Two leaders thousands of miles apart woke up early this year clinging on to two remarkably similar dreams. Donald Trump imagined he could end the Russo-Ukrainian war within a day of assuming the presidency. After that proved impossible, he let it be known that an Easter peace had a nice ring about it.

In Moscow, meanwhile, Vladimir Putin emerged from the three-year nightmare of an inconclusive war with his neighbour thinking that if only Trump were to cut off Ukraine’s arms supplies, a Russian victory could quickly emerge. Better still, it could be in the bag by the May 9 Victory Day Parade in Red Square. And if not, who knows, perhaps the two leaders could net a joint Nobel peace prize? Crazier things have happened.

None of this will come to pass. Trump’s hope of ending the war through what he undoubtedly sees as his own superhuman force of will was exposed as empty talk at the weekend when his plan, worked out by his envoy Keith Kellogg, turned out to be a barely concealed demand for Ukrainian capitulation and enforced partition. Kellogg’s comparison of Ukraine with the postwar division of the vanquished Third Reich was flakier than cornflakes. Who was going to police a notional buffer zone between Ukraine and Russia? What follow-up plan was mooted to ensure the Russians did not (again) mount an attack on Kyiv from Belarus?The Trump administration is in effect colluding with Putin to create yet another frozen conflict — which can be reheated at will by the Kremlin — and repackage it as a US-inspired peace settlement.For Putin, these moves have some merit. If realised, they would disable Ukraine, turning it into a shrunken country largely abandoned by the West. And they would present an opportunity to engineer the overthrow of Volodymyr Zelensky, or at least his democratic defeat at the polls. The former Ukrainian president and Zelensky rival Petro Poroshenko is being brought back into play with a suggestion that he could help lead a transition from the current system of martial law (due to expire on May 8) to a more open, all-party government of national unity. Putin would count that as a road to a political victory: the demilitarisation of Ukrainian society, the depoliticisation of the Ukrainian military, the end of the western fascination with Zelensky as a war leader.Yet while Putin may welcome Ukrainian demobilisation, he fears it at home in Russia. The return of a million men in uniform spells trouble. What will be their political and social impact? Some are already speaking up. They grumble that Putin is letting Trump make commercial gains out of Ukraine’s buried minerals which should count as Russian spoils of war.Other veterans feel betrayed by the top brass. The head of the mercenary Wagner group, the warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, led an abortive coup against the Kremlin and the military establishment in July 2023, playing on the resentment felt by soldiers in the field against self-enriching generals. That ended badly for Prigozhin but it did signal the arrival of a new era, that of late Putinism, a realisation that running the Kremlin like a medieval court is no longer the appropriate way to govern a modern state.Veterans, many of them now physically and mentally damaged, feel that their direct experience of the reality of a grinding war should either bring privileges or concrete changes in society. David Lloyd George promised returning soldiers from the Somme a land fit for heroes — better housing, higher standards of living — but government debt, inflation, austerity, the distortions of a war economy, soon put paid to that. By 1922 Britain had 1.5 million unemployed, many of them unemployable ex-soldiers.In democracies, khaki elections often generate pressure for social reform. But in a dictatorship like the one run by Putin, veteran protest cannot easily be deflected. The setting up of arms factories in small towns has created jobs in the provinces but peace economics means that many will go. The oil price is in the doldrums, the anger is rising. Returning vets have joined gangs; provincial towns are already complaining of creeping brutalisation.A remarkable recent exhibition, War and the Mind at the Imperial War Museum, compared the First World War experience of shell-shock that turned so many soldiers into nervous, twitching wrecks with those currently exposed to traumatic shock by swarming drone attacks in the Russo-Ukrainian war. It is partly the horror of not being able to control one’s fate when confronted with autonomous weapons; their very noise generates anticipatory anxiety, leads to sleeplessness and panic attacks that dog civilian life. Reports from released prisoners of war of both sides describe it as an emasculating experience.Ukraine has been making strides in prosthetics and psychological care but Russia continues to conceal the human effects of the war. Putin’s response is to anticipate a veteran backlash by empowering the military counterintelligence wing of the FSB spy agency: its brief is to spot and weed out popular and ambitious generals, bring often-critical military bloggers under Kremlin control and pinpoint corrupt arms procurement networks. Will that be enough to stymie the rise of a veteran nationalist faction in Russia? Probably not.It is this fear of failure — a weakening of political power at home, a demoralised army and only negligible results on the battlefield — that has steered Putin towards outsourcing troop recruitment to central Asia, North Korea and new mercenary units. He will feign an interest in an incremental progression to peace while pushing Russia towards a forever war. The snag? Putin may not be a forever leader.