war and the absence of offensive maneuver, further mobilizations or greater manpower would be useless, as “there is no basis to expect any time soon the advent of technical capabilities or tactical approaches that would allow for a significant breakthrough.” The goal of “liquidating the anti-Russian regime” in Ukraine is now “fundamentally unobtainable without a full military occupation of the country (including its western part) for an extended period,” which “for Russia is technically impossible in the context of the special military operation.” Russia also lacks the capacity to control large territories of Ukraine that might be annexed to Russia “in the case of a hypothetical collapse of the Ukrainian front,” given their economic ruination and an “extremely hostile population.” Moscow could have only realized such a goal through the success of the originally conceived “bloodless and lightning special operation, which apparently is why the Russian leadership took this gigantic risk.” Nonnuclear escalation by systemic targeting of Ukraine’s governmental agencies and leadership, including President Zelensky, would be possible, although as the recent example of the US war with Iran shows, it would not result in the achievement of Russia’s war aims. The Ukrainian state apparatus has already long been a target, and succession plans are in place that could result in “new, younger, energetic and radicalized replacements.” Nuclear escalation is also “not a means to qualitatively attain the results of the special military operation.”
The war in Ukraine, in Kashin’s view, “is an element of our broader confrontation with Europe and (to a lesser extent) with the U.S.,” and as such it is an obstacle to the necessary rebuilding of Russia’s industry, technological base, and military “for the general strategy of the confrontation” with Europe in the future. “It is not in our interests,” Kashin concludes, “to endlessly burn through these resources over Malaia Tokmachka in the name of imagined goals.”
According to a description of the SVOP debate by political scientist Sergei Tsypliayev, Kashin’s topics and arguments appear to have been central to the session. The “pro continuation” team held that a Russian victory in the war is essential for future generations, that the Ukrainian side will not hold to any agreements reached, and that Russia can achieve its goals only through military means. The “pro cessation” team brought up several points, the first—most likely argued by Foundation for Societal Opinion head Larisa Pautova—was that the war is causing an increase in anxiety and social problems at home and that support in Russia for continuing the fighting is decreasing. The second point, reflecting Kashin’s points, was that the war must stop because it is draining Russia’s resources ahead of a future confrontation with a strengthening Europe. As with President Truman’s decision to sack General MacArthur rather than engage in all-out war with China over Korea, the war in Ukraine for Russia “is not the right war, not the right adversary, and not the right time.” Continuing military action against Ukraine leads only to the bolstering of the European military economic bloc and to the exhausting of Russian forces ahead of an inevitable future confrontation. In Tsypliayev’s recounting, the discussion became heated “as passions boiled over,” resulting in accusations of treason and “of working for the enemy” being thrown around before the session was ended.
Nevertheless, as Tsypliayev also pointed out, the session demonstrated that Russia’s foreign policy community now expresses significant differences in opinion: “If in the past 2–3 years anyone suggesting ending the war would have been ostracized, now a so-called honorable end to the conflict gets wide airing and becomes the topic of serious discussion.” Of note, the strongest arguments in this session for halting the war were made not in the name of humanitarian interests or in recognition of flaws in Russia’s war aims or policy outlook, but rather because continuing the war obstructs Russia’s capacity to prepare for a future, larger-scale conflict with Europe and the West. Those calling for such a provisional peace also seem to take for granted that any such agreement would be based on what the Russian media refers to as the “spirit of Anchorage,” a settlement on Russian terms that neither the West nor the Ukrainians has actually accepted. In any case, another participant in the session, philosopher and political scientist Boris Mezhuyev, later argued on his Telegram channel that the “party of escalation” appears to be in the ascendancy in the Russian expert community.
Ultimately, while it is surely of interest that such heated discussions are occurring in elite foreign policy forums such as SVOP, given Russia’s “vertical” power structure, it is questionable whether opposing views can affect policy or change minds at the level of policy making. As one of the participants of the session, Sergei Poletayev, observed on May 23 in a post on his “Vatfor” blog on Telegram, “as the result of countless discussions I understand that there is not a party of negotiators and a party of non-negotiators, there are only those who are sure that we can achieve nothing more in Ukraine and those who are sure of the opposite.” In the end, Poletayev concludes, “our higher leadership—Putin, [Chief of the General Staff Valery] Gerasimov, and Lavrov belong to the second, that is, they start from the idea that a decisive success can be achieved in Ukraine by military force, and they base their decisions and actions on that conviction.” Still, even in highly centralized systems, leaders’ positions can change as circumstances evolve. The views expressed in the SVOP debate may shed light on the range of alternatives currently under consideration in the halls of power.
Keywords: Russia-Ukraine War, Russian foreign policy, think tanks, Russian military thought, strategy, threat perceptions
Timothy K. Blauvelt
Timothy K. Blauvelt holds a PhD in political science from the University at Buffalo. He was based in Eurasia for nearly a quarter century, serving as professor of Soviet and post-Soviet studies at Ilia State University in Georgia and as regional director for the South Caucasus for American Councils for International Education. In May 2026, he became the research professor of Russia and Eurasia studies at the Army War College. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and several coedited volumes, including Georgia After Stalin: Nationalism and Soviet Power (Routledge, 2016), The Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic of 1918 (Routledge, 2021), and Reconsidering the Political in Soviet History (Routledge, forthcoming 2027). His monograph, Clientelism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba (Routledge, 2021), has also been published in translation in Georgian and Russian.
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