There will likely be no deal between Moscow and Washington to end the war in Ukraine. It’s now evident that the only peace Russian President Vladimir Putin wants is the peace of victory. As Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained this week, “This is a long process, it requires effort, and it is not easy … The main thing for us is to achieve our goals. Our goals are clear.”

Those “goals” mean keeping Ukraine out of NATO and the Western political orbit. Here, Putin’s mystical Russian Orthodox nationalism is simply not comprehensible to Trump or many others in the West. While Putin wanted a good relationship with Trump, he values Ukraine’s fate far higher than parley with Washington.

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In truth, Putin and his regime were never interested in Trump’s reality-TV style deals pretending to be high-stakes diplomacy. The Kremlin’s commitment to victory over its neighbor is now total, as the White House seems to be gradually realizing. Russia’s sunk costs in the current round of this war, restarted by Putin in late February 2022, are vast in lives and treasure. Nothing short of strategic victory can justify Russia’s massive losses.

Although there’s evidence of mounting political and economic weariness across Russia this summer, there’s no bona fide antiwar movement in the country. Opposition figures are intimidated into silence, exile, or mysterious death. Putin’s dictatorial rule, buttressed by the powerful Federal Security Service secret police, is secure for now. There’s no reason to expect Russia to alter its aggressive actions toward Ukraine unless Putin’s regime collapses. Otherwise, the Russian military will continue its blood-soaked attritional strategy until Ukraine eventually collapses.

That said, if Trump sticks with his plan to keep Ukraine supplied with weapons to kill Russians, while inflicting enhanced sanctions to damage Russia’s already weakened economy, we should expect Putin to push back hard. Putin is a KGB officer at heart, what the Russians call a “Chekist.” By that code, Trump’s perceived hostile acts toward Moscow will demand a reply that causes pain.

Outright war against NATO is unlikely, although that risk cannot be assessed at zero. Russian military finger-jabs at the Baltic states and Poland with NATO resolve-testing overflights, interspersed with confrontations between Russian and NATO warplanes and ships, are usually contained locally. However, the chance of a misunderstanding devolving into shooting is higher than it was just a couple of years ago. And remember, a Russian fighter jet nearly, if apparently accidentally, shot down a British spy plane with more than two dozen crew members on board in September 2022.

Regardless, Moscow possesses numerous methods of retaliating against Trump’s new sanctions and weapons supplies short of starting a shooting war. For years, the Kremlin’s spy agencies have waged a variant of hybrid war against European NATO countries, encompassing traditional espionage plus cyberattacks, sabotage, and terrorism. This week, German counterintelligence warned of rising Russian hybrid warfare against Berlin, including sabotage of German infrastructure, notably around NATO bases, which are supporting Ukraine’s war effort with training and logistics. There are concerns that these relatively low-level nuisance forms of terrorism could turn into something deadlier, particularly given online efforts by Russian spy agencies to recruit criminals to conduct attacks on Ukraine-linked targets across Europe.

Last week, the British government took the unusual step of placing sanctions on three units and 18 officials of Russian military intelligence, known as GRU, for their years of cyberattacks, assassinations, and violent attacks in multiple countries, including the notorious, nearly fatal poisoning of GRU defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in 2018 with a weapons-grade nerve agent. London is showing the proper path, since the one language that the Kremlin always understands, especially the thuggish GRU, the most dangerous of Putin’s spy agencies, is force. Punishing Moscow for past GRU crimes may discourage future ones.

The good news for Americans is that, after years of tit-for-tat espionage expulsions, Russia’s intelligence presence inside the United States is largely manageable from a conventional counterintelligence perspective. However, if negotiations to reestablish full diplomatic representation are successful, the threat will increase with an influx of new Russian spies. But U.S. military bases in Europe are already vulnerable. The GRU could retaliate against Trump’s rising support for Ukraine with violence. The big American spy base at Wiesbaden in western Germany has been outed in the media as the intelligence nerve center of NATO’s direct support to the Ukrainian military, and surely Moscow knows the details.

There’s also the migrant threat.

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Western intelligence has known for a decade that Russia’s FSB was exploiting migrant flows into Europe, seeding the ranks of asylum-seekers with Russian agents and spies. Neither has this disturbing trend ceased. How many such Kremlin operatives have settled in NATO countries and are waiting to be activated? Nobody knows.

Worse, there are pervasive fears in U.S. counterintelligence circles that Russia and its allies, such as Cuba and Venezuela, have dispatched spies into this country masquerading as migrants. Millions of unvetted migrants entered the U.S. during former President Joe Biden’s time in the White House. American counterspies worry that at least hundreds of hostile spies and possible terrorists were hiding among them, but nobody in Washington has any idea how many crossed our borders. The number of Russian spies and saboteurs inside the U.S. may be considerably higher than we believe. A strong dose of counterintelligence vigilance is needed, without delay.

John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.