Here is the deal Europe has put on the table. Stop fighting, and we will put French and British soldiers on Ukrainian soil to make sure you never start again.
Read that once more, slowly, from the Kremlin’s side of the desk.
The single thing Vladimir Putin wants least in this world is Western troops stationed permanently inside Ukraine. And the only way that happens is if he agrees to a ceasefire. So the prize for stopping is the outcome he has spent four years and several hundred thousand lives trying to prevent.
That is not a deterrent. That is an incentive to keep going.
🎲 The commitment problem
Game theorists have a tidy name for this: the credible commitment problem. A threat only works if the other side believes you will carry it out, and if carrying it out costs them something before they have already conceded.
The Coalition of the Willing, co-chaired by Paris and London, has 26 countries pledged to deploy forces “the day after” a ceasefire. It has held war games on Ukraine’s borders. It has signed declarations of intent. Its co-chairs issued a statement in July 2026 calling, once again, for an immediate ceasefire.
What it has not done is impose a single cost on Moscow for saying no.
Every part of the package is contingent on Putin’s signature. Which means every part of the package is, in practice, his to veto. He does not need to attack the reassurance force. He just needs to never let it exist. Waiting is free.
🚫 No, that does not mean sending the Paras in now
The obvious rejoinder is “well, deploy immediately then.” Tempting, and wrong.
The force being planned is a reassurance mission for western Ukraine: guarding ports, power plants and cities behind a ceasefire line. It is not an expeditionary army, and nobody in Whitehall or the Élysée has costed one. Putting British and French battalions into an active war against a nuclear power is a different proposition entirely, and it hands Moscow exactly the “NATO invasion” story its propaganda has been begging for since 2022. Kaja Kallas called it a Russian trap early on. She was right.
So the fix cannot be to move the troops earlier. The fix has to be to make not stopping expensive, and to make the expense automatic.
⚙️ Build a ratchet
Think of a ratchet: it turns one way and never slips back.
Pre-agree a ladder of responses and tie each rung to a category of Russian behaviour. Ratify it once. Then nobody votes again. The Kremlin does something, the mechanism does the next thing, and the only way back down the ladder is verified de-escalation.
The individual measures are mostly things Europe is already arguing about. The novelty is taking the argument out of the loop. Two examples show how it would bite.
🏭 Rung one: Aughinish
On the Shannon estuary in County Limerick sits the Aughinish Alumina refinery, the largest in Europe. It is owned by Rusal, which the Swedish tax authority has concluded is still controlled by Oleg Deripaska despite the 2019 “sanctions deal” that was supposed to change that. Aughinish alumina feeds Rusal smelters. OCCRP and iStories traced Rusal metal into Rostec’s supply chain, which is to say into Russian munitions.
I wrote about all this in May. Ireland has kept Aughinish outside every sanctions package on the grounds that it employs several hundred people and that its output is not, technically, a weapon. Fine. Every exemption is a political choice, and a choice can be made conditional.
In a ratchet, the Aughinish carve-out is a rung. A confirmed hybrid attack on European infrastructure, a severed Baltic cable, a sabotaged German rail line, a GRU arson job in a Polish warehouse, and the exemption lapses. Automatically. Dublin does not get a second vote, because Dublin cast its vote when the ladder was ratified.
Moscow then has a choice it currently does not face: keep the sabotage campaign running, or keep the alumina flowing. Today it gets both.
🚀 Rung two: Taurus
Germany has 600 Taurus cruise missiles. Ukraine first asked for them in May 2023. Three chancellors and defence ministers later, in July 2026, Boris Pistorius ruled out delivery again, this time on the grounds that Ukraine’s own drones are doing the job.
Whatever you think of the decision, notice its shape. For three years the Kremlin has been able to price Taurus at zero, because delivery depends on the mood in Berlin and the mood in Berlin has always, in the end, been no. Friedrich Merz campaigned on delivering it. He has not delivered it. Every time Russia has escalated, the answer has been a new debate rather than a new missile.
In a ratchet, Taurus stops being a debate and becomes a threshold. A defined volume of drones and missiles fired at Ukrainian cities in a calendar month, or a single mass-casualty strike on civilian infrastructure, and the transfer happens. The Bundestag ratified it once; the Bundeswehr executes. The Kremlin’s own launch tally becomes the trigger.
That is a very different piece of information for a Russian targeting officer to hold. The weapon he is trying to keep out of Ukrainian hands is delivered by his own strike planning.
🗳️ Why it keeps not happening
Because the votes are the problem.
Every EU sanctions package, and the Union is on its twenty-second(?), is negotiated from scratch and needs unanimity. Back in 2014 the bloc actually tried a semi-automatic mechanism, where measures would pass unless a member state objected. One did. The deadline slipped. Moscow noticed.
The pieces of a ratchet exist in fragments. Washington’s Sanctioning Russia Act would fire if Moscow refuses good-faith talks or breaks a signed deal, but it is a single switch, not a ladder. The UK sanctions the GRU when it catches it sabotaging things, as one-offs. A recent policy paper even recommends “pre-announced tiers of escalation” with automatic triggers that keep running after any ceasefire.
Nobody has bolted these together into one mechanism. A published, categorised ladder that says: this act, this consequence, no further debate.
🐕 The bit Putin understands
Moscow is very good at reading process. It knows a threat that requires 27 governments to agree next month is not a threat, it is a suggestion. It knows that a troop deployment conditional on its own consent is a deployment it can cancel by doing nothing.
What it cannot game is a clock it does not control. Costs that rise on a schedule, triggered by its own actions, ratified once and never again, are the only version of European leverage that does not depend on Putin choosing to be leveraged.
Until then, “troops after the ceasefire” is a lovely sentence. It is also a reason to make sure there is never a ceasefire.
Good post.
There's another ratchet: the impounded central bank funds. There are reasons to keep it's future unresolved. But pay it to Ukraine in monthly automatic installments, perhaps as reparations.
Now there's a new cost to prolonging the war for Russia. The slow drum beat of pressure takes away the chip. At the moment of a negotiated peace the Ukrainians & EU might agree to release the funds rather than continue the war. The money puts time on Russia's side. Taking it all at once removes it as a chip for peace and creates obstacles. But it'll still be there in 2 years if the fighting continues.
Put in a mechanism so it pauses automatically during a ceasefire.
The invasion is sustained by 8k glide bombs a month. Delivered using weapons that the Russians don't currently have the capability to replace. What happens to the invasion if it that's off the board?