Understanding andattitudes towardspeace, a potential peaceagreement, and possiblesecurity guarantees

This report is a part of the activities of the National Platform for Resilience and Social Cohesion (National Platform).

This civic initiative was launched in February 2018 (formerly known as the National Platform ‘Dialogue on Peace and Secure Reintegration’).

The National Platform’s activities are geared towards strengthening Ukraine’s national resilience. This could be achieved by establishing dialogue practices in society, providing authorities with proposals for developing relevant policies, particularly those on resilience and social cohesion, and ensuring public awareness of these processes.

The initiative has been implemented with financial support from the European Union as part of the Sustaining Ukrainian Resilience and European Security through Dialogue project. The report is based on findings from facilitated cohesion dialogues held in Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Chernivtsi and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in March 2026. It outlines general trends and contentious issues in the context of potential options for a peace settlement, and identifies the conditions under which a possible settlement might become socially acceptable, politically legitimate, and capable of contributing to stabilisation.

UCIPR expresses its gratitude to all participants for the open exchange of views, and to the Regional Network of National Platform for Resilience and Social Cohesion coordinators, Dmytro Arabadzhyiev, Diana Barynova, Dementii Bilyi, Nataliia Nechaieva-Yuriichuk, and Andrii Romanenko, for organising the discussions.

The report is drafted by Julia Tyshchenko, co-founder of the National Platform for Resilience and Social Cohesion.

1. General context

Data from facilitated oblast-level dialogues did not primarily capture a breakdown of Pros and Cons of a potential ‘peace’ or ‘agreement’. Rather, they showed a shared shift in the meaning of the word ‘peace’ itself in contemporary public perception. Peace emerged as a multi-layered concept. A potential peace agreement was assessed less by its diplomatic form than by its substance: whether it reduced the security threat; avoided legitimising the consequences of aggression or rewarding the aggressor; avoided pushing the question of justice into the background; and left Ukraine room to strengthen itself strategically, maintain its armed forces, integrate into the European security system, and pursue EU accession. This framing indicated a high level of public distrust of abstract political formulas and a demand for specificity about consequences, mechanisms, and the limits of acceptable compromise.

A common trend across all oblasts was the coexistence of two attitudes that may appear contradictory at first glance: 1) the desire to reduce losses and preserve lives, and, at the same time, 2) distrust of any settlement that could become a deferred defeat or a pause before a new cycle of war and Russian aggression, while also weakening Ukraine’s security position. The key criteria for the acceptability of any arrangements were not the symbolic ‘end of the war’ or the mere fact of negotiations, but defence capability, state sovereignty, legal certainty, the future of people in temporarily occupied areas, the internal resilience of the state, and society’s ability to withstand the consequences of compromise without undermining trust and cohesion.

Differences in how the situation was interpreted across oblasts were visible mainly in the different ways communities entered this shared framework. Frontline communities interpreted peace through the lens of immediate physical security, survival, and the risk of another attack even after a formal ceasefire. Oblasts with experience of prolonged occupation or displacement placed greater emphasis on the right to return, the socio-political visibility of people in the TOAs, the danger of turning losses into legal facts, and the moral unacceptability of ‘normalising’ occupation. Rear communities more often brought into the peace framework issues regarding the quality of domestic governance: justice, language and cultural policy, social endurance, human resources, and trust in institutions. The difference between oblasts, therefore, lay not in opposing goals but in different hierarchies of threats through which a potential agreement was assessed.

In this form, the report was relevant to different audiences working on peace and post-war stabilisation. For European institutions, it showed that any negotiating framework for Ukraine would be judged publicly acceptable not by the mere existence of a political, declarative agreement, but by the extent to which it included meaningful security, legal, and humanitarian provisions. For the Ukrainian authorities, it identified the boundaries of decisions that could be perceived as acceptable or, conversely, as destabilising. For the expert community, it provided grounds for treating peace not as a one-dimensional issue of ending hostilities, but as a complex nexus of security, justice, reintegration, resilience, and public communication.

You can read the text of the report at the link