Hardliners on both sides in the Ukraine war are pursuing a chimaera in the hope of a miracle. Moscow appears to believe that in the near future, the Ukrainian defences that have held the Russian advance to a bloody crawl for years will miraculously collapse, or that the European money and arms that have enabled those defences will suddenly vanish. A large part of the Western commentariat (and some, though by no means all Ukrainian security experts) appear beholden to a symmetrical fantasy. Drones and satellite intelligence have made the accumulation of combat power for a Russian breakthrough impossible, enabling the Ukrainian army to fight Russia to a near-standstill. Yet Western observers seem to believe that these technologies will miraculously not allow Russia to do exactly the same to the Ukrainian army. 

Western military experts who talk of Ukraine having ‘turned the tide’ display an indifference to the lessons of the war that casts serious doubt on either their expertise or their honesty. The much-lauded Ukrainian success in damaging Russian oil refineries (though only eliminating about 13 per cent of production) has been vastly outmatched by Russia’s closure of the port of Odessa and damage to Ukrainian transport and electricity generation. Russia’s capacity to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure has also been greatly increased by the end of the supply of US air defence missiles to Ukraine as a result of the war with Iran.

Russian ultra-nationalists with whom I have spoken still profess to think that Russia can capture Odessa – something that would require the Russian armed forces either to fight their way across the lower reaches of the Dnieper or launch a massive amphibious attack. This would mean rebuilding the Black Sea Fleet that has been decimated and forced from its base in Sevastopol by Ukrainian missiles and drones. Parts of the Western media have tried to foster a mirror-image delusion: that Ukraine’s success in damaging the Russian navy and supply routes to Crimea means that it can recapture the peninsula. As with Russia’s putative conquest of Odessa, this would require the Ukrainian army to fight its way across the Dnieper or launch a seaborne invasion with a navy that it does not possess.

It is hard to know what would be worse: if we are being deliberately lied to, or if these retired officers and security ‘experts’ heralding imminent victory for Ukraine actually believe this nonsense. Most probably, the political, bureaucratic, media, academic and think tank consensus in Europe has now become so monolithic and absolute that they do believe it, since nobody is saying anything different. To find alternative, more realistic voices, all too often one regrettably has to turn to the populist right.

The situation on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine now resembles the stalemate on the Western Front in 1916, but with a key difference. By the end of 1916, the new weapons and tactics that two years later were to end the war had already appeared, albeit only in embryo. Tanks, aircraft and infiltration tactics eventually overcame the machine guns and barbed wire. There is no prospect of such a military transformation today. The monstrous casualties inflicted by drones may eventually lead to the creation of robot tanks and soldiers (which, unlike human soldiers, will continue to advance even if their comrades are destroyed). But this seems very unlikely to occur soon enough to transform the war in Ukraine.

The one concrete thing that the two sides are fighting over is the question of who controls the 11 per cent or so of the Donbas region that is still in Ukrainian hands, and which Russia is demanding as part of the price of peace. The contrast between the size of the disputed territory – around 2,000 square miles – and the scale of the suffering involved in the battle for it resembles that at Bapaume or Passchendaele. Perhaps 100,000 men have died on both sides for control of the insignificant town of Pokrovsk alone (in Soviet days Krasnoarmeisk), a place I used to drive past without noticing on my way between Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk.

The claim on both sides is that this area is strategically vital, because it contains a string of heavily fortified Ukrainian towns. The Ukrainians say these are indispensable to their defences; the Russians say they could be used as the springboard for a future Ukrainian attempt to reconquer the rest of the Donbas. I am not fully convinced by either argument. The Russians have made very slow progress against Ukrainian-held towns in the Donbas, but they have also made no progress at all trying to advance across open country elsewhere. Assuming – as the Trump administration has proposed – that a peace settlement would entail the demilitarization of this part of the Donbas, Ukraine would be able, with European help, to build a new line of defences a few miles further to the west. For Kiev this is a moral, not merely a strategic issue. Every Ukrainian with whom I have talked (including ones desperate for a compromise peace) has said that while as part of a settlement Ukraine could acknowledge the reality that territory now held by Russia will remain in Russian hands, it is morally and politically impossible for any Ukrainian government to hand over territory that Ukraine still holds.

Russian insistence on the practical importance of the northwestern Donbas is even less convincing. As well as its supposed potential as a launchpad for a future attack on Russian-controlled territory, it is argued that it is essential for the water supply to the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk. But a future Ukrainian offensive could come anywhere along the front line; and alternative supplies of water to the Donbas from Russia would not be hard to create. In private many Russian analysts admit that these arguments are for show, and that the real reason that Moscow is insisting on pursuing this tiny parcel of land is that without it, it will be far more difficult to claim that this war has ended in victory, that embarking on it was a good idea and that the immense losses have been worthwhile. 

In fact, though it has made some gains, the Russian army’s overall achievement so far has been miserable, compared not only to the Kremlin’s goals in February 2022, but the past four centuries of its domination of most of Ukraine. It is true that Russia has captured a land-bridge to Crimea that has vastly increased the security (and the water supply) of the peninsula, and has pushed Ukrainian forces away from the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk, beyond the range of the artillery with which Ukraine intermittently bombarded these cities between 2014 and 2022. But I very much doubt whether Putin would have launched the war if he could have foreseen that after four and a half years, this is all that Russia would have achieved.

As for the Ukrainian political elites, we may equally wonder if with hindsight they would still have wrecked the Minsk agreement granting autonomy to the Donbas within Ukraine, thereby helping to bring about this conflict. On the one hand, they can take satisfaction from the fact that the war has dramatically consolidated Ukrainian national identity, turned the great majority of the Ukrainian population against Russia, turned Zelensky into a historic national leader and enabled the ultra-nationalists to gain control over large parts of the armed forces. But on the other hand, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian young men have died, the economy has been wrecked, millions have fled to the West, most likely never to return, and the birth rate has collapsed. As far as the Ukrainians themselves are concerned, recent opinion polls suggest that a majority now defines victory as bringing the war to an end without further concessions, and restoring ‘normal life’. Hopes of driving Russia from the territories it has occupied have largely vanished. 

Yet as things stand today, all parties to the conflict seem stuck in their present positions and willing the war to continue. All, it seems, find this politically preferable to making the concessions necessary to end it. Perhaps also – if only subconsciously – both Zelensky and Putin anticipate with deep anxiety the political, social and economic dilemmas they will face as soon as the war is over, including the problem of shifting back to a peacetime economy. Putin may also confront questions about the appalling incompetence with which his administration launched the war. And both Ukraine and Russia will face the great challenge of how to integrate masses of embittered, traumatized soldiers back into civilian life.

As for Ukraine’s Western backers, the Trump administration is distracted by the war with Iran, and apparently content that Europe should go on paying for US arms to Ukraine. Any radical new approach to ending the war will be even less likely to emerge if the Democrats win control of Congress in the mid-term elections in November – both because the vast majority of congressional Democrats have been fully committed to Ukrainian ‘victory’ and opposed to a compromise peace, and because they will be automatically hostile to any initiative of the Trump administration. European governments meanwhile have nailed themselves to what amounts to unconditional support for Ukraine, to a degree that seems to make it impossible for them seriously to aim for a compromise peace. At their meeting in London on 7 June, the ‘E3’ (the UK, France and Germany) and Ukraine set out conditions for a peace settlement that included an immediate ceasefire before negotiations begin; the deployment of ‘a multinational force for Ukraine’; and Ukraine’s right to join NATO. Since the Russian government has repeatedly stated that these demands are off the table, this amounts to a collective veto on any peace settlement. Emblematic of the mindless conformity has been new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s immediate declaration of fealty to the existing line. 

At most, all that the leaders concerned can hope for is that the war will eventually lead to mutual exhaustion, resulting not in a stable peace but the kind of precarious, repeatedly violated ceasefire that has existed in Kashmir since 1948, or in eastern Ukraine between 2015 and 2022. It is hard to see how any sensible person could believe that such an outcome would be in the interests of Europe or Ukraine. Among other things, it would make future Ukrainian accession to the EU impossible – which it may be in any case, given the difficulties this would cause for several key EU members. Poland and other East European states would have to give up the subsidies that they still receive from Brussels and Western Europe so that these could be reallocated to Ukrainian development; farmers across Europe (most importantly in France) would see a radical restructuring of the Common Agricultural Policy, leaving many of them facing ruin.

All this leaves two alternative possibilities open. The first is whether in the year or years to come a combination of economic crises and political upheavals will so overwhelm Europe that sustaining adequate levels of support for Ukraine becomes impossible. A key moment will be if Rassemblement Nationale wins the French presidency next spring. While Jordan Bardella has sought to conform to NATO and EU positions on Ukraine, Marine Le Pen is known to see herself more as the heiress of de Gaulle’s position on common European security including Russia. It is also true that while without any sympathy for Russia, Bardella’s supporters see migration, crime and social disintegration as by far the most important threats to France. 

The second possibility is that the war will drag on without major victories for either side, until eventually, after more years and more deaths, Russia will take the last bit of the Donbas, allowing Putin to declare victory. It would however be unwise to rely on the war continuing along these lines without radical escalation. So far, relative restraint by both Russia and NATO has prevented a direct clash, despite the desires of some hardliners on both sides. But there is always the possibility of a disastrous accident, like the misdirected US missile strike that destroyed a primary school in Iran.

Russian analysts have told me of their belief that if a Ukrainian missile or drone – however accidentally – hit a school in Moscow or St Petersburg, Putin would have no choice but to escalate against European NATO members, which Russians believe – with good reason – have been assisting Ukraine with its targeting. This would be precisely the opportunity Russian hardliners are hoping for, as they believe that only by terrifying the Europeans into withdrawing support from Ukraine can they hope to achieve the complete victory of which they still dream. The Ukrainian government too has been working assiduously to bring about a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO through feeding the Western media with ‘information’ about Russia’s aggressive universal ambitions.

In the later decades of the Cold War, despite Western fears of Soviet aggression, the risk of escalation leading to nuclear catastrophe produced a serious will to détente among Western establishments. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became clear that Soviet aggressiveness had been vastly exaggerated in the West. Today, the risk of escalation is much greater, but that lesson has not been learned, and the will to détente seems to have disappeared. It needs to be recovered, before it is too late.

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