The moment has now come when a peace agreement in the Russia-Ukraine war is more possible than ever thanks to the successes of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) and the resilience of Ukrainians on the home front.
This latest assessment came from Petro Poroshenko – Ukraine’s fifth President and the head of the parliamentary opposition faction “European Solidarity” – during the Black Sea Security Forum.
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“I state this responsibly. Right now, in May 2026, Ukraine, Europe, and the world have never been as close to peace as they are today, on this very day. And our task is to take advantage of this narrow window of opportunity; to use the capabilities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian government, Europe, and the United States... [Russia President Vladimir] Putin once liked the phrase ‘force into peace.’ Well, now we must force Putin into peace. I am ready to provide reasoned evidence that today this is absolutely possible,” Poroshenko stated.
Earlier this week, Poroshenko said that peace must be achieved only on Ukraine’s terms, including no territorial concessions.
He noted that 12 years earlier, in 2014, Ukraine’s situation was significantly worse, but even then, thanks to volunteers who went to the front and managed to stabilize it, Poroshenko and his team were able to achieve a ceasefire and disrupt Putin’s summer offensive against Ukraine.
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“When I became president in 2014, in accordance with the promises I made during the election campaign, I did everything possible to stop the war. And in 2019, then-presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky spoke about an urgent ceasefire. I gave Putin seven days to implement a ceasefire but that did not happen.
“I have not said this before, but in September 2014, I did not have a single battalion behind the front line to stop Putin, because immediately after [former President Viktor] Yanukovych fled, we had only 5,000 soldiers who were ready to fight. Then volunteers from the Maidan went to the training ground in Novi Petrivtsi and from there headed straight to the front – in school buses and dressed in civilian clothes.
“It was a miracle then that we developed a strategy which enabled us to introduce a ceasefire... The first ceasefire took place in September 2014... No one believed that we would be able to stop Putin and his offensive at that time,” Poroshenko recalled.
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