Putin's May 9, 2026 Victory Day address and surrounding official communications through May 14 will contain neither (a) a substantive unilateral ceasefire proposal with concrete operational terms directed at Ukraine or NATO, nor (b) a formal military escalation announcement such as a new mobilization wave, a new annexation declaration of territory beyond currently claimed oblasts, or an explicit expansion of formal war aims. The address will maintain existing war-justification framing with rhetorical intensification but no structural departure in either direction. If ceasefire-adjacent language appears, it will be encoded as performative diplomacy with conditions calibrated to fail (e.g., NATO withdrawal or no-membership guarantees) rather than a genuine diplomatic initiative.

All four frameworks independently predict the same outcome through distinct causal pathways, which is a strong convergence signal. The institutionalist framework receives highest weight because it has the most directly applicable historical data point (May 9, 2022), the clearest mechanistic account of why the ritual grammar suppresses strategic departures, and the only framework that can specify why this particular occasion is structurally constrained rather than just generally constrained. Marxist receives near-equal weight for the ideological reproduction mechanism, which explains why the ‘performative ceasefire’ variant (conditions calibrated to fail) is the most likely edge case rather than genuine (a). Keynesian provides the demand-lock mechanism that explains why the war economy cannot absorb a genuine ceasefire at this stage. Austrian receives lowest weight because it systematically underweights coercive maintenance of unsustainable programs and cannot independently date the inflection point. Base rate from historical precedent (Soviet and Russian Victory Day addresses, 1980–2025) suggests major strategic departures at this ritual occasion have probability roughly 0.05–0.12; calibrating upward slightly for Trump-era novelty yields ~0.08 base rate for either (a) or (b) occurring. Framework convergence at 0.62–0.72 individual confidence, combined with direct 2022 precedent, justifies upward adjustment to 0.81 for the null prediction. The main residual uncertainty is the Trump-mediated sanctions channel, which could make a performative ceasefire gesture instrumentally rational in a way prior administrations did not create.