February 18, 2026 | In-Depth Analysis
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On the morning of February 17, American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner did something that would have seemed extraordinary even in the most ambitious diplomatic playbook: they shuttled across Geneva in a single morning, first to conduct indirect negotiations with Iranian officials over Tehran’s nuclear programme, and then across town to mediate between Ukraine and Russia. That two of the world’s most intractable conflicts were being handled by the same pair of men, in the same city, on the same day, said something revealing about the Trump administration’s approach to global order — and about the profound uncertainties facing every country, Singapore included, that has built its prosperity on the assumption of a stable, rules-governed international system.
The Geneva talks — the third round of US-brokered negotiations following two inconclusive sessions in Abu Dhabi — concluded the first of their two days without any public breakthrough. Ukraine’s lead negotiator, Rustem Umerov, characterised discussions as focused on “practical issues and the mechanics of possible decisions,” language so carefully hedged as to communicate, in diplomatic idiom, that nothing of substance had yet been agreed. The delegations were set to resume on February 18. And four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war grinds on, with Russian drones striking Odesa’s power infrastructure even as diplomats exchanged pleasantries in Switzerland.
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The Architecture of Failure: Why These Talks Face Structural Limits
To assess the effectiveness of the Geneva process, one must begin not with optimism but with the weight of accumulated evidence. The Geneva round follows two Abu Dhabi sessions that concluded without any major breakthrough, and the fundamental reasons for that failure have not changed.
Russia’s negotiating position remains maximalist. The Kremlin is demanding that Ukraine formally cede the portions of Donetsk oblast it has not yet militarily captured — roughly 20 per cent of that region, on top of the approximately 20 per cent of Ukrainian national territory already under Russian occupation, including Crimea and parts of the Donbas seized before the 2022 invasion. For Kyiv, accepting this demand would mean surrendering territory its forces still hold on the battlefield, effectively ratifying military conquest through diplomatic acknowledgement. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has made plain that this is a line his government will not cross.
This is not merely a positional disagreement; it reflects a structural asymmetry in how the two sides perceive both their battlefield position and the costs of continued fighting. Russia, despite enormous human and material losses, has been making gradual territorial gains in eastern Ukraine over the course of 2025. Military analyst Michael Kofman has cautioned against reading too much into kilometre-by-kilometre changes — “changes in territorial control are a lagging indicator,” he has noted — but the broader trend has not favoured Kyiv. If Russian forces complete the seizure of all of Donetsk, as some analysts project is plausible by the end of 2026, Moscow’s leverage at the negotiating table will only grow. Putin himself told his commanders in late December 2025 that Russia’s interest in a negotiated withdrawal “is in fact reduced to zero,” given current military momentum.
The composition of the Russian delegation reinforces the bleakness of the outlook. Vladimir Medinsky, who led Russia’s side, is a Kremlin aide whom Ukrainian negotiators have previously accused of using historical lectures as a substitute for genuine engagement. His appointment signals that Moscow is performing diplomacy rather than practising it — turning up to talks in order to demonstrate flexibility to an American interlocutor without conceding anything of substance.
The sequencing of Russian behaviour makes this interpretation still more compelling. On the same night that delegations were travelling to Geneva, Russia carried out extensive airstrikes on Odesa, severely damaging the city’s power network and leaving tens of thousands without heat and water during the winter. As Oksana Reviakina, an internally displaced person from Russian-occupied Melitopol who was sheltering in a Kyiv metro station during the attack, put it with the bluntness of lived experience: “One shouldn’t trust the Russians absolutely, not even a little.” Conducting air raids on civilian energy infrastructure while simultaneously presenting diplomats for peace talks is not a signal of good faith; it is a demonstration of continued coercive intent.
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Trump’s Gambit: Pressure on Kyiv, Leverage from Uncertainty
The Trump administration’s approach to the war has been characterised, since its return to office, by a studied ambiguity that functions as a form of leverage. By declining to recommit to open-ended military support for Ukraine and by repeatedly framing Kyiv — rather than Moscow — as the party that must move quickly, Washington has introduced uncertainty into a conflict where Western solidarity had previously been the central variable. “Ukraine better come to the table fast. That’s all I’m telling you,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One ahead of the talks, a statement whose bluntness was calibrated less for diplomatic effect than for domestic audience consumption and for signalling to Moscow that American patience has limits.
Zelensky has been candid about the asymmetry he perceives in this pressure. He has said that Ukraine faces more demands to make concessions than Russia, and at the Munich Security Conference just days before Geneva, he described the process in terms that exposed his cautious scepticism: talks feel “serious, substantive… but honestly sometimes it feels like the sides are talking about completely different things.”
There is, nonetheless, a scenario in which American pressure on Kyiv produces a ceasefire, even an imperfect one. The Trump administration’s primary interest appears to be in demonstrating dealmaking capacity and in reducing American exposure to a European conflict that it has framed as a drain on resources needed for Indo-Pacific competition. If the administration is willing to offer Kyiv meaningful security guarantees — the precise shape of which remains the central unresolved question — Zelensky may ultimately accept territorial losses in exchange for a credible framework that prevents further Russian encroachment. Several European delegations were present in Geneva precisely because Zelensky requested their inclusion, suggesting he is trying to ensure that any eventual deal is not simply an American-Russian construct that leaves Ukraine exposed.
But the structural problem persists: a ceasefire that freezes current battle lines would leave Russia in possession of a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, would leave millions of displaced Ukrainians unable to return home, and would reward the most significant violation of the post-1945 territorial order in Europe. Whether the international community — and whether the rules-based order as a concept — can survive that outcome is a question with ramifications far beyond Geneva.
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What Is Actually at Stake: The Global Order Question
Fareed Zakaria argued recently that Ukraine’s fate in 2026 carries consequences that are “seismic” for the international order — specifically, for whether territorial conquest once again becomes an acceptable instrument of state power. That question is not merely philosophical. It sits at the heart of what Singapore has spent over five decades building its entire national existence upon.
Singapore is a city-state of less than six million people, with no natural resources, surrounded by vastly larger neighbours, dependent on maritime trade for its economic existence, and possessed of no historical great-power patron willing to guarantee its security unconditionally. Its survival has always been premised on the idea that rules matter — that the United Nations Charter’s prohibitions on the use of force to acquire territory are not simply aspirational language, but operative constraints that powerful states have reasons to respect. When Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong remarked in 2022 that if politics were based on “might is right,” the world would be “a dangerous place for small countries like Singapore,” he was articulating not sentiment but existential calculation.
This is why Singapore was, and remains, the only ASEAN member to have imposed direct sanctions on Russia, to have co-sponsored UN General Assembly resolutions condemning the invasion, and to have maintained a consistently principled public position even as larger regional neighbours like Indonesia and Malaysia retreated into vague language about being “concerned.” Singapore’s Foreign Ministry reaffirmed at the UN in February 2025 that “the invasion of one country by another, under any pretext, cannot be justified,” and called on all parties to negotiate in good faith. The explicit framing — that upholding international law is “a matter of existential importance” for small states — connects Singapore’s stance not to ideology but to survival.
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Singapore’s Material Exposure: Energy, Trade, and the Sanctions Tightrope
Beyond the normative dimension lies a set of deeply practical economic considerations that will shape Singapore’s interest in how these talks conclude.
Singapore imports approximately S$1.8 billion worth of goods from Russia annually, of which refined petroleum accounts for the vast majority. Russia, as the world’s second-largest oil exporter, has exerted outsized influence on global energy prices since the invasion began, and Singapore — which relies primarily on natural gas for electricity generation and imports most of its energy needs — has felt the consequences directly. Electricity tariffs rose more than five per cent from early 2022, and food inflation accelerated as global wheat and grain markets were disrupted by the closure of Ukrainian export corridors. Ukraine is the world’s third-largest maize exporter and fourth-largest wheat exporter; Russia is the largest wheat exporter globally. Taken together, the disruption to these supply chains has contributed to inflationary pressure that, while easing, has not fully resolved.
The energy picture for 2026, however, is more nuanced. Global LNG prices have fallen sharply from their 2022 peaks — delivered prices into Asia are now roughly two-thirds below that post-invasion high — as a massive new wave of supply from the US and Qatar comes online. A peace settlement, or even a durable ceasefire, that reduced geopolitical risk premiums in commodity markets would benefit Singapore’s consumers and businesses. The city-state’s interests in a negotiated resolution are therefore not merely principled but calculable.
Singapore also occupies a sensitive position in the enforcement architecture of Russia sanctions. It is a major oil trading and bunkering hub, and since 2022 there have been documented increases in the blending and re-export of Russian fuel through Singapore’s terminals — a practice that CSIS analysts have argued undermines the price-cap coalition’s ability to constrain Russian energy revenues. As the only ASEAN member to have imposed its own sanctions, Singapore has a dual exposure: it faces pressure from Western partners to close loopholes in sanctions enforcement, and it faces pressure from commercial interests not to damage its attractiveness as a global trading hub. The deadline for major new US sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil — the two companies accounting for over half of Russia’s oil production — was set for February 28, 2026, just days after these talks conclude. How those sanctions are implemented, and whether a Geneva framework affects their application, will be a matter of direct relevance to Singapore’s financial and shipping sectors.
The city-state’s trade-to-GDP ratio exceeds 300 per cent. It is the second-busiest container port in the world after Shanghai. Any scenario that destabilises global shipping, restricts the movement of goods through critical maritime chokepoints, or accelerates the fragmentation of the global trading system into rival blocs is a scenario that attacks Singapore’s core economic model at its foundation. Oxford Analytica has noted that Singapore seems to have concluded the US is “no longer willing to underwrite the global order,” a development that is “unfavourable to Singapore” as a highly trade-dependent economy in a multipolar world.
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Singapore’s Strategic Response: The Lesson Being Drawn
Singapore has not been a passive observer of the war’s military dimensions. Its defence community has been studying the conflict carefully, drawing lessons about the nature of modern warfare — drone operations, electronic warfare, energy infrastructure as a target, the importance of resilience in distributed systems — that are directly shaping how the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) is being restructured and equipped. The SAF’s fiscal year 2025/26 defence budget was SGD$23.4 billion, some 12.4 per cent higher than the revised estimate for the prior year. Singapore is acquiring F-35 fighter jets — it will be the only Southeast Asian nation to operate fifth-generation stealth aircraft when its first F-35Bs arrive in 2026 — as well as additional Invincible-class attack submarines and Boeing P-8A maritime patrol aircraft. This is not coincidence. The lessons of Ukraine about the vulnerability of small, open, internationally connected states to militarily superior revisionist powers are being absorbed and institutionalised.
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What a Deal — Or No Deal — Means Going Forward
Three scenarios present themselves for the trajectory of these talks.
The first is a ceasefire along current lines, with or without a formal framework, negotiated under American pressure in the coming months. This would leave Russia in possession of substantial Ukrainian territory, likely without meaningful international recognition, but would stop the active killing. For Singapore, such an outcome would reduce energy market volatility, provide some stabilisation of global commodity markets, and reduce the immediacy of sanctions compliance pressure. But it would establish a precedent — that territorial conquest by a nuclear power can be rewarded with a ceasefire that it can then use to regroup and re-arm — that carries long-term systemic risks to the international order on which Singapore depends.
The second scenario is continued stalemate, with the talks producing nothing of substance and the war continuing at current intensity. This is the most likely near-term outcome from Geneva. It maintains current levels of economic disruption, keeps energy markets volatile, sustains sanctions pressure on Singapore’s trading sector, and prolongs the normative damage to the rules-based order.
The third scenario — a comprehensive settlement with verified security guarantees for Ukraine — remains remote. Putin has given no credible indication of willingness to accept a framework that leaves Ukraine sovereign and secure, and the Trump administration has not yet indicated it is prepared to offer the kind of ironclad guarantees that might make any deal durable.
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Conclusion: The Talks as a Mirror
The Geneva talks are, in a sense, less a negotiation than a mirror in which the current state of the international order is reflected back to all who observe it. What that mirror shows is a system under severe stress: a revisionist power conducting airstrikes on civilian infrastructure while sending negotiators to Switzerland; an American administration applying more visible pressure on the invaded than the invader; European powers present in Geneva but excluded from the room; and a set of fundamental questions about territory, sovereignty, and the enforceability of international law that remain unanswered.
For Singapore, the stakes in that unanswered question are not abstract. They are embedded in every electricity bill, every shipping contract, every sanctions compliance decision, and every defence procurement approval. Zelensky asked, in his nightly address from Kyiv on February 17: “The question for the Russians is: just what do they want?” It is, as he well knows, the question whose answer will determine not only Ukraine’s future but the shape of the world that Singapore — and every other small, trade-dependent, rules-reliant state — must navigate for decades to come.