Even among Vladimir Putin’s most trusted officials, the decision to start the war didn’t come easy. The whole of Russia saw how the foreign intelligence chief Sergey Naryshkin’s voice broke when the president demanded his direct answer on plans to recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” (Donetskaya Narodnaya Respublika, DPR; Luganskaya Narodnaya Respublika, LPR). But no matter how frightening it was for Russia’s elites to start this venture, getting out of it might be even more complex.

By the end of the third week of the war, rumors had begun circulating in Russia on the possibility of a peace deal. Such claims stemmed from the participants of the official negotiations and from high-ranking functionaries. “Of course, we’d much prefer for all of it to happen much faster; that’s the sincere aspiration of the Russian side. We want to get to peace as soon as possible,” head of the Russian negotiators and ex-culture minister Vladimir Medinsky averred. Even foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said he has “a particular hope for compromise being reached.”

If the word “compromise” started appearing in the speeches of Russian bureaucrats and diplomats, this didn’t come out of the blue. The war has been unfolding in ways that defied Russian strategists’ expectations. Moscow came to realize that it could no longer count on having a “small victorious war” with the enemy’s quick capitulation. The question is: How significant are the concessions that the Kremlin will now have to make? The other side understand this, too.