Putin's Three-Day Favour

On the evening of 5 September 2026 the American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner sat down with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, and the meeting ran for more than three hours. Before it began, the Russian president made a point of telling his guests that Kyiv had not been struck since midnight. It was offered as a gesture of good faith, and much of the reporting that followed described it as a ceasefire. It was not a ceasefire. It was a decision to stop hitting one city for three days, taken for the duration of a visit, and everything that lay outside that narrow line continued exactly as before.

The distinction matters more than it might appear, because the shape of the pause tells us a great deal about how Russia understands the war, what it is willing to trade, and what it is not.

What was actually agreed

The sequence is worth setting out carefully, because the different accounts have been used to support very different conclusions.

On 4 September, ahead of the American visit, President Volodymyr Zelensky proposed a truce in the air. His offer was reciprocal and specific. Ukraine would refrain from striking Moscow from that moment until the end of Monday, and it expected Russia to do the same with regard to Kyiv. Russia did not accept those terms. During the night of 5 September Russian forces struck across Ukraine with ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones, killing at least five people, and they hit the airports at Kyiv and Boryspil. Zelensky read those strikes as a deliberate signal about the possibility of the American delegation flying into Ukraine, which would have been the first arrival of a foreign official by air since the invasion began.

Only on the afternoon of 5 September did the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirm the pause, and his wording was precise. Putin had instructed that no strikes be carried out against Kyiv for three days from midnight, and this was connected to the preparation and conduct of the American meetings in the capital. Putin himself later told Witkoff that Ukraine had published its call for a wider ceasefire but that Russia had never discussed it with the Ukrainian side, and that Russia had not agreed to any pause longer than three days.

The Ukrainian side described the position in almost the same terms from the opposite direction. The presidential communications adviser Dmytro Lytvyn said that the proposal had been passed to Russia but that no actual ceasefire had taken place. The General Staff, speaking through the government’s Centre for Strategic Communications, said that a ceasefire cannot be unilateral or asymmetrical, and that the tasks of the defensive operation were being carried out in full.

There was also a period of genuine confusion on the Ukrainian side, which is worth recording honestly. An influential Telegram channel reported a Ukrainian order for a seventy two hour ceasefire from midnight on 5 September, yet no other outlet confirmed it, individual units reported receiving no such order, and Russian strikes continued through the night. It remains unclear whether an order existed. What is clear is that nothing observable stopped except strikes on Kyiv.

So the true content of the arrangement was this. One capital was granted three quiet days because foreign guests were coming to it. Kamianske in Dnipropetrovsk region was hit with eight ballistic missiles, and large fires broke out at the Kametstal metallurgical plant. The Kyiv region outside the city continued to be attacked, and two people were killed there on the same day. Drone strikes went on elsewhere, including against a parked aircraft at Zhulyany and against the office of the acting head of the Ukrainian security service. A pause that protects the venue of a negotiation while the rest of the country remains under fire is not a step toward peace. It is a demonstration of control over the tap.

The decision that came first

The three days should be read against a decision that Putin announced only four days earlier, and which has not been withdrawn.

On 1 September, speaking after the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, Putin said that the Russian armed forces had been instructed to prepare and carry out massive strikes against Ukraine’s energy facilities, and that he had given the order himself. He presented it as a response to Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries and civilian infrastructure. On the same trip he claimed that Russian troops were twelve kilometres from the Sumy ring road and that Sviatohirsk had been captured. Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation pointed out that in June he had given the same distance as ten and a half kilometres, that Sviatohirsk had not fallen, and that Sumy has no ring road. A similar pattern appeared around Kozacha Lopan in Kharkiv region, which Russian sources declared captured and which the Ukrainian 14th Army Corps says remains under Ukrainian control amid heavy fighting.

The order to strike the energy system therefore sits in the background of the Kremlin meeting, unrevoked. Independent monitoring of Russian bomber movements suggests that the package was being assembled while the envoys were in the air. By 5 September there were reported to be three Tu-160M and six Tu-95MS aircraft armed with cruise missiles at Ukrainka airbase in the Far East, which is the number normally associated with a large combined attack. The expectation among observers was that the attack had not been cancelled but postponed by a few days.

This is the pattern that has defined the last month. Escalation is decided first, and then paused briefly and reversibly when there is something to be gained from the pause.

Why Russia is choosing to escalate

The reasoning behind that choice appears to be domestic rather than strategic in any conventional sense.

Russia’s army has been effectively stalemated for years, and the war has settled into a contest of drones and missiles that damages both countries. Yet the Kremlin is not looking for an exit. Reporting from people close to the Russian leadership indicates that Putin spent several weeks over the summer weighing his options and decided to escalate. There are signs that he read the unexpected arrival of the CIA director John Ratcliffe in Moscow on 25 August as evidence of American weakness rather than as a warning. Russian accounts say that Ratcliffe came to argue that Russia’s military and economic position was worsening and that a deal now would serve Moscow better than waiting, that he met the heads of the foreign intelligence service and the security service, and that Putin then declined to see him at all once the purpose of the visit was understood. A proposal for a three way meeting between Trump, Zelensky and Putin was dismissed by Peskov as an information hoax.

The pressures behind the decision are visible enough. The silent public consent that supported the war has been eroding. Deep Ukrainian drone strikes and internet restrictions have made the war part of ordinary Russian life, the Levada Centre finds that fifty seven per cent of Russians describe the situation as tense, and Putin’s approval rating is falling. The mood among the elite is reported to be worse, with the dominant complaint being that nearly five years have been consumed for no result. Putin is said to have told associates at one point that failure to secure the whole of Donbas would end with him being hanged. In a system that tolerates violence but punishes visible failure, simply continuing is not an attractive option, because inertia consumes money and political capital without producing anything to show.

What escalation means in practice is mostly more of what is already happening. Within Ukraine it means heavier strikes on energy and logistics. On the ground, Russian sources say Putin is committed to feeding a further three hundred to four hundred thousand men into the fighting, with recruitment handled by regional governments so that any resulting discontent stays local, and the new system is already being tested in Penza. Outside Ukraine it means more hybrid pressure on the countries that supply Kyiv, and Western agencies are concerned about European factories that make weapons for Ukraine. The same agencies judge that Putin does not want a direct confrontation with NATO. Repression at home is being tightened in parallel, which is best understood as a display of strength rather than a response to any real threat.

The winter campaign

The most consequential part of the escalation is the coming attack on Ukraine’s power system, and the balance there has shifted against Kyiv over the past year even though Ukraine has prepared far better than before.

Ukraine’s preparations are real. A programme to harden the grid began in April and is running ahead of schedule, with about half the work finished. The country expects to enter winter with surplus generation capacity, fourteen billion cubic metres of gas in storage, physical protection at key nodes and new private air defence companies supporting the air force. The State Restoration Agency has shielded roughly two dozen of Kyiv’s 110 kilovolt transformers with netting and concrete, having protected none of them before this year, and its director believes the new defences will hold against anything short of a direct missile hit. By December, according to the energy expert Oleksandr Kharchenko, three times more will have been done than in any previous year.

The threat has moved faster. Russian production of ballistic missiles has risen to roughly one hundred a month, against an estimated three a month in 2022, while Ukraine’s stock of interceptors has fallen. Ukraine is seeking an additional three hundred Patriot missiles from partners this winter with no guarantee of receiving them, and domestic interceptor projects are years away. Maxim Timchenko, the chief executive of DTEK, notes that monthly strike records have been set four months running and accepts that a concentrated ballistic attack can destroy any one of the company’s power plants, which are too large to protect fully.

The newer problem is the jet-powered drone. Ukraine had learned to shoot down more than nine in ten of the propeller driven Shahed type, but the jet models fly at up to six hundred kilometres an hour rather than two hundred, and in recent attacks a combination of fighter jets, shoulder launched missiles and automated guns brought down only about thirty per cent of them. They have reached high value targets that ballistic missiles had missed for four years. Russia appears to have solved the production problem by obtaining 3D printing equipment for turbines despite sanctions, and the unit cost has fallen by half or more to somewhere between fifty and seventy thousand dollars. The tactic has changed with the technology. Instead of assembling a large swarm every few nights, Russia now sends one or two jet drones at a time without pause, which keeps air raid alerts sounding almost continuously in Kyiv and exhausts the population without any single spectacular attack.

Kyiv is the weak point. Some substations around the capital have no backups, nor do its connections to the nuclear plants that supply most of its electricity, and the power supply to the water system is vulnerable, which means that a sustained outage would take down sewage and central heating together. Two and a half thousand of the city’s fifteen thousand buildings have no back up source of heat. One senior official expects the capital to be tormented once the frosts arrive.

The war against logistics

Alongside the energy campaign, a second and less reported campaign has been aimed at the movement and storage of goods.

The data assembled by the analyst Clément Molin shows one hundred and forty recorded strikes on Ukrainian warehouses in August, of which more than ninety five were against civilian logistics facilities. The monthly average had been about thirty for sixteen months, then roughly sixty after Ukraine began mid range strikes on Russian logistics, and then one hundred and forty in August. The geography moved too, with Kharkiv region the most targeted between February and June and Kyiv city and region the most targeted in August.

Molin argues that the surge is connected to Ukraine’s own campaign against Russian logistics, including strikes on Wildberries facilities, and that Russia used it as justification for a much larger effort against Ukrainian civilian storage. This is a contested reading. Others point out that Russia has struck warehouses throughout the war and that many of the targets, particularly in Kyiv, have both military and civilian uses. Both things can be true at once. The pattern through this war has been that each side adopts the other’s methods, from fuel truck strikes answered by attacks on filling stations, to Ukrainian drone use answered by mass Russian drone deployment, to Russian fortification lines copied two years later by Ukraine, to Russian strikes on the grid answered by Ukrainian strikes on power supply in occupied areas. What is not in dispute is the effect. Ukraine’s agrarian policy minister Taras Vysotskyi says that around ninety per cent of the country’s modern storage and warehouse capacity has been destroyed, and while he sees no risk of famine, he warns that continued attacks will affect the availability and variety of goods in shops.

There are also signs that the campaign is moving west, with Russian reconnaissance flights reported in the direction of Rivne and Ternopil in early September. Regions that have been comparatively safe for four years should not assume they will remain so.

Donbas is emptying

While attention is on the air war, the region the whole war is nominally about is quietly ceasing to be a place where people live.

Of the Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control, about two thousand five hundred and twenty square kilometres out of roughly four thousand one hundred and thirty are now zones of mandatory evacuation for families with children, which is around sixty one per cent. Combining occupation with mandatory evacuation, about ninety four per cent of the region is either in Russian hands or effectively empty. Measured across Donbas as a whole, roughly ninety seven per cent is occupied or dead, leaving something close to three per cent where ordinary civilian life continues. That remaining sliver contains most of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, the towns of Novodonetske, Cherkaske and Oleksandrivka, and a number of villages. About thirty per cent of Slovyansk and ten per cent of Kramatorsk already fall inside evacuation zones.

The population figures show how quickly this is happening. There are 92,932 civilians left in Ukrainian controlled Donetsk region and none at all in the sliver of Luhansk region still held. In January 2026 the figure was 192,600, so the civilian population has more than halved in eight months and has fallen by nearly forty thousand in the last two. Novodonetske, one of the last two significant liveable towns in the western part of the region, is now under intensified glide bomb and drone attack with the front line still around seventeen kilometres away.

On present trends the remaining areas will be placed under mandatory evacuation in the coming months, and Donetsk region will join Luhansk and Crimea as territory that is either occupied or empty. After nearly thirteen years of war that began in 2014, the end of 2026 may mark the end of Donbas as a functioning part of Ukrainian society. This deserves more attention than it receives, because a settlement that hands Russia the whole of Donbas would be transferring a region that has already lost the population the argument was supposedly about.

The pressure on Russia

None of this means Russia is comfortable, and the financial picture explains part of the urgency.

Oil and gas provide a fifth of Russian budget revenue, and in the first half of 2026 that revenue came to 3.7 trillion roubles, twenty three per cent lower than a year earlier, even though the average oil price used for tax purposes was higher than the budget assumed because of disruption around the Strait of Hormuz. The deficit for the first half alone reached 5.7 trillion roubles, about two and a half per cent of annual output, against a projected 3.8 trillion for the whole year.

A strong currency made this worse, because exporters earn dollars and the budget is written in roubles. The rouble averaged seventy seven to the dollar in the first half against a budget assumption of ninety two, so the government moved on 5 August to increase daily purchases of foreign currency and gold by about a fifth, and the rouble duly weakened to around eighty five by mid month. The finance ministry has also been given the right to borrow above the statutory limit without further approval, and Russian businessmen have been asked to make voluntary contributions to the budget, which have produced 384 billion roubles since the start of the year. Inflation has risen to six per cent, helped by the petrol shortage caused by Ukrainian strikes on refineries, and a weaker rouble will push it higher.

This is a government managing a squeeze rather than one facing collapse. Ukrainian long range strikes are imposing real costs, but the Russian ability to keep fighting is not about to run out, and Western assessments that assume otherwise have been wrong before.

What Europe has concluded

The most significant development of the last month may not be on the battlefield at all, but in how European governments have started to plan.

Sweden is the clearest example, because it has moved further than most. Two years after joining NATO and abandoning two centuries of neutrality, support for Ukraine is so uncontested there that the war barely featured in the campaign for the election of 13 September. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson says he sees no sign that Russia has changed the basic logic behind the war, that Russia wants to conquer Ukraine, and that nobody knows what its aims would be after that. His government has tied Sweden to Ukraine as a long term industrial partner, including Gripen fighter aircraft, and has expanded conscription while deepening ties with its Nordic and Baltic neighbours and with Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland. On the centre left, which polls suggest will win the election, senior figures describe Russia as a long term existential threat and talk about a fifty year commitment to national defence.

The wider picture supports that reading. Finland has asked for Swedish aircraft and ships to help monitor its border for incursions. Germany has publicly blamed Russia for a drone attack at Leipzig airport on 4 August. Romania has destroyed a Russian naval drone that targeted a drilling platform in its waters, and Slovakia has foiled an arson attack on a drone factory. These are small events individually, but together they describe a campaign that is already under way against countries that are not at war.

What worries Stockholm is not only the war but its ending. There is a real fear that a ceasefire would produce a frozen conflict rather than a durable peace, and that European unity, which has held up better than expected, would come under strain as countries further from Russia press for normal relations. There is quieter anxiety about what would happen if Washington sought peace at any price, by restricting the transfer of American weapons and parts, cutting off intelligence, or threatening to withdraw troops from Poland and the Baltic states.

Conclusion

Three days of quiet over one city, granted for the convenience of a meeting and framed by its author as a favour, is the most accurate available summary of where this war stands.

The war is intensifying, because Russia has decided to escalate and has the missiles, the drones and the manpower plan to do it. It is expanding, because the pressure is now being applied to Ukraine’s suppliers and neighbours as well as to Ukraine, and because the strike campaign is moving toward regions that were previously spared. And it is stuck, because neither side can impose a result and both consider defeat worse than continuing.

The diplomacy is real, and the arrival of American envoys in Moscow and Kyiv in the same weekend is not nothing. But the terms on which the pause was granted show what Russia is prepared to concede at this stage, which is a temporary and geographically limited quiet that costs it nothing and can be withdrawn at any moment. The bombers were being loaded while the talks were going on. Until a pause covers the whole country, applies to both sides, and survives the departure of the visitors, it is a piece of stagecraft rather than a step toward the end of the war.