How to shutdown keepalived without releasing the VIP

Usually it is a good thing that when keepalived shuts down, it releases the virtual IP address (VIP) via VRRP and removes the address from the local interface so that other instances can take it over.

When the last instance of keepalived shuts down, one could argue that if another instance is started at some later point it can take over without causing a conflict.

If however there is only one instance remaining and it is shutdown purely for configuration changes or other maintenance reasons, one could also argue that the VIP should stay up so that connectivity of the services listening on this VIP is not disturbed.

I am looking for a way to shutdown keepalived in a way that doesn't release the VIP and doesn't remove it from the interface. I found a command line flag -V, –dont-release-vrrp which sounds like it could do that job. However, there is no command line utility that manages a running instance and it seems the described flag is supposed to be used on startup of the daemon. This is not what I would want because as described earlier, in most cases releasing the VIP is the intended behavior.

Is there a way to shutdown keepalived while not touching the currently configured VIP and assuming the daemon was not started with the -V, –dont-release-vrrp flag? I imagine a signal interpreted to provoke this behavior, but any idea on how to achieve this would be nice.