Friday’s 16-year sentence for Evan Gershkovich, a 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in Russia last year on bogus espionage charges, reveals a basic fact about contemporary Russia: Unless dissuaded by force, the Kremlin never shies away from arbitrary cruelty.

Following last week’s phone call between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, negotiations with Russia seem on the horizon.

Yet those seeking a deal with Vladimir Putin must bear in mind the depravity of the man and his regime.

Just this month, the Kremlin had no qualms striking a children’s hospital in central Kyiv, far from any meaningful military targets.

The missile killed at least 42 civilians, including children, and interrupted life-saving surgeries.

Upward of 19,000 Ukrainian children, meanwhile, have been abducted from Ukraine’s Russia-occupied territories and taken to Russia. It is unclear whether they will ever see their relatives again.

There is growing evidence that Russia is using Ukrainian prisoners of war as human shields in its so-called “meat wave” attacks — mass groups of men, sometimes including wounded Russian soldiers on crutches, sent against Ukrainian positions to deliberately draw fire and pinpoint their locations.

Practically all Ukrainian POWs interviewed by the UN’s Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine had been subject to torture in Russian captivity, including “repeated beatings, electric shocks, threats of execution, prolonged stress positions and mock execution,” the group has reported. “Over half of them were subjected to sexual violence.”

The regime had no qualms letting Alexei Navalny die in jail — a fate that likely awaits another opposition leader, Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has been imprisoned in a Siberian penal colony despite suffering from a progressively worsening neurological disease.

As a US citizen, Gershkovich might be eventually saved, as might Alsu Kurmasheva, a Radio Free Europe journalist arrested on similarly bogus grounds while visiting her ailing mother.

But if they do survive, it will be because the regime has used them as bargaining chips, not due to humanitarian or moral concerns.

The deeply immoral nature of Putin’s regime matters.

By all means, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Donald Trump, should he win in November, should feel free to negotiate an end to Russia’s ongoing war of conquest against Ukraine.

But nobody should be under any illusion that the Kremlin will negotiate in good faith — or that it will be prepared to uphold its end of an agreement without significant guardrails.

Like Iran and North Korea, Putin’s Russia has crossed the Rubicon beyond which a restoration of its status as a normal, responsible stakeholder in the international system is impossible — at least not without a major change in its leadership.

To be sure, that does not preclude dialogue or the possibility of a negotiated end to the war.

It does mean, however, that a sustainable deal with Russia will have to come with outside enforcement.

The regime in the Kremlin might temporarily cease hostilities, but it can’t be trusted to give up on its ultimate aim: the subjugation of Ukraine and the destruction of Ukrainian nationhood.

How exactly can the United States and its allies make a deal with a deeply immoral regime in Moscow stick?

One word: deterrence.

The Budapest Memorandum of 1994, a toothless commitment of the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity, did Ukraine little good in the face of Russian revisionism, nor did the 2015 Minsk Agreements stop the Kremlin’s 2022 full-scale invasion.

NATO members, in contrast, are safe as long as the alliance’s commitment to collective defense is seen as credible.

Those keen to negotiate with Russia, in Ukraine or the West, must be prepared to do more than draw lines on a map.

Unless the world wants to see a larger and bloodier replay of this same scenario a few years down the line, a Ukraine-Russia peace agreement must come hand in hand with Ukraine joining NATO — or with a long-term allied force setting up inside its borders — to dissuade the Kremlin from ever contemplating a similar attack again.

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. Twitter: @DaliborRohac.