The western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was supposed to help the latter by punishing the former. That strategy isn’t working. Punishing Russia economically is suring up Putin’s position domestically, NATO’s expansion is strengthening the China-Russia alignment, and military assistance to Ukraine without direct NATO involvement is merely protracting the war, with no clear end in sight. Given the geopolitical deadlock, the only viable option would be for the West to broker a neutrality status for Ukraine. It will be a difficult deal, with lots of costly compromises, but at this point it's the only geoplolitical solution available, writes Alexander Korolev.

The West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 can be broken down into three main prongs. The first one has to do with the imposition of unprecedented economic sanctions to inflict enough punishment on Russia to delegitimise Vladimir Putin’s political regime or make it change its foreign policy calculus and stop the war. The second prong materialized in extensive military assistance to Ukraine to help Kyiv fence off Russia’s aggression by making the costs of the war unacceptable to Moscow. The third prong took the form of a new round of NATO expansion into Finland and Sweden – to contain aggressive Russia more effectively and, according to NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, demonstrate that NATO’s door remains open regardless of Mr Putin’s preferences and that smaller states have full agency over their foreign policy choices.