To maintain his grip on power, Putin needs to win the war in Ukraine, which means taking control of the five Ukrainian regions annexed by Russia. But that appears to be a difficult, if not insurmountable, task. According to British General Sir Roly Walker, it would take Putin five years and 1.8 million lost soldiers.

Having failed to achieve his goal by force, he is trying to do it by diplomacy. To this end, Putin stepped up his information war and changed its strategy. Now he has donned the sheep’s clothing of a peacemaker. He claims that Ukraine has no chance of regaining the occupied territories and that continuing this war will only bring Ukraine more losses of land and lives. Therefore, to save these lives, peace must be concluded immediately.

In this humanitarian guise, he is trying to sell his plan to America and other countries. He has sent his emissary Viktor Orban to Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and other world leaders. In addition to these diplomatic efforts, he has launched an intensive propaganda campaign to gain support for his plan from the wider political and intellectual community.

This is a hoax. If he really wanted peace, Putin could end this war by pulling his troops out of Ukraine. But that is not the peace he wants. He does not want peace; he wants victory. And he wants America to hand him that victory by cutting off support for Ukraine, forcing it to surrender, and legitimizing Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian lands.

Instead of stopping this war, Putin is strengthening his army, stepping up his offensive, and doubling down on his atrocities. Shortly after announcing his peace plan, he bombed a children’s hospital, killing children and their doctors. More recently, his attacks on major Ukrainian cities have killed hundreds of civilians. His message: give me peace on my terms, or worse.

And this blackmail has begun to bear fruit. Putin has received a positive response to his plan from some world leaders and prominent members of the Western cultural and political elite. Two letters endorsing Putin’s plan that appeared in midsummer are a good example of this. The first letter, signed by former US Ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock and other prominent figures, is entitled “Seize peace in Ukraine before it’s too late.” The second, “Not to kill each other but to save the planet,” is signed by 51 Nobel laureates in various fields.

Both letters accept Putin’s assessment: “The longer the war continues, the more territory Ukraine is likely to lose.” Both endorse Putin’s plan: “Some territorial concessions would seem a small price to pay for the reality, rather than semblance, of independence.”

Both letters are written from the position of moral equivalence with respect to Russia and Ukraine, speaking of the “legitimate security interests of both Ukraine and Russia” and calling it “the conflict between Russia and Ukraine,” without mentioning that Russia is the aggressor while Ukraine is the victim of this aggression.  They call indiscriminately “the victims of war,” both Russian contract killers and innocent Ukrainian children whom they kill.

As if it wasn’t enough that Ukraine was given half the responsibility for the war, it was also made guilty for the hunger in Africa: “conflict, leading to increased famine in African nations” and for climate change: “While killing each other, people are also destroying our planet.

These accusations of all mortal sins against Ukraine have only one goal: to deprive Ukraine of all support and force it to surrender. The authors of these letters help Putin achieve victory by discrediting his opponent. Helping our country’s main enemy defeat not only Ukraine but also America is a dubious position that is unlikely to withstand any criticism. To denounce any potential critics, the authors of these letters take the moral high ground: “It is immoral not to try to reach it [this world] now.”

Neither the title of ambassador nor the Nobel Prize are certificates of moral superiority. But by conferring it, they not only deflect any criticism but also any responsibility for the dire consequences if their plan succeeds. These consequences will be the persecution of people in the occupied territories that has already begun, the loss of their homes by millions of Ukrainians, the demoralization of the entire country if Ukraine loses, and the strengthening of Putin’s regime if he wins, as well as China and Iran, which will become an even greater threat to their neighbors, and America’s loss in another war.

These letters deserve such attention because they are representative of a much broader campaign. Putin’s peace offensive continued and expanded even after Ukraine invaded the Kursk region. His immediate reaction was to drop his peace plan, but he soon returned to it. It seems he has no choice but to convince the West to abandon Ukraine in his favor.

Western support for Putin’s peace offensive is reminiscent of the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s that sought unilateral US disarmament. It was initiated by the Kremlin, which could not keep up with Reagan’s military buildup and tried to stop it with the help of American and European activists.

The same with Putin. Despite his bravado, his successes on the battlefield are small and extremely costly. His human and technological resources are depleted, and his power is increasingly shaky. His peaceful offensive is being waged not from a position of strength but from desperation. Just as the Soviets tried to stop Reagan by turning Western public opinion against him, Putin is now trying to use that public opinion to prevent Ukraine from resisting his aggression.

Critics of the nuclear freeze movement were often denounced as warmongers, especially those of us who exposed its connection to the Kremlin. Later, we were completely vindicated. In the late 1980s, at the height of glasnost, when many Soviet secrets became public knowledge, PBS aired a documentary that provided irrefutable evidence that this movement was initiated and controlled by the Kremlin. But this evidence came later. The movement collapsed earlier, faced with the insurmountable wall of the clear and strong position of Ronald Reagan, who did not give up and stayed his course, which led to a significant reduction in Soviet nuclear weapons and, ultimately, to the collapse of the Soviet communist regime—the main force behind the global nuclear threat.

Do our current political leaders have the same clarity and strength to completely ignore Putin’s peace offensive and instead increase support for Ukraine and help it win this war, which is the only way to true peace?

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Yuri Yarim-Agaev is a scientist and human rights activist.

Dr. Yarim-Agaev is the author of over 300 original works in physics, chemistry, applied mathematics, economics, finance, and international politics. He began his scientific work at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and then continued it at MIT, Stanford University, Bell Labs, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan.

In the 1970s, Yuri Yarim-Agaev joined the Moscow Helsinki Group and became one of the leaders of the Soviet dissident movement. In 1984, he founded in New York the Center for Democracy in the USSR, which provided support to dissidents in the USSR and to the first independent publications and opposition groups. Later he became co-founder of Democracy and Independence, an organization devoted to promoting the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union into new independent states.

In 2007, Dr. Yarim-Agaev became a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Yuri Yarim-Agaev is currently the head of the Center for the Study of Totalitarian Ideology. He is the author of numerous publications in the American, Ukrainian, and Russian press and a frequent guest on radio and television.