Then Trump turned toward Iran. The Russia-Ukraine war dropped in US foreign policy priority list. Now, because of oil and gas, it’s back at the top again. Trump realized that he cannot be at war with two of the largest oil and gas countries in the world. Iran may only be seventh on the list of the world’s largest oil producers, but by closing down the Strait of Hormuz, Iran indirectly affects some 20% of global oil production.

Russia, however, is the world’s second largest producer of both oil and gas. The Europeans dismissed the recent US-Russia diesel deal as another stunt by Trump, and it’s true that it won’t affect gasoline prices in the US by much. If it had been an isolated deal, I wouldn’t have paid much attention either. But it wasn’t. Trump followed up with actions he had hitherto shied away from.

The first sign came last Wednesday morning. Ukrainian media reported that, overnight, the country’s forces had experienced sudden restrictions on Starshield, the military part of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system. Ukrainian drones were losing signal when they traveled faster than 160 kilometers per hour. The sudden throttling of the service disrupted several Ukrainian drone missions.

The presumption within Ukraine was that SpaceX had imposed those restrictions on behalf of the US government. And the next day, Reuters reported that the order came directly from the White House, which had been angered by Ukraine’s continued targeting of Russian refineries. So this was not a technical service disruption, but a ruthless application of the kill switch. All we got from the White House, though, were news leaks. No official statements. Not even a tweet. For the Trump administration, this is not normal.

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Along with the news of the throttling of Starshield came suggestions that the US had ended intelligence sharing. On the night of 12 October, Russia launched a volley of ballistic missiles at Ukraine. Normally, US intelligence would give the Ukrainians a warning. But on this occasion, there was no heads-up — and the results were horrendous.

Until that point, intelligence sharing had been one of the most important components of the defense of Ukraine. The Americans have satellite-based infrared systems that can detect ballistic missile launches, and the Ukrainians could rely on it.

But things had changed. Two days after the attack, it was reported that the White House had discussed ending the sharing of intelligence. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, wanted to continue sharing intelligence — but others, it seems, didn’t. Trump denied that the US had cut intelligence sharing. Indeed, it is possible that Russia may have used weapons that resisted detection. We should at this point treat the disruption of information flows as suspicious, but unexplained, even if that flow now seems to have definitively resumed.

Then, late on Friday, Trump used an executive order to waive the implementation of sanctions against Russia under the Graham Act, whose goal was to deprive Russia of financial resources that allow it to wage war against Ukraine. Named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump had signed it into law only last month.

The secrecy, the reports of meetings inside the White House, the reports from Ukraine itself, and the suspension of the Graham Act: together these developments give us a coherent picture, even if some of the details are still missing. They tell us that the US is no longer actively engaged in the defense of Ukraine.

That’s different from the situation in late February last year, when Trump and Zelensky clashed in the White House. After that meeting, the US paused weapons deliveries and financial assistance. The White House also cut off intelligence sharing for a week, but then resumed it.

But what the Americans are doing now is far more coordinated. And it presents the Europeans with a conundrum. They will attempt to mitigate the effects of this change in US policy, however, there is not much they can do. They can offer intelligence from their own satellite network, but this will not match the communication quality Ukraine’s fast drones require to function as intended.

Nevertheless, Zelensky turned up at the European Council in Brussels last week, where EU leaders took another opportunity to show their solidarity with the Ukrainian leader. He is a regular guest there. But beneath the bonhomie, tensions are rising. Ukraine is running out of money faster than the Europeans had expected. Last December, the Belgians vetoed the sequestration of Russian funds that are sitting, frozen, in a Belgian bank. The EU reluctantly agreed a €90bn loan to Ukraine, money they themselves borrowed, pretending that Russia would eventually have to pay back this loan. The loan was supposed to plug Ukraine’s funding gap for this year and next.

As it turns out, Ukraine now needs another €70bn. Marine Le Pen, the front-runner in the French presidential election race, has promised that, if elected, she would cut off all support for Ukraine. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has promised more funding, but this money is not showing up anywhere in his government’s own budgets.

While Zelensky revels in the public admiration of Europe’s leaders, then, the foundations of Western support have been getting shakier. Now it is getting even harder, because the US is actively conspiring against Europe. The deal under which the US buys 4.8 million tons of diesel from Russia looks like an attempt to restart commercial relationships. I expect this will be the first of several natural resources deals between the US and Russia.

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I could, for example, see a deal struck over Russian gas. Envoys have been discussing extending their new commercial partnership to the defunct Nord Stream pipeline that used to carry gas from Russia to Germany. This would be an ironic twist, because it was the first Trump administration that placed sanctions on the German and Russian operators who were building Nord Stream 2, a successor pipeline.

In September 2022, the section of piping that runs below the Baltic Sea was sabotaged. A Ukrainian commando is accused of being behind the explosion. The trial against one of the suspects started in Germany last week, and it promises to give us a lot of details of this operation, including information about the extent of Zelensky’s involvement.

Germans will be watching closely. Like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, the hard-Right Alternative for Germany is also opposed to Ukraine aid. The AfD has, over the past year, enjoyed a fast rise in the opinion polls. The Ukraine war is one of the themes most central to its campaign, and the trial will be a gift to them that will keep on giving.

Trump’s negotiators recently pressed the Europeans to release parts of the frozen Russian assets: to make them available for a special Ukraine investment fund, rather than directing them toward further fighting. The Europeans rejected this request, because their plan is to fund Ukraine’s war with Russian money. I am reminded of the old Thatcher joke about why socialism does not work: because socialists run out of other people’s money. If the EU got its wish and were able to sequester the Russian money, given how fast Ukraine is spending money, it would not last for long.

Additionally, the EU is exploring the possibility of giving full membership of the bloc to Ukraine, but membership can only help fund the reconstruction of Ukraine if accompanied with large fiscal transfers. Right now, Germany is leading a group of countries that are opposing a plan by the European Commission to increase the size of the next EU budget. The Europeans say one thing, but do another: a classic case of revealed preferences clashing with stated preferences.

Politically, and financially, the room for maneuver by the Europeans is decreasing. The Europeans need the US, but the US, having enthusiastically supported Ukraine under Joe Biden, has become first a reluctant supporter and now a country that no longer pretends to support Ukraine. I doubt very much that, come 2029, even a Democratic president would expend political capital on a war, which by then would have been waged for seven years.

Wars usually end when one side is running out of food, oil, or other critical supplies. It is delusional to think that with an oil price at $110 a barrel, the world’s second-largest oil producer is running out of money. The war will end eventually, most likely with a dirty peace deal that will leave the Europeans in shock.

I suspect that it will happen during the remaining two years and three months of the Trump administration. Trump has been too inconsistent for any such forecasts to be made with complete certainty. But I am confident that last week’s decisions will go down as the turning point in this war.

Europe’s leaders chose forever war. They labeled Vladimir Putin the new Hitler. Once they had done so, it was impossible to envision any agreement with him. Like Donald Trump, who had hoped that shock-and-awe over Tehran would trigger an internal coup or rebellion that might topple the Islamic Republic, European leaders placed their bets on the prospect that the combination of tough sanctions on Russia and arms for Ukraine would topple Putin. It didn’t.

Four years of sanctions and war have achieved the opposite result. They rebalanced Russia’s current account, energized factories that lay dormant since the end of the Soviet Union, transferred foreign-owned companies to Russian oligarchs and kept oligarchic profits within Russia. Thus, the sanctions combined with military Keynesianism to stabilize Putin’s reign. Meanwhile, despite its impressive resistance on the battlefields, Ukraine’s economy is being steadily weakened while Europe is trapped in a geostrategic conundrum of its own making and the new oil crisis engineered by Israel and the United States.

Lacking both a strategy for winning the war and an interest in suing for peace, European leaders have ended up struggling to find increasingly scarce means of prolonging the war a little more in the vain hope that some miracle may deliver them from their strategic void or that their tenure will have ended by the time their folly has been exposed for all to see. Meanwhile, the bodies pile up in Ukraine’s killing fields and Europe’s social economies are hemorrhaging.

With Europe’s strategic defeat a near certainty, there are only two ways it will play out. One is that President Trump puts on the table a take-it-or-leave-it peace plan that President Zelensky and the European Union must accept, or else the United States ceases to share intelligence and to sell weapons to the Europeans to pass on to Ukraine. Exhausted by their energy crisis, fiscally stressed, and unable even to maintain the current level of support to Ukraine, German, Italian and French politicians will acquiesce to Trump’s plan. A Europe that has left them high and dry will leave Ukrainians feeling abandoned, unsafe and disillusioned. The ignominy will be complete when Russian natural gas begins to flow again into Germany, Italy and the rest of the European Union through pipelines that are, now, partly US-owned, with Washington retaining a share of the proceeds, while the European Union foots Ukraine’s reconstruction costs in their entirety.

The other possibility, one that will obtain if Donald Trump remains distracted for the rest of his tenure by his Iran war folly, is even less appetizing. Russia’s juggernaut, boosted by the windfall from high oil and gas prices, ekes out the rest of the Donbas slowly, painfully, devouring lives with a ruthless, mechanical precision until, at a moment of his choosing, Vladimir Putin declares victory and announces a unilateral ceasefire. Then, any leverage the European Union might have had to shape a peace and security agenda for its neighborhood withers to nothing.

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What if Europe were to ditch forever war in favor of its second option, the path never taken? What if it were to offer Russia a sensible peace and security pact that extends beyond settling the Ukraine war? Just posing the question will, undoubtedly, trigger howls of betrayal, charges of appeasing the new Hitler, accusations of reciting Moscow’s speaking points. These are the natural responses of having made, initially, the forever war choice which, as already argued, leads to a bitter betrayal of Ukraine and a miserable outcome for Europe.

To envisage this second option, a European offer of a peace and security pact, there are three prerequisites. First, the abandonment of the delusion that the offered pact should contain nothing that Putin can present as a victory. All pacts, agreements, peace deals, etc., must offer each signatory things they can present as great gains to their own constituency. Is there something that Putin can present to the Russians as worthy of their sacrifices during this awful war which Europe, including Ukraine, can live with? I think so. How about that, in the same way the United States can say an emphatic “No!” to the right of Mexico to deploy Chinese weaponry in Tijuana, Russia also has the right to seek security by demanding, as it has done for three decades, that Nato stay out of Georgia and Ukraine? A provision in the proposed European Peace and Security Pact that recognizes this Russian concern is not just a particularly small price to pay but also one that Europe should desire, in view of the dangerous tensions that a face-off between Russian and Nato troops within a postwar Ukraine, or indeed in Georgia, would generate.

The second prerequisite for a genuine peace and security pact is the rejection of the notion that it will have to involve an Anglo-European “coalition of the willing”; that is an army of British, German, French soldiers facing off their Russian counterparts along whatever line of control is agreed to. To insist on such an army is to state that Europe is not even attempting a genuine détente, assuming it to be impossible. The United States did exactly that on the Korean peninsula, leaving behind an ironclad, nuclear armed, huge army to police an impenetrable line of control. Europe cannot and should not want to do likewise in Ukraine. The best Keir Starmer’s “coalition of the willing” can deliver is a sad outfit facing the fate of UN peacekeepers in South Lebanon. It takes no more than a few moments of clarity to recognize that a functional peace and security pact must involve full de-militarization of the contested territory and its surrounding areas. In turn, this requires a spirit of détente based on the recognition that Europe must provide both sides, Ukraine and Russia, with security guarantees.

Finally, the third prerequisite is a readiness to be creative with issues of sovereignty and governance over disputed territories with a view to preventing the type of airtight partition left behind by the British Empire in India, Palestine, Cyprus, and Ireland, guaranteeing permanent conflict. Speaking of Ireland, the Good Friday agreement, a worthy effort to part ways both with the logic of strict partition and Westphalian sovereignty, is a splendid example of how the Donbas and other contested areas can be governed after the cessation of hostilities as part of a comprehensive peace and security pact.

Having stated the three prerequisites for a European pivot from forever war to offering Russia a peace and security pact, and before delving into what such a proposal might contain, the importance of rebuilding channels of communication with Russian society cannot be overestimated. The European Union’s policy of frowning upon, even sanctioning, anyone who dares maintain communication channels with Russian civil society is a form of self harm. This is why I accepted an invitation to address an investment conference in Moscow last week, one that involved no government representatives but did engage a large audience of financiers, technologists, students and journalists. If channels of communication are to be rebuilt, this is the type of audience that needs to get involved.

My visit to Moscow did not come out of the blue. In April 2022, two months after the war’s commencement, the movement that I helped co-found, DiEM25 (the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), canvassed a five-point solution which I subsequently campaigned for, leading to the Athens Declaration on behalf of the Progressive International which called for a solution to the Ukrainian tragedy within the broader framework of a new Non-Aligned Movement. That was the background to my recent Moscow visit. Naturally, a Moscow visit by a former finance minister who failed spectacularly to alter Europe’s course a decade ago is not any kind of breakthrough, at least not in itself. However, what it can do is to demonstrate how Europeans can begin to mend fences with Russian civil society.

Turning to the actual proposal for a comprehensive European peace and security agenda, which I went to Moscow to canvas for, it consists of six parts.

First, Ukraine becomes in the 21st century what Austria used to be during the Cold War: a neutral but armed European country with its territorial integrity and political sovereignty jointly guaranteed by all European countries, plus Russia, under the auspices and in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

Second, the signatories of this Peace and Security Agenda shall agree on the gradual elimination across Europe of certain categories of weapons (including nuclear, chemical, and AI-powered drones). Within this context of deescalation, Russian and Ukrainian troops shall withdraw fully 300 kilometers on either side of the agreed border or line of control.

Third, all war refugees will have the right to return to their pre-2014 homes, with all sides committing to aid their return in practice.

Fourth, the Donbas and other disputed territories that come under Russian control shall be demilitarized and governed in the same manner as Northern Ireland under the Good Friday Agreement. Just as London retained sovereignty on paper but, in practice, shares it with Dublin, while the two communities share power equally on every governing body (from local government to Stormont), the idea here is that sovereignty of the areas that Russia is granted will remain formally within Russia, but free movement within and outside these regions will be guaranteed, and each municipality as well as every Oblast will be governed on the basis of equal representation of Russian- and Ukrainian-speakers. Anyone who says that this is impossible must be reminded that, not long ago, it seemed similarly impossible to envision Sinn Féin and Ulster Unionists power-sharing.

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Fifth, the European Union unfreezes Russia’s assets and removes all sanctions. Meanwhile Russian energy begins to flow again to Europe, with a portion of all proceeds dedicated to a Ukraine reconstruction fund.

Sixth, modeled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established after the fall of apartheid to offer an opportunity to air grievances and to be heard by the opposite side, a similar council shall be convened by the UN, led by judges with experience in restorative justice from South Africa and other countries.

As wars and the fear of war expand their domain, an international push for peace is more pertinent than ever. An inability to imagine what a comprehensive European peace and security agenda would look like is perhaps the worst impediment to its emergence. The above six-point proposal is meant as an example of how to overcome this obstacle, outlining concrete steps Europe could take to break the deadlock and give itself a chance to become relevant again.

Many will ask: how would the Russian government, Vladimir Putin in particular, respond to such a proposal? While no one knows until it is on the table, my recent experience in Moscow tells me that Russian civil society is not only ready to welcome it enthusiastically but also to pressurize its government to take it seriously. Eager to reconnect with the West, but repulsed by the clear signs EU leaders want to see Russia torn apart by centrifugal forces, Russian public opinion is keen to enter into a fruitful dialog on the basis of such a plan — including opponents as well as supporters of Putin’s government.

Last but not least, many of the Russian technocrats, students and journalists I met in Moscow last Saturday told me there was a reason they were more amenable to this particular proposal for a European peace and security agenda: it was put to them by someone whose stance on the Ukraine war four years ago (“Stand with Ukraine but not with Nato’s expansion”) was attacked with equal venom by the Russian government’s supporters and Nato stalwarts. This may help explain the impromptu party atmosphere, following the proposal’s presentation, to which I surrendered happily. Mending fences in the cause of peace takes a variety of small, human steps.

This is hardly a surprise. The EU has shown an utter disinterest in hard-nosed diplomacy. If the bloc had really wanted to be a strategic actor during the Russia–Ukraine war, it would be orchestrating the peace talks rather than leaving Trump and his team in charge.

Diplomacy was a state art the Europeans themselves invented. It was the Americans, however, who transported it into the modern age. During the Yom Kippur war in 1973, Henry Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the time, maintained close contact with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the US. The US supported Israel while the Soviet Union sided with Egypt and Syria. According to records later released by the US, Kissinger warned Dobrynin in a telephone conversation that he had received intelligence that Egypt and Syria were about to attack Israel. Then he said: “The President believes that the US and USSR have a special responsibility to restrain our respective friends.” It was the kind of thing that neither he nor Nixon could have said in public. Diplomacy often sounds very undiplomatic. Keeping channels open is not about being polite. It is about preventing accidents and finding solutions.

The Kissinger–Dobrynin exchange is a quintessential example of backchannel diplomacy. Effective diplomacy does not have to happen at the official level. Kissinger and Dobrynin were not even direct counterparts. If Kissinger had insisted on only talking to the Russian foreign minister, he would not have got as far as he did.

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In the first few weeks of the Ukraine war the Europeans tried top-level diplomacy through a series of progressively frustrating meetings. Four days after Russia’s invasion on 24 February, 2022, official delegations from Russia and Ukraine met for talks in Belarus, in a place close to the Ukrainian border. After three rounds of discussions, the talks moved to Antalya, Turkey, where the foreign ministers met on 10 March. The two sides then held talks in Istanbul on 29 March, after which they exchanged draft texts for a few weeks. The Russians insisted that Ukraine become a permanently neutral state and end its plans for EU membership. In exchange, Ukraine would receive security guarantees from a group of countries, including the UN Security Council members. The status of Crimea would be addressed through talks over 10 to 15 years. That was a better deal than what is on the table today.

The process stalled around mid-April and never resumed. Around that time, contact between the Europeans and the Russians also came to a close. Neither the Biden administration, nor the Europeans, maintained a Kissinger–Dobrynin style backchannel.

One of the important questions for historians to address is the extent to which European governments pushed Ukraine towards rejecting a peace deal four years ago. My reading has always been that the Europeans did not want to settle for anything less than a total Russian withdrawal from the occupied Ukrainian territories. They wanted to see Russia defeated — for their own security too — and were happy to let Ukraine fight on their behalf. But they had no strategy for a Ukrainian victory. And since they ended all diplomacy, they had no strategy for peace either. This, in a nutshell, is why Ukraine is losing the war.

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Recently, Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni have suggested that Europe resume diplomacy with Putin. Neither France nor Italy can afford an ongoing war, now that the bloc cannot fund its support for Ukraine by sequestering the frozen Russian assets. Meloni and Macron are right. The Europeans made a monumental error of judgment when they ended the communication that still happened in the early phase of the war. To be fair to Macron, he tried harder than others.

It would, however, be unwise to resume diplomacy at the level of heads of government or even foreign ministers. The stars of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which laid the ground for one of the more peaceful centuries of modern European history, were four diplomats: Klemens von Metternich from Austria, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand from France, Viscount Castlereagh from Britain, and Karl August von Hardenberg from Prussia. With the exception of Russian Tsar Alexander I, Europe’s emperors stayed in the background. Peace is hard, detailed work.

Today, by contrast, Trump’s much-maligned emissary Steve Witkoff is a businessman, with no previous experience in diplomacy. I recall a scene in the Elysee Palace where the German ambassador to Paris laughed at him for comparing the grand ornaments in the Salon des Ambassadeurs to those of the Mar-a-Lago beach club. The President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has played a key role in the peace talks, is much the same. They are the kind of Americans who bring out the worst in Europeans, but the former have ultimately been more successful than the latter. If there is a deal, the Americans will have been the one to have prepared it. When Witkoff went to Moscow, he spent hours in detailed negotiations with Kirill Dmitriev, who heads the Russian sovereign wealth fund. Business can unlock problems that are not solvable through classic diplomacy.

So, who is Europe’s Witkoff? Given that Kissinger was a morally compromised person who was excellent at his job, I would probably pick one of the many morally compromised Germans. Perhaps Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor who knows Putin, but maintains loyalty to his home country. You do not want to give that job to Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat. She loses no moment to tell us that Putin must be defeated but has never given us a convincing plan on how to do this.

A politician who is sometimes mentioned as a potential interlocutor is Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, who is more of a political realist than Kallas. The EU might be a place in which politicians from small countries play important roles, but that doesn’t mean they can suitably represent Europe in geopolitical power battles. Just look at Vivian Motzfeldt, the Greenland foreign minister, who broke down in a live TV interview after meetings with JD Vance and Marco Rubio. The EU sometimes likes to think of itself as a big country, but when it comes to foreign policy, it really is a collection of minions.

The restoration of diplomatic ties would be an opportunity for the UK to offer leadership, but the four prime ministers since the start of the war have shown no interest. Yvette Cooper, the current foreign secretary, has thoroughly rejected the idea of reestablishing talks with Putin. “I think what we need is evidence that Putin actually wants peace and at the moment, I’m still not seeing that,” she recently proclaimed. Is it not the whole point of backchannel diplomacy to get people to create the evidence? Diplomacy is not about sitting back and waiting for things to happen.

War and diplomacy are two sides of the same coin as the German military historian Carl von Clausewitz reminded us. You talk. You fight. Then you talk some more. The Second World War was the exception, not the rule. The Western allies did not maintain backchannel diplomacy with the Nazis. They did, however, have a strategy for victory, and they won. It is unfortunate that the Western commentary continues to draw so many parallels today with a war that could not be more different.

Based on the imperfect information we have today, the best outcome for Ukraine would have been a deal based on the draft that circulated after the meetings in Istanbul. The second best outcome would be a deal based on what Witkoff and Kushner are currently negotiating.

Yet it is possible that the peace process fails. Russia is seeking to gain full control of the Donbas region, including land in the east it does not occupy. Ukraine is unwilling to hand it to them on a platter. We could be looking at some really bad scenarios. Russia may seize more Ukrainian territory than it currently claims. Ukraine may lose its independence or be reduced to a small rump state surrounded by Belarus in the north, Russia in the east and the south, and cut off from the Black Sea. This is not the most likely scenario, but it’s more probable than glorious victory. Without some dirty diplomacy, I don’t see a good outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Remember, though, the Kissinger–Dobrynin channel was arranged within a few weeks of President Nixon’s inauguration. That was almost five years before the Yom-Kippur diplomacy was masterminded. Even if the Europeans started to regrow a diplomatic brain, it would take time. We should not expect miracles. But if they don’t start now, they will forever stay where they are today: out of the reckoning.

But amid the noise there is signal. Finding that signal, and discerning what the future is likely to hold, is the mission of the Swift Center for Applied Forecasting, where we apply scientific methodologies to scenario analysis and forecasting to predict the future. In 2025, we successfully predicted that major threats dominating the headlines would fail to materialize. We correctly forecasted a significant war between India and Pakistan would not occur; that H5N1 would not become a devastating pandemic; and that the global oil market would be resilient to price shocks despite the conflict between Israel and Iran. Conversely, we identified quieter, yet critical geopolitical shifts, such as the rising risk of US engagement in Venezuela, weeks before the mainstream press acknowledged this reality.

What does 2026 hold? The starting point is to know where to look. With that principle in mind, we have identified specific scenarios for 2026 — five relating to technology and five relating to geopolitics — that we believe are underrated and worth watching. In each case, resolution one way or another will dictate geopolitics for years to come or constitute a significant step toward a landmark in human history.

Technology

1. Will any, or all of, OpenAI, Anthropic or SpaceX IPO?

The potential initial public offering (IPO) of OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX in 2026 would mark a new era for frontier technology. These firms will no longer be AI and rocketry startups, but full-fledged geopolitical assets. Crucially, an IPO forces transparency. For years, the capabilities and financials of these labs have been shrouded in NDAs and corporate secrecy. But a public listing would require the disclosure of risk factors and expenses such as compute costs. It would also require published revenues rather than opaque comments during podcast interviews. It would effectively serve as a public audit of the AI market, revealing whether the path to AGI is truly the profit utopia many believe.

An IPO for any of these entities would very likely to be the largest technology listing since Alibaba or Saudi Aramco. It would absorb significant liquidity from capital markets and would stand a good chance of setting valuation benchmarks for the entire AI and aerospace sectors for the coming years.

Each of the three companies is driven by an insatiable need for liquidity to fund the next generation of capital-intensive projects. It may be possible for all three of them to IPO in 2026. Our forecasters note that the prospect of artificial general intelligence (that is, AI with across-the-board human-level capabilities) and multi-planetary life has captured much of the market’s interest. 2026 may represent the optimal window to convert that hyperbole into public capital before the excitement fades or regulation arrives. However, the capital required for all three to IPO will be substantial — enough to leave a question mark over whether all three will IPO.

2. Will an AI system exceed 85% on the key intelligence benchmark?

How do you measure the capability of an AI model? By using “benchmarks”: suites of tests that assess the model’s ability to solve a range of problems. The ARC-AGI-2 benchmark is widely regarded as the only test that effectively measures “fluid intelligence”: that is, the ability to learn and generalize from novel information. While large language models (LLMs) can pass the Bar Exam by reciting law, ARC-AGI requires them to solve abstract visual puzzles they have never seen before. The average human scores between 60-65% on the test. A score of 85% is generally seen as the threshold for AGI-level performance on this specific benchmark.

Earlier in 2025, no AI model scored more than 24% on ARC-AGI-2. But Poetiq AI, a system that acts as a “reasoning layer”, or wrapper, on top of existing frontier models like Gemini, recently scored 54%. The fact that a small team of six researchers could leverage existing models to originally break the 50% barrier suggests that the underlying intelligence of current models is yet to be fully exploited.

The view persists that LLMs are merely “clever parrots”, but if a model were to score 85% it would be an important development. In short, it would constitute powerful evidence that we are getting closer to creating a general reasoning model. This would likely trigger an acceleration in investment and add fuel to the concerns of those calling to regulate frontier AI models.

Some of our forecasters are bullish. They argue that if a wrapper can double performance in a few months, the integration of these reasoning techniques directly into the training of GPT-5 or Claude 4, the leading models produced by OpenAI and Anthropic, could easily bridge the gap to 85% in 2026. More skeptical forecasters argue that the curve will flatten; the jump to 54% picked the “low-hanging fruit” of reasoning, but the final 30% represents a fundamentally harder class of difficulty.

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3. Will a private fusion energy company achieve net energy gain?

Energy is the hard constraint on the AI revolution. Data centers, between them, are as hungry for energy as are small nations. As such, the search for a dense, clean, and scalable power source has intensified. Achieving “net energy gain” — that is, producing more energy from an experiment than is put into it — in a private facility would be an important milestone, for it would signal that fusion is transitioning from an experiment to an engineering and commercial problem. It would unlock substantial investment and could fundamentally alter the long-term projections for climate change, industrial capacity, and geopolitical energy dominance.

The probability for this event in 2026 remains low. The historical precedent is that technical progress consistently lags behind promised schedules. This precedent, understandably, weighs heavily on forecasts. But new developments contradict that pessimism. While only the government-run National Ignition Facility (NIF) has publicly achieved net energy gain, investors are piling capital onto attempts to repeat the feat in private facilities. Companies such as TAE Technologies, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and Helion are deploying high-temperature superconducting magnets and advanced computational modeling that were unavailable a decade ago. For a private sector facility to achieve this would demonstrate fusion is becoming a commercially viable alternative to natural gas and fission — unlocking a scalable energy source that is capable of meeting the demands of the AI revolution.

A critical development to watch is the intersection of politics, media, and energy. Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) has announced a merger with TAE Technologies in a deal valued at over $6 billion. The combined entity aims to site its first utility-scale power plant next year. Devin Nunes, CEO of TMTG, has explicitly linked this move to “ensuring America’s AI supremacy” by providing the massive power required for future data centers.

While constructing a plant and achieving net gain are vastly different milestones, the aggressive timelines of private firms suggest that 2026 could see a breakthrough for private fusion. If a private company achieves what NIF did, but in a way that is commercially viable, the energy markets will price in a future of abundant power long before the first electron hits the grid.

4. Will Tesla deliver its first Optimus robot to paying customers?

While LLMs displace cognitive labor, humanoid robots target physical labor. Optimus is Tesla’s humanoid robot prototype. There are several hurdles to widespread commercial release of humanoid robots — with those problems including battery density and real-world motion and navigation — but if Optimus reaches the market, it would be a sign that humanoid robots have become commercially viable.

The implications for the labor market would be huge. Humanoid robots do not need breaks and are increasingly physically capable. If their dexterity and reliability improve, and the cost of running them comes down, then they will start to become serious competitors to human workers. Once a robot costs around $15/hour to operate, human wages for the equivalent tasks will be difficult for businesses to justify.

Elon Musk views Optimus as potentially more valuable than its car business, and competitors are on the march: companies like Agility Robotics and Figure AI are already running pilots in factories. Naturally, Swift Centre forecasters remain skeptical that mass adoption of humanoid robots will occur in 2026, viewing pilot programs within Tesla’s own factories as more likely than general retail availability. However, this is a crucial invention to watch in the months ahead.

5. The AI race: Will a Chinese company beat the US models?

The narrative of US leadership in AI is built on the assumption that export controls and superior talent will keep Western models ahead. However, if a Chinese company were to release an open-source model that beats Western closed models on a “time horizon” benchmark — which measures the ability of an AI to autonomously complete long, complex tasks — then the assumption of US leadership would be immediately weakened.

Already, the gap between US and Chinese models is closing faster than analysts anticipated. The next battleground isn’t just about chatbots that can write poetry. Instead, it is about “agency”: AI that can plan and execute complex tasks on its own. If a Chinese lab such as DeepSeek releases a model that tops the charts in autonomy, and gives that model away free of charge, that lab would be flooding the market with free, high-level intelligence. This would undercut the business models of the US tech giants and mean there was a real threat to the US’s leadership on frontier AI.

In short, it would prove that the US’s attempt to gatekeep the future is floundering, leaving Washington with next to no leverage and Silicon Valley with no monopoly. Swift Center forecasters are therefore closely watching AIs’ performance against the time horizon benchmark set by the AI evaluation organization METR.

Geopolitics

While technology seeks to drive the world into a new era, geopolitics in 2026 is defined by fragmentation and the conflicts of old. The post-Cold War order is fraying, and in its place is emerging a new round of protectionism, regional blocs, and raw power politics.

1. Will the Supreme Court strike down Trump’s emergency tariffs?

Since taking office, President Trump has leveraged emergency executive powers to impose broad trade tariffs, including a blanket 10% tariff on all global imports. The constitutional legality of these powers is now being tested in the US Supreme Court.

A Supreme Court ruling against Trump’s emergency tariffs would be a defining constitutional moment for the US in 2026. A strike-down could hamstring the administration’s economic agenda. It could also create chaos in global markets, for importers, having paid billions in import duties, will seek billions in refunds. Such a ruling would force the administration to seek alternative, and probably more aggressive, legal avenues to enforce their desire for protectionism.

Our forecasters note that this is a high-stakes legal battle with the potential for significant economic fallout. The administration argues that tariffs are a national security tool, citing precedents from the Nixon era. However, the Supreme Court has shown some resistance to executive overreach.

In response, the administration might use the Smoot-Hawley Act or the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to provide legal justification for tariffs, signaling that the trade war will continue regardless of the ruling. A defeat would have the additional significance of being framed by the administration as an abuse of power by the courts, hampering the economic will of the people. But a win for Trump would show just how powerful he has become.

2. Will Russia and Ukraine agree to an indefinite ceasefire or peace agreement?

A ceasefire in 2026 would redefine the security architecture of Europe. It would almost certainly leave Russia in control of significant Ukrainian territory, validating the use of force to redraw borders. It would also force difficult conversations about the lifting of sanctions, the reconstruction of Ukraine, and the future of Nato. Conversely, a failure to reach an agreement risks an embarrassment for the Trump administration while prolonging the human, economic, and financial costs of the war. It also prolongs the risk of the war escalating into a direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

A peace in 2026 is unlikely to be a true resolution. More likely is an “indefinite ceasefire” akin to the Korean Peninsula’s frozen conflict. This allows both sides to claim partial victory — or simply survival. The key variable to watch is the terms of security guarantees for Ukraine and how seriously they are enforced.

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3. Will Benjamin Netanyahu still be Prime Minister of Israel?

After two years of war in Gaza, and a shorter war between Iran and Israel, the Middle East is in a fractious state — with consequences for us all. Central to what happens next will be the political survival of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister who took Israel to war. His coalition relies on the Israeli far-Right, making a two-state solution or normalization with Saudi Arabia difficult if not near-impossible. If Netanyahu loses, the probable winner will be Naftali Bennett. Bennett’s path to victory will require a coalition with centrists and possibly Arab parties. The departure of Netanyahu could therefore create an opportunity for a diplomatic reset between Israel and its neighbors.

This year, Netanyahu faces both an election and the resolution of his corruption trial. While the polls currently show him losing to a centrist coalition, the Israeli opposition is fractured, and Netanyahu is a master campaigner. If Netanyahu survives 2026, he will probably move to finalize his overhaul of the judiciary. Specifically, he could seize control of the Judicial Selection Committee and pass the “Override Clause”, which would allow his government, if it has a majority in the Knesset, to ignore Supreme Court rulings. This would effectively end the independence of Israel’s judiciary, removing the last barrier to permanent annexation policies and shielding Netanyahu from his own corruption trial.

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4. Will Reform UK win the most seats in the 2026 Welsh Senedd and England local council elections?

While the world watches Washington, a quiet political earthquake is building in Wales. The 2026 Senedd elections will use a new voting system that swaps “First Past the Post” for “Closed List Proportional Representation”. Insurgent parties such as Reform UK are expected to benefit from this new system, for as they can convert vote share into seats more efficiently than under First Past the Post.

After 27 years of the Labour Party’s governance in Wales, there is a feeling of voter fatigue. Issues such as NHS waiting times and controversial 20mph speed limits have been highly unpopular with working-class voters, who are flocking to Reform UK. Reform, riding high on its local election victories and strong public polling, could take control of the Senedd in 2026, with Plaid Cymru being the other major horse in the race. If Reform, the Right-wing party led by the Brexiteer and MP Nigel Farage, wins the most seats, it would be a historic shock to the UK’s political system.

A victory for Reform in Wales would be more than just a headache for Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Labour; it would be a resounding signal that the traditional Westminster parties are losing their grip on power. Just as voters in the US, France, and Germany have punished incumbents for perceived failures on immigration and economics, Welsh voters appear ready to reject the norm. If Labour loses the Senedd — a socialist citadel the party has held for nearly three decades — it would signal that there are no safe havens from the rising challenger parties. It would demonstrate that the disconnect between the governing class and the governed has reached a breaking point from which traditional parties may not recover.

5. Will the Iranian regime fall?

There is growing unrest in Iran over the soaring cost of living. Across social media there are numerous videos of cars being set on fire during running battles between protesters and security forces, with several deaths already being reported. Many protesters have called for ending the rule of the country’s Supreme Leader, while others have called for a return to the monarchy.

While street protests are not new to the Islamic Republic, the recent events signal a shift in the political risk. The coordinated strikes by the “Bazaar” (the conservative merchant class) represent a historic break between the regime and its traditional economic backbone. Student unrest is common; merchant class unrest less so. This signals a substantial shift in the risk of the unrest turning into a crisis that the Iranian government can’t control.

Already, the Islamic Republic faces difficulty in de-escalating the protests. This is because the driving force is not just inflation, but fiscal rigidity. The regime faces significant spending pressure following the return of UN sanctions and the costs of the 12-Day War with Israel in June. Reports suggest that projected oil revenues now cover only a fraction of administrative costs: perhaps as low as 5%. This forces a stark trade-off. Does the government concentrate funding on security, or on the maintenance subsidies that previously helped manage social unrest? Our forecasters have noted the government’s decision to close public offices in 26 provinces. Officially, the reason for this was “energy conservation”, but given the context of mild weather and the country possessing the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves, it instead suggests the state is running on empty.

On the Islamic Republic’s side is that it remains the strongest regional ally to China and Russia. Iran sends ~90% of its oil exports to China, and China is Iran’s largest trade partner. Iran is also the only country in the region actively and publicly supplying Russia with military equipment for the war in Ukraine. However, with Chinese demand for oil lessening, Beijing’s willingness to bail out Tehran may be waning.

Should the regime fall, the geopolitical realignment would be profound. It would represent a strategic victory for the United States and Israel, while dismantling a central pillar of Chinese and Russian influence in the Middle East. The fallout would be felt directly in Europe, where the loss of Tehran’s drone and missile supplies would damage Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. Regionally, Hezbollah and the Houthis would lose vital support, dramatically reducing their capability to continue destabilizing the region.

Collectively, as we look forward to what 2026 may bring, we see rapid technological advancements matched by growing geopolitical tensions. Yet the dawn of genuine stability across the Middle East may be breaking on the streets of Tehran.

In real life, though, it was so much worse. The highly leveraged bets placed were in the billions, not millions, and the banks turned them into products which they would then sell on to naive investors. From the outside, these products looked just like a safe government bond. But, in reality, they were toxic — just like the three-day-old seafood stew metaphor that Anthony Bourdain cooks up in another scene from the movie.

If there is one thing that everybody should remember about the global financial crisis, it is this: complex financial products, especially the three-letter acronym ones, serve one purpose — to defraud. The only financial advice I ever dished out during my previous career as a financial journalist was that when you meet a three-letter acronym, run fast.

You might have thought that the calamity of that relatively recent crisis would have put an end to these scams. And in one respect it did: banks no longer use them. The problem is, governments do. And the three-letter acronyms are back. We saw this only last week, in Brussels, where EU leaders were on the brink of agreeing on a €150bn loan to Ukraine. That the plan fell through was because Bart De Wever, the Belgian Prime Minister, looked at the small print of the agreement. When he discovered that his country would be most exposed by the loan, he asked the others to share the risk. They said “No”. So he said “No”.

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I am sure the EU will find a way to change De Wever’s mind. And if it is good at one thing, it is at getting people to agree to something they don’t want to agree to. Certain readers might think this would be a good outcome: Ukraine needs the money to defend itself against an evil aggressor. But let’s first take a closer look at the small print of this special purpose vehicle — also known by the three-letter acronym SPV — or “reparations loan”.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU froze some €200bn worth of its assets. Most of that money is sitting in Belgium, with a financial company called Euroclear. This is not an ordinary bank, but a depository, where governments and central banks around the world hold their assets.

Originally, some member states wanted the EU to sequester the Russian money outright — to literary take the money and give it to Ukraine. But this would have been a big legal and financial risk. Foreign courts would have declared the confiscation illegal and forced Euroclear, which has offices around the world, to compensate Russia. And since Euroclear is headquartered in Belgium, the Belgian government would have been the ultimate guarantor. So the EU devised a scheme very similar to the subprime scam 20 years ago — a scheme with the sole purpose of hiding the risk, to make it impossible for foreign law courts to get their fingers on the money. No wonder De Weever was antsy.

Here’s the small print. Step one, the EU creates an SPV — a special purpose vehicle — essentially a reparations loan to Ukraine based on the Russian assets. This means that the frozen Russian money is not physically moved; it stays in the frozen bank account at Euroclear. But the SPV holds a claim on those funds. In step two, the European Commission would issue the debt, which would be guaranteed by the member states. This money is then put into the SPV. In step three, the SPV then gives out a loan with this European money to Ukraine.

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Ukraine gets the money. But can’t afford to pay it back. Everyone knows this. A bank would call this bad-faith lending. It is exactly what happened during the subprime crisis, which started with teaser rates on mortgages. The banks knew that once those rates reset, people could no longer afford them. Under the cover of the SPV, the idea is that Ukraine would repay the loan after receiving war reparations from Russia, which, as we know, is never going to happen.

Let’s return to our movie scene and consider the people in the audience who placed their side bets on Gomez winning her game of Blackjack. In the jargon of finance, their side bets would be called a derivative — something which derives its value from an underlying bet — in this case a Blackjack game. Back in the real world, Europe’s gamble with the Ukraine loan is just as risky. Essentially, the success of the EU’s bet lies on the outcome of a future legal case — that an international court will commit Russia to war reparations, while also declaring our SPV scheme to be legal. So we are betting on the outcome of a legally unprecedented case at an uncertain point in the future. It’s no different from placing money on the outcome of a Blackjack game. Remember all these expert opinions that told us the subprime mortgages were safe? Beware!

But in many respects, this is much worse than the subprime crisis. When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, governments bailed out the banking system, and central banks printed vast quantities of money to keep the world economy afloat. This time, though, it’s the governments themselves who are engaging in these dodgy transactions. They want to dish out a loan of some €150 billion without having to get approval from anybody. And if it fails, who is going to bail them out?

Inevitably, if the EU loses the legal bet, they will have to pay out themselves — with member states first in line. They are the guarantors of the loan. As a result, when the Russians “default” and fail to pay war damages, the losses will fall to the European taxpayer — another parallel with the subprime crisis. But back then, the banks concealed the risk from the investors. Here, the politicians are attempting to conceal the risk from the voters.

They are doing so because they have run out of political support at home. The former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said German voters would never finance Ukraine if it meant they had to sacrifice domestic spending. I think this is probably true of France and the UK as well — not that they would admit it.

France, hovering on the verge of a debt crisis, spends almost nothing on Ukraine. The UK and Germany are the biggest contributors, but even together they can’t begin to fill the gap left by Donald Trump’s decision to cut America’s support for Ukraine to the minimum. Trump will supply weapons only for as long as the cash-strapped Europeans pay for it. But as the latest statistics from the Kiel Institute Ukraine Support Tracker attest, there has been a sharp fall in Western military support for Ukraine. It has fallen from an average monthly spend of just under €4 billion in the first half of the year to a little over €2 billion in July and August. This is entirely due to lower spending by Europe. Essentially, to keep the war going, the Europeans need to implement their dodgy scheme. Their €150 billion loan to Ukraine should keep the show on the road for another year.

But then what?

The Europeans still have no strategy for ending the war, yet Vladimir Putin has good reason to believe he can achieve his military goal of occupying the entirety of the Donbas region. He outspends the West, he has a lot more troops, and he has made some progress recently. Given Ukraine’s formidable defenses, it might still take him another year or two, but the odds are in his favor.

If, then, Putin prevails, the peace talks will not only be about the land and the post-war security arrangements. The Russians will want their confiscated assets back. I don’t think for a moment that the Europeans would blow a peace deal by refusing them. So Putin will get his money. And the European taxpayer, who never approved these loans in the first place, will have to pay out.

The EU’s too-clever-by-half scheme will end up like all those other dodgy three-letter financial schemes — with voters being forced to eat Brussels’ toxic seafood stew.

After two years of conflict between Israel and Hamas, and nine months of Trump’s second presidency, the White House seems to be moving with alacrity. At the same time, officials seem to be trying to ensure that Trump gets credit. Rubio had also handed Trump a note instructing the President that he would need to approve a social media post, “so you can announce deal first”.

The instinct to give Trump credit is nothing new. But why the sudden haste? One reason might be the two-year anniversary of the October 7 massacre. But another key landmark looms. Today, the Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce the winners of its annual awards — and the world will know whether or not the Peace Prize has been awarded to the American President.

Trump has not been subtle in his pursuit of the gold medal. In January, in his second inaugural address, Trump predicted that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker”. Since then, his deputies have often referred to him as “peacemaker-in-chief”, and the White House has been on a diplomatic trolley dash. This summer, while holding a press conference with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump claimed to have “stopped six wars”. “I’m averaging about a war a month,” he quipped. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, used the same line, telling the press corps on 31 July that Trump had ended conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia, Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Pakistan, Serbia and Kosovo, and Egypt and Ethiopia. “This means President Trump has brokered on average about one peace deal or ceasefire per month during his six months in office,” said Leavitt. To drive the point home, she added: “It’s well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

By the time Trump addressed the UN General Assembly in September, denouncing the globalists in the gilded hall in which they had previously laughed at him, his case had been apparently strengthened: the US had now brokered a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Seven wars down, Trump devoted a portion of his address to the prize and how little he cared about it. “Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize,” the President explained, “but for me, the real prize will be the sons and daughters who live to grow up with their mothers and fathers because millions of people are no longer being killed in endless and un-glorious wars. What I care about is not winning prizes, it’s saving lives.”

It would be forgivable to think that Trump’s words recalled Shakespeare’s line “the lady doth protest too much”. The White House’s concerted campaign is evidence enough; the Nobel prizes are supposed to be awarded for feats achieved in the 12 months prior to the award being given out. Hence the rush. But Trump’s obsession with the prize goes back much further. Before his re-election, he complained that, if he were named Obama, he “would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds”. The original Obama, Trump noted, won the Nobel Prize almost as soon as he had been elected. “He didn’t even know what the hell he got it for.”

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It is commonly held that Trump has despised Obama since the latter, then the incumbent president, humiliated the real-estate developer at a White House dinner in 2011. Obama’s easy charisma gave him bien-pensant acclaim and is likely to have smoothed his path to the Peace Prize. Within a year of reaching the White House, Obama joined Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela in the annals of Nobel peace laureates. How infuriating it must have been for Trump that his nemesis seemed to stroll so effortlessly into that pantheon.

And it is a pantheon that has enough popular attention for Trump to have been eyeing it up for decades prior to Obama’s award. Jay Nordlinger, author of Peace, They Say, a history of the Nobel Peace Prize, told me that, in Trump’s formative years, “being on the cover of Time magazine was a huge, huge deal. If you’re the cover of Time magazine, you were like a national celebrity. And Trump has always liked being on the cover of Time.” Some of the most famous past winners received their prizes in the Eighties and Nineties, when Trump was completing his ascent to the heights of new-money stardom and first suggesting that he might one day run for president. The award would satisfy Trump’s competitive instincts and his desire for acclaim. It represents a further crowning achievement for a man who has already reached the world’s most powerful office twice, and it would be the result of his dealmaking: the keystone of Trump’s self-mythologizing. And, given that the award is doled out by European liberals, a Trump victory would feel like a storming of the citadel. It would be as though his greatest enemies were made to place the crown on his head.

So how likely is his success? Fact checkers have been somewhat puzzled by Trump’s claims to have ended conflicts in Serbia and Kosovo, and Egypt and Ethiopia, though critics concede that the President has played a key role in nudging many of the relevant parties into peace agreements. Evelyn Farkas of the McCain Institute framed his victories as missions to pick low-hanging fruit. “In the cases where he can get quick results, he’s been successful,” she told FactCheck.org.

And, for what it’s worth, Trump has had support from outside the White House. Pakistan’s government nominated Trump for the prize, making him one of 338 total nominees, as did the prime minister of Cambodia. Pakistan cheered Trump’s “decisive diplomatic intervention” amidst conflict with India this year, and Cambodia’s PM hailed his “extraordinary statesmanship” in helping resolve a border dispute with Thailand. Citing the Abraham Accords, Netanyahu shared his nomination letter to the Nobel committee in June, writing, “Few leaders have achieved such tangible breakthroughs to peace in such a short time. In these times of great historic change, I can think of no one more deserving than President Trump of the Nobel Peace Prize.”

These nominations will go only so far. Tevi Troy, a presidential historian, told me he thinks Trump faces “two hurdles”. “One is that he’s an American president,” said Troy, “and the second is that he’s a Republican.”

“American presidents relatively rarely win the Nobel Peace Prize,” he added, “and a Republican hasn’t done it since Teddy Roosevelt.” Hawkish American executives did not lend themselves naturally to consideration from Scandinavian peaceniks after the Second World War. Further, Troy noted, the two significant conflicts on everyone’s mind — Israel and Hamas and Russia and Ukraine — are not yet clearly resolved. Even on their own, Nordlinger posits, the Abraham Accords would likely not be Trump’s ticket to the prize because of the ongoing “bloodletting” in the conflict.

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Nor are the signs from Norway promising. One member of the five-person Nobel committee doused Trump’s hopes in cold water with a little-noticed leak to Reuters. Trump’s “lobbying” for the award, “is likely to be counterproductive”, the reporter Gwladys Fouché wrote in late September. “The award-giving committee prefers to work independently, one of its members told Reuters, sheltering from outside pressures.”

When asked if he could come up with any other historical examples of a candidate campaigning so openly for the prize, Nordlinger said, “I’m afraid I can’t.” “No one’s ever campaigned so openly, so brazenly for the prize as Trump has,” he explained. “Nobody, not even close. And usually it is said that campaigning backfires.” Committee members, Nordlinger says, are elected by the Norwegian legislature and thus “the Nobel Committee reflects Norwegian and, more broadly, Scandinavian political culture, which is social democratic”. Judges evaluate nominees on three points: disarmament measures, efforts to hold peace congresses, and “fraternity between nations” — Nordlinger says this is the most important criterion. Trump’s aggressive address to the UN is unlikely to have been helpful.

One White House staffer told me Team Trump has privately written off the possibility of their boss being rewarded for his efforts. The sense at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave is that Trump could bring about world peace and still get snubbed.

Nordlinger’s view is that Trump’s most recent comments on the matter can be thought of as “putting pressure on the refs. He’s making it so that when they don’t give it to him, he’ll say that he was robbed.”

Trump has overcome steep odds many times in his political life, has three more years in the White House, and can count on allies and supplicants to keep nominating for as long as he remains in power. “He deserves that Nobel Peace Prize, he deserves to be on Mount Rushmore, and I think in time he’ll get both,” said his son, Eric Trump. This might not be Trump’s year, then, but there remain wars to end.

As of Monday, Trump’s odds on Polymarket were a measly 3%. By Thursday, after the Gaza peace announcement, those odds had doubled — to a whopping 6%. “Will Trump get the Nobel Peace Prize?” Nordlinger asks. “Stranger things have happened, but not many.”

What did it take to get here? While a ceasefire will not be a pre-condition, the Europeans have been granted some of the assurances they wanted on security guarantees. Whether these can be enforced is, of course, an entirely different matter — but America’s agreement, in principle, to help the Europeans meet their obligations does mark an important shift in this seemingly endless war.

Since it is now unlikely that Trump will change his mind and revert to the Biden-era policy of unconditional, if hesitant, support for Ukraine, we are now left with two possible scenarios for how the war plays out.

In the first, Ukraine and Russia will agree to a peace deal, and the US and Europe will try their best to make the post-war security arrangement work. It is our baseline scenario, but it will be hard to pull off since the question of land is a particularly difficult one. The starting point of the talks would have to be the existing military situation — not Russia’s or Ukraine’s maximal demands — and would then need to be followed by detailed negotiations.

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In the second scenario, the peace talks will go ahead but fail. Trump will then blame Zelensky and actively disengage from supporting Ukraine. Beware of extrapolating yesterday’s show of support: the smiles are deceptive. Trump wants to get out. Like the real estate developer he once was, who has first put a deposit down, Trump has invested political capital into a peace process and he is not going to back down. This scenario would be very bad for Ukraine and for Europe. America would withdraw — for real this time. The Europeans would be left having to support Ukraine and build a new security infrastructure without US support.

This is not really a viable financial or military option for European leaders. After all, their engagement would have to be major. The Ukraine-Russia frontline is, at the moment, about 1,200 kilometers — around the length of the Cold War-era inner German border. Nor does this include the rest of Ukraine’s de jure border to the north and east with Russia, and with Belarus. There have been some comparisons with the situation in Korea — but the demilitarized zone there is barely 250 kilometers in length.

Adequately securing such a large border on the Ukrainian side would take a huge amount of troops — one estimate suggests as many as 150,000 European soldiers. This is a far larger deployment than anyone else has envisaged; Emmanuel Macron mentioned troop numbers in the thousands earlier in the year similar to the so-called tripwire troop deployments in the Baltic States.

And even if they wanted to, European leaders don’t have the troops needed to provide genuine assurances to Kyiv. Johann Wadephul, the German foreign minister, recently admitted that Germany probably wouldn’t have the capacity to send troops to Ukraine. And while the UK might be keen to voice its political commitment to the country, it’s doubtful that it can meaningfully back this up. A RUSI piece last year indicated that Britain does not have enough equipment to sustain a proper three-brigade armored division. Even deploying a single brigade would use up 70-80% of the British Army’s total combat engineering capabilities.

There are other challenges too. At this stage, the easiest way to blow a deal, by either side, would be to refuse concessions on land. The Russian claim for the entirety of the Donbas region, including the parts they don’t occupy, is a maximalist one, from which Russia would have to retreat if the negotiations were to succeed. There are some commercial assets in the region of interest to Moscow — mines and industrial companies based in the Russian-occupied parts — but it has military significance for Ukraine. In any case, there is a long history of European regions being split. Karelia split into Finnish and Russian parts after the Winter War of 1939-40, and parts of the old Prussia are now in Lithuania, Russia, Poland and Germany. Negotiations, though, will be fraught.

But the big difficulty European leaders will face is how to deal with their war-crazed supporters back home. There has been a great deal of cheerleading and regime-change fanaticism in the European political and media space, with many recent headlines insisting that Russia must not be rewarded for its aggression. None of these authors, of course, has a military strategy for victory, because strategic thinking is not what educated Europeans do. They use the passive tense when they speak or write: something must be done, they intone. Rarely, if ever, do they say: “we will do this and are ready to make sacrifices to do so.”

But we do know the rest of the world does not look at Russia the way Europe does. This Eurocentric perspective no longer dominates global discourse — except, of course, in Europe. It is clear that we are living in one of those dangerous moments in history where fate could flip either way. Yet for all his arrogance, at least Trump has a strategy, whereas the Europeans do not.

Today, Putin and Trump are expected to meet and, if Trump is to be taken at his word, hammer out the terms of a peace deal over Ukraine. The stakes could hardly be higher. Trump, ever the showman, hails the Alaska meeting as a decisive moment to “end the war”. Across the table, two men whose own political fortunes have been bound up with nationalist spectacle may soon decide Ukraine’s future. Regardless of what they agree, one thing is missing: Ukrainian representation. And without that representation, any deal may fuel Ukrainian veterans’ disappointment, damning its society to years of political turmoil.

The phrase doing the rounds around the proposed deal is “land swap” — a euphemism that, in practice, means no swap at all. In reality, it would involve Ukraine ceding a vast swathe of territory now under Russian occupation. Should that happen, and should Zelensky be bludgeoned into selling the deal to his own people, Ukraine’s near future could be defined less by recovery than by a smoldering, violent response to perceived defeat.

Unsurprisingly, Ukrainians across the political spectrum are furious with the outline of the deal. Zelensky himself, who is under immense pressure from the country’s political class and civil society not to hand Putin a victory, would find it all but impossible to sell any deal to the public, even if he wanted to. As he has made this clear: “Ukraine won’t cede land that could be used as a springboard for war.” He has been similarly bullish about being frozen out of the Alaska summit, warning that “they cannot decide anything about Ukraine without us”.

Ukrainians remember the failures of the Minsk I and II agreements made with Putin a decade ago, and Russia riding roughshod over the Budapest Memorandum that promised them safety in return for giving up their nuclear arms in the Nineties. Above all, they remember the images of murdered civilians in Bucha and Irpin that shocked the world in early 2022. Soldiers on the front, where the death and casualty rate soars ever higher, and where at least 50,000 Ukrainians have died, bristle at the idea of giving in to Russia. As one frontline soldier put it, fighting will continue “until Russia suffers big enough losses”. 

A deal that therefore fails to grapple either with the causes or the effects of the war — which have never been limited to Nato expansion — will only ever result in backlash from the Ukrainian population. Indeed, it is important to stress that the war against Ukraine stems from the Kremlin’s increasingly paranoid, imperialist messianism, a worldview in which Ukraine’s independent existence is an existential affront. Ever since the humiliation of seeing his favored candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, lose Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election to the Western Ukrainian Viktor Yushchenko, Putin’s state media has peddled myths about Ukrainian “nationalists” and “Nazis” plotting against Russian-speakers in Ukraine. After the Maidan Revolution of 2014, Russia’s dictator acted on those fictions, invading Crimea and parts of Donbas under the pretext of stopping an imagined “genocide” against Russian speakers.

By 2022, Putin’s language had become even more wild. After all, Ukraine’s far-Right held only a sliver of the electoral vote, and no seats in parliament. It had little following on social media and no discernible cultural sway. Indeed, the country’s president was a Russian-speaking Jewish entertainer popular on both sides of the border, elected not to build a nationalist utopia but on a promise to ease the war in the east. Putin’s war against “fascists” has always been Quixotic — a tilting at windmills in service of an imagined imperial conquest by a man who increasingly sees himself as a new Peter the Great, or even a new Stalin.

However dim the prospects of regaining territory currently occupied by Russian forces, agreeing to formally surrender it would be a deep psychic wound. Russian forces have committed war crimes on an industrial scale. They have flattened cities like Mariupol, where 85% of the housing stock was destroyed and tens of thousands of civilians killed. In place of a functioning if corrupt democracy, Russia has established a system of totalitarian torture and control that sees objectors beaten, jailed, and murdered. All the while, children are torn from their parents and sent to Russia, to be adopted and “Russified”.

Moscow taunts Ukrainians online with glossy footage of rebuilt apartment blocks and new public facilities — much of it in fact shoddy — and grotesque images of sites where Ukrainian children are put up for adoption. Toss resentment against an unjust peace into the mix and the response could be severe.

A “stab in the back” myth — built around the belief that Washington and Europe have always been slow to back Ukraine, before abandoning Kyiv when the fight became inconvenient — is already simmering in Ukrainian discourse. Trump is certainly unpopular in this regard, but his predecessor Joe Biden was the target of much ire for slow-pedaling on first providing, then giving permission to use, the ATACMS missile system.

The roots of this narrative go back to 2014, when Germany’s business-as-usual policy with Moscow brushed over the seizure of Crimea. From there, the “betrayal” of Ukraine seems set to dominate every nook and cranny of Ukrainian society over years to come, should the Trump-Putin deal become a reality. Nor is this really surprising: what was the sacrifice of tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives worth if the outcome is not merely lost land but a diminished sense of nationhood — and thousands more Ukrainians abandoned to their fates under Moscow’s thumb?

Some Ukrainians might still look to Europe for answers. The pro-Nato, pro-EU bloc, which sees them as bulwarks against Putin’s war on individual freedom, remains the largest and most powerful force in Ukrainian politics. For its part, Zelensky’s Servant of the People party still leads the polls by some distance. Yet Europe looks to many like a house divided: Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron’s “coalition of the willing” has talked up its willingness to help, but in practice has done little to prepare for a defense of either Ukraine or the European continent. Instead, leaders have gazed on as Trump’s Ukraine policy has oscillated, even as the Kremlin has conducted a hybrid war against Europe. An extraordinary 90% of Ukrainians favored EU membership last summer. Surely that number will not hold if the stab-in-the-back narrative spreads. 

The darkest scenario here is an ultra-nationalist turn, and a politics dominated by embittered, violent veterans in a demographically and economically decimated country hungry for scapegoats. And scapegoats there will be. In some corners of Ukrainian society — including pro-European and liberal factions, but especially among the armed forces — names are already circling: Western leaders are first among the villains, blamed for choosing short-term and commercial interests over saving Ukraine. But Ukrainian military leaders and politicians are not without blame. That means above all military commanders such as Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander-in-chief blamed by ordinary soldiers for the worsening frontline situation in recent months. Should Zelensky be seen to sell his forces down the river, the reaction will be extreme, regardless of how little choice he actually had.

The optics of the Alaska summit will not help here. A camera-friendly meeting between Putin and Trump — two strongmen casually hashing out Ukraine’s future without a single Ukrainian in the room — has justifiably enraged Ukrainians across the political spectrum. If the deal is rammed through over Kyiv’s objections, nationalists will mine the “betrayal” for decades: it’ll be another Munich, when Hitler was allowed to annex the Sudetenland, with today’s Ukraine betrayed by a West that simply didn’t care. Ukrainians could thus prime themselves for another war, choosing leaders whose reputation and politics rests on war — or find themselves watching as those leaders, from among a corps of embittered veterans, force their way to power.

Support for nationalist factions today is still limited. The far-Right remains a minority in politics. In a June poll, the ultranationalist National Corps reached 6%, its highest ever rating. But Servant of the People did not even exist a decade ago, and Ukraine’s political scene is not dominated by entrenched parties. Especially in the wake of a devastating war, it is deeply susceptible to whirlwind forces transforming nations everywhere: online mobilization, norm-shattering rhetoric, the rise of new parties from nowhere, and the demolition of old political truths. Not long ago, most Ukrainians opposed Nato membership. Indeed, not long ago, Zelensky was a TV comedian. There is nothing to prevent an ultra-nationalist rise in Ukraine. 

The question, then, is not where public opinion stands today but where it might go in the next few years, turbocharged by disappointment, social collapse, economic devastation, and a Europe increasingly inclined to slam the door shut on a fragile and unstable Ukraine. The Ukraine that could emerge would be defined by military paranoia. Veterans alone would have “earned” the right to set the national agenda. Indeed, rumors now abound that figures like Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the popular former commander-in-chief now serving as Ukraine’s ambassador in the United Kingdom, might enter politics. Zaluzhnyi is no extremist, but others with more hardline views might explode from the ranks of the army into the public consciousness should widespread resentment take hold. 

Indeed, Zelensky’s decision to welcome and thus implicitly endorse nationalist soldiers in the military, desperate for anyone willing to fight, may turn out to be a major strategic error. This Ukraine would look neither to Brussels nor to Washington but inward — rebuilding its forces, militarizing society, and, as some voices around the country are already advocating for, seeking nuclear weapons to reverse the “mistake” of giving up its arsenal in the Nineties. 

Putin claimed he was forced to invade Ukraine to destroy the threat of Ukrainian “fascism”. Yet in February 2022, the far-Right in Ukraine was a negligible force: indeed Russia’s neo-Nazi problem far exceeded Ukraine’s. But do a deal with Trump over his enemy’s head, and Putin could soon find that his fantasy of a fascist Ukraine becomes reality. 

I am not arguing that this is the most likely scenario. Ukraine’s democracy has repeatedly resisted the pull of extremes — from Russian interference and invasion to internal politicking and corruption — since independence from Moscow in 1991. Its commitment to reinforcing democratic norms, bolstered by the EU, other nations, and a large, vocal civic block willing to take to the streets, most recently against Zelensky’s targeting of anti-corruption laws, suggests that liberal democracy may yet prevail.

But nationalists will not hesitate to use force if they see an opening. Complacent Western leaders, and Trump most of all, seem uninterested in this risk. Ironically, this was the very mistake made in Russia in the Nineties, when the West adopted a shock economic policy to “repair” post-Soviet Russia while ignoring worrying trends in the country’s culture and identity. Putin, for his part, knows all about the psychologically scarred veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars. After all, in the early 2000s, he channeled their trauma and propensity for violence into support for his own nationalist myth. Today, his government and security services are full of these men, still willing to use any means to secure and hold power.

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By Philip Cunliffe

Reining in such forces in a post-conflict Ukraine will be a vital task. Peace can be salvaged even from the most brutal and bitter conflicts, but only with hard work, serious negotiation, mutual compromise, and above all, a focus on what comes after the ink dries. The Dayton Accords, which ended the Yugoslav wars in 1995, were the product of three months of intense talks built on years of groundwork, strong-arming from Europe and the Americans — and input from all sides. And even then, the Accords left the roots of nationalism and factionalism intact.

The mooted Alaska plan is long on promises and short on detail. A made-for-social-media deal is unlikely to last. Even those Ukrainians most inclined to peace are unlikely to be placated by a “land surrender” agreement while Russia remains unbowed. At any moment, Moscow could return to the battlefield, retooled and remanned, this time without the blunders of February 2022. Putin shows no signs of making real concessions. His propagandists continue their maximalist talk, and his army continues its scorched-earth advances. 

Indeed, the further Ukraine moves towards ultranationalism to hedge against this continued threat — or in response to the disappointment of a peace deal forced down the population’s throats — the more Putin will claim he is justified in launching new aggression against his western neighbor. The peace deal, far from ending the fight, might only encourage Russia to assault the fragile remainder of a free Ukraine in a few years’ time.

Nonetheless, nobody in the White House, publicly at least, seems to be thinking beyond the next move. Signing a peace deal will not make the problem of Russian aggression disappear; it may even exacerbate the problem. As heart-rending images of burned-out Ukrainian cities and murdered Ukrainian families fade from our screens, we may be tempted to believe the problem is gone. But Moscow will still be fighting — and a resentful, traumatized Ukraine will still remember.

But it is not yet five months since Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the Oval Office ended abruptly — and in humiliating fashion — after Trump dressed down his Ukrainian opposite number, accusing him of “gambling with World War III”. Trump’s months-long charm offensive with Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, was characterized by lengthy and seemingly convivial phone calls that flattered the Russian president’s ego. Nonetheless, it did not budge the Kremlin’s position on the war. An apparently irate Trump, who styles himself as the ur-peacemaker, now claims to want to “finish” the war through other means. On the surface, it seems as if Trump’s policy toward Russia and Ukraine has entirely shifted in the last two weeks.

If Trump is still committed to ending the war in Ukraine, which last autumn he promised he could do in 100 days, then he has decided — for the time being at least — to achieve that goal by forcing Vladimir Putin to back down rather than giving him what he wants. Today, he is not just promising a restored weapons supply, he is even purportedly asking Zelensky if he can strike deep into Russian territory, potentially as far as Moscow. “Absolutely”, reportedly replied Zelensky, “We can, if you give us the weapons.” Is this a new Trump, whose electoral commitment to isolationism and peace has seen him launch attacks on Iran and now promise to use American military might to bend Moscow to his will? And if this new, serious Trump is willing to use such levers to get his way, do his intentions go beyond a change in policy toward Russia and Ukraine?

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The halls of power in Washington are riven with divides over these questions. A substantial group, including, most notably, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, have been vocal advocates for a rapprochement with Moscow, which they see as a means to disrupt the emerging Russia-China partnership by trying to get on side with Moscow and thus weaken Beijing. Meanwhile, another group, including Senator Lindsey Graham, advocates for a more hawkish policy toward Russia that resembles Cold War-era visions of containment and would play well with an American public that remains deeply suspicious of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In recent days, analysts have struggled to understand where Trump stands, given that the president now seems to be as critical of Vladimir Putin as he has been of Xi Jinping, and whether his new approach will last.

The explanation for the last fortnight’s events is as simple as it is frustrating for analysts and Ukraine’s military planners: although the White House’s policy in the short-term may have changed, the underlying logic of Trump’s behavior remains just the same. Few can disagree that Donald Trump — ever since the Eighties, and certainly since 2016 — has been a creature who feeds on, and whose persona has been created by, media attention. It is Vladimir Putin’s continued stalling over giving Trump the grandest of all headlines — Trump as the great peacemaker in Ukraine, Trump as a potential Nobel Peace Prize winner — that is likely motivating the president to change tack today.

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By Thomas Fazi

Trump seems to feed on news coverage that, whether as hero or villain, makes him out as the protagonist of the story: the deal-maker who calls the shots. Look at how often he complains of being treated unfairly by the media, how he stages extravagant shows of signing executive orders and appearing in the White House to dictate the run of political play, and how he even brought a military parade to Washington in June. Trump’s staged phone calls with Putin, his elaborately orchestrated peace talks in Saudi Arabia, and his Oval Office blow-up with Zelensky — all of which favored the Russian president — have come to nought.

Moreover, theatrics sympathetic to Putin now offer diminishing media coverage, as the public have become used to them. Unlikely to succeed, making another offering to Putin would be of little interest to a fatigued public and media. What better than to perform an outrageous volte-face, play the strong man, and generate endless inches of media coverage in articles just like this one? Look past the headlines, and Trump is behaving entirely predictably, at least according to his own lights.

Unsurprisingly, then, the Russian political apparatus is totally unfazed by what seems like terrifying news for a country whose economy is barely running on fumes and which can barely stop Ukraine’s makeshift drone strikes, let alone repel offensive US-made weaponry. The Russian stock market surged in response to the news of the weapons deal and Trump’s talk of sanctions, while former Russian president and current Security Council member Dmitry Medvedev on Twitter dismissed Trump’s move as a “theatrical ultimatum.” Hardly known for his political nous, even Medvedev has Trump pegged.

Should Trump make good on his latest promises — and there is no guarantee that the weapons systems at hand will make their way to Ukraine, let alone be used for offensive strikes on Russia itself — the war might well be prolonged or even turned. That, of course, would still turn on Ukraine being able to strike deep and hard enough into Russian territory to affect the population en masse or to cause fear of a military collapse among the Russian elites. Should massive tariffs or wide sanctions on Russia also be implemented, Trump and Ukraine may even force a desperate Putin to the negotiating table. Until they do, Volodymyr Zelensky and his allies — especially the NATO nations that have been on tenterhooks ever since the American president was inaugurated in January — will at least be pleased with this new spirit of collaboration.

Nonetheless, they will remain hesitant about whether a man like Donald Trump can really commit to a long-term policy of military support for both Ukraine and the Western alliance. In a BBC interview on 14 July, Trump admitted that he trusts “almost nobody”. Should Vladimir Putin find a way to stroke the president’s ego, give him an opportunity for a grand media spectacle, and allow him to make some more headlines, another sudden U-turn might be in the offing. State visits, gifts, and all sorts of other attention-generating moves might be enough.

Meanwhile, there is only one big winner from this chaos. As Trump continues to blow hot and cold with his allies, eroding stability and certainty in both the financial and security worlds, Xi Jinping will look on with calm confidence. Until Trump commits to a coherent, long-term strategy that will ensure American economic dominance and military superiority continue — and that would likely mean continued and transparent cooperation with either NATO or another group of reliable allies, a move that today seems unlikely — the day that China overtakes the USA as the world’s superpower only looks to grow closer.

The most notable shift was from the right-wing ECR group, which includes Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. Previously, these MEPs had supported von der Leyen on several key proposals, but few voted against this motion, with most opting to desert it altogether. Also revealing was the support the motion received beyond its Right-populist sponsors: several MEPs from The Left group as well as non-affiliated Left-populist deputies from Germany and elsewhere, also backed it. Overall, von der Leyen secured the backing of 360 MEPs — 40 fewer than in her 2024 re-election.

A key point of convergence between these otherwise divergent forces is their shared opposition to the Commission’s belligerent stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Indeed, the no-confidence motion also referenced the Commission’s proposal of using an emergency clause in the EU treaty to shut MEPs out of approving a €150 billion loan scheme to boost the joint procurement of weapons by EU countries, mainly to increase military support for Ukraine.

It’s important to note that the motion of censure wasn’t just directed at von der Leyen but at her entire Commission — in particular, her second-in-command, Kaja Kallas, Commission Vice-President and High Representative for Foreign Affairs, the closest thing the EU has to a foreign minister.

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Kallas, the former Prime Minister of Estonia — a country of just 1.4 million people, fewer than reside in Paris — was confirmed as the EU’s new High Representative for Foreign Affairs in December of last year. Since then, she has come to personify, more vividly than anyone else, the EU’s toxic blend of incompetence, irrelevance and outright stupidity.

At a time when the war in Ukraine is unquestionably Europe’s foremost foreign policy challenge, it is difficult to imagine anyone less suited to the role than Kallas, whose deep-seated hostility towards Russia borders on obsession. On her very first day in the job, during a trip to Kyiv, she tweeted: “The European Union wants Ukraine to win this war” — a statement that immediately caused unease in Brussels, where officials viewed it as out of step with settled EU language two years into the war. “She is still acting like a prime minister”, one diplomat commented.

Just months before her appointment, she proposed breaking Russia into “small states” and, since then, has repeatedly demanded the full restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders, including Crimea — a position that effectively rules out negotiations. While even Donald Trump has acknowledged that Ukrainian Nato membership is a non-starter, Kallas insists it remain a goal — despite it having been a red line for Russia for nearly two decades. Kallas has even declared that “if we don’t help Ukraine further, we should all start learning Russian”. Never mind that Russia has no strategic, military or economic reason to attack the EU. Earlier this year, she denounced Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war, dismissing them as a “dirty deal”, which explains why US Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly cancelled a scheduled meeting with her in February.

Kallas’s single-minded fixation on Russia has rendered her virtually silent on every other foreign policy issue. As former UK diplomat Ian Proud, who served at the British Embassy in Moscow from 2014 to 2019, observed, she comes across as a “single-issue High Representative” who is “intent only on sustaining the decade-long European policy on non-engagement with Russia, whatever the economic cost”.

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Her aggressive, unilateral rhetoric — often delivered without prior consultation with member states — has alienated not only openly Euro- and Nato-sceptic governments in Hungary and Slovakia, but also countries like Spain and Italy, which, while broadly aligned with Nato’s Ukraine policy, don’t share Kallas’s assessment of Moscow as an imminent threat to the EU. “If you listen to her it seems we are at war with Russia, which is not the EU line”, one EU official complained.

Technically, the High Representative’s role is to reflect the consensus of the member states as an extension of the Council, not to freelance as a supranational policymaker. Yet, Kallas interprets her role otherwise, repeatedly acting as though she speaks on behalf of all Europeans — a top-down, anti-democratic approach that is symptomatic of a broader authoritarian trend supercharged by von der Leyen.

Despite her proclamations about defending democracy, Kallas herself has no democratic mandate. Not only was she never elected to her current office, but her party — the Estonian Reform Party — received fewer than 70,000 votes in the last European Parliament elections, representing less than 0.02% of the European population. Von der Leyen, though, has packed her Commission with these like-minded Baltic officials — hailing from a region of just over six million people — to fill key defense and foreign policy posts. These appointments reflect a strategic alignment between von der Leyen’s centralizing ambitions and the ultra-hawkish worldview of the Baltic political class. Both share an unwavering commitment to the NATO line and a deep hostility to any diplomacy with Moscow.

Kallas’s anti-Russian zeal made her a natural choice for the job. But rarely mentioned is the fact that Kallas’s own family, far from being the victim of Soviet oppression, actually lived a relatively comfortable life as part of the Soviet establishment — or what may very well be considered the Soviet middle class.

In fact, Kaja Kallas was born into one of Estonia’s most powerful political families — a family whose rise was facilitated, in no small part, by the very Soviet system she now demonizes. Her father, Siim Kallas, was an influential member of the Soviet apparatchik and then a key figure in Estonian post-Soviet politics, eventually becoming Prime Minister before serving as a European Commissioner for over a decade. Few will be surprised to learn that immediately after completing her studies, in 2010, Kaja decided to enter politics and joined the Reform Party — her father’s own party — nor that she followed his footsteps in moving to Brussels after serving as Prime Minister from 2021 to 2024. It’s hard to shake the idea that elite continuity and inherited privilege had a helping hand. One is also left wondering, given her upbringing, whether her aggressive anti-Russian posture is a sincerely held conviction, or a cover for personal ambition.

One story sheds particularly interesting light on her geopolitical attitude. In 2023, when Kallas was still Prime Minister, three major Estonian newspapers called for her resignation after it emerged that her husband’s transport company had continued to do business with Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. However, Kallas dismissed the scandal and refused to resign, claiming no wrongdoing, sparking accusations of hypocrisy: demanding the total economic isolation of Russia on one hand, while turning a blind eye to her own family’s business ties with the country.

All things considered, Kallas is dramatically ill-suited for the job — stumbling from one blunder to the next. Only recently, she managed to offend nearly every Irish citizen by suggesting that Ireland’s neutrality stems from not having experienced atrocities such as “mass deportations” or “suppression of culture and language” — a bizarre statement, given Ireland’s long history of British colonial rule and the bloodshed of the Troubles.

Some blunders are far more consequential. In a recent meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Kallas demanded that China condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine and fall in line with the “rules-based international order”. Yi, usually soft-spoken, responded sharply, noting that China had not supported Russia militarily — but also had no intention of seeing Moscow defeated, since that would simply bring the West’s wrath upon China next. He may have been alluding to Kallas’s earlier remark: “If Europe cannot defeat Russia, how can it take on China?”. That a senior EU official would frame global affairs in such stark, confrontational terms reflects an astonishing lack of diplomatic nuance.

The fact that Kallas felt comfortable lecturing China on international law and the “rules-based order” reveals not only a striking blindness to Europe’s diminished global standing, but also a profound lack of self-awareness about how the EU’s double standards are viewed in Beijing and across the Global South. While loudly condemning Russian attacks on civilians, Kallas has consistently whitewashed — or outright endorsed — Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. A recently leaked EU report confirmed that Brussels acknowledged a long time ago that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza, including “starvation, torture, indiscriminate attacks and apartheid” — yet Kallas has neither condemned Israel nor questioned EU-Israel ties. Similarly, she said nothing about US threats to annex Greenland and supported the US-Israeli bombing of Iran — a clear violation of international law.

This selective moralism has done lasting damage to the EU’s credibility, particularly in the eyes of the Global South. But to lay the blame solely at Kallas’s feet would be a mistake. In the end, it’s not Kallas who should concern us most, but the system that made her possible — a system that rewards the loudest hawks, holds scant regard for democracy, and replaces statesmanship with social media posturing. If Europe continues on this path, it won’t just lose its place in the world; it will become the most vivid expression of the West’s broader slide into kakistocracy — government by the worst, the least qualified and the most unscrupulous.

Last weekend, over 100 first-person view Ukrainian drones whacked four air bases across Russia — the furthest in Siberia — severely diminishing Russia’s offensive air capabilities. Zelensky’s message was clear: we can hit you wherever you are, with technology you can buy for thousands of dollars or less on the internet.

Yet if operation Spider Web was part MacGyver, it was also part le Carré. The Ukrainians had their drones smuggled on trucks well in advance of the strikes. The weapons were hidden in containers disguised as sheds, before being transported into Russia by truck. These were then parked near the air bases, before Ukraine remotely opened their retractable roofs and launched their cargo to devastating effect.

Drones evoke a simple truth: hoard technology, especially military technology, and you centralize power. Disperse it and watch that power vanish alongside it.

Historically, war was an intimate affair. For millennia, the only way to kill someone was if you could see them. That remained true even with the invention of gunpowder. Machine guns and howitzers can certainly fire further, but still require proximity. The basic dynamics were always the same: men and machines clashed on the ground. Success depended on outlasting or overpowering the enemy through sheer force, numbers, or strategic positioning.

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By David Patrikarakos

In practice, that made logistics and supply lines crucial to war machines. And, as late as the 20th century, conflicts were won by states that could deploy the greatest amount of resources against the enemy. The key here was effectiveness (total output), not efficiency (the ratio of output to input). And this is partly why two behemoths dominated the Cold War world so absolutely. Notwithstanding their vast differences, the US and USSR enjoyed almost unimpeded control of their respective nation’s resources — and because they had more resources than their rivals, they became hegemonic.

But drones are different: representing are a step towards detaching humanity from hand-to-hand fighting. War is no longer only about mobilizing soldiers, but rather about sending autonomous machines to survey, target and even strike the enemy. This transforms war for would-be attackers: even if Spider Web’s drones had all been discovered or destroyed, the Ukrainian pilots operating them remotely would still have been safe.

There are broader implications here, especially in the way organized violence shapes society. Whoever deploys violence most effectively is best positioned to secure territories and resources, the foundation of political authority. The Gunpowder Revolution helped drag the West into civic modernity: by increasing the scale and scope of war, it increased the money needed to fund it. That, in turn, sparked the need for more sophisticated revenue-gathering systems, requiring greater centralization, a trend that persisted until the end of the last century.

Drones, then, have reversed this dynamic, decentralizing power and putting it into the hands of groups and individuals — or indeed war weary states facing a continent-sized enemy. Only governments have access to fighter jets and similar: an F-16 costs around $30 million and requires years of training to fly. Spider Web used drones that cost just thousands dollars, and which you can learn to pilot in days, even as they eliminated $7 billion of sophisticated military hardware in mere minutes. How’s that for power dispersal?

The result is inevitable: greater independence for smaller, poorer, or less militarily capable states. The Ukrainians remain reliant on US hardware, especially for air defense systems. As Russia daily pounds Ukrainian cities, they represent a lifeline for Kyiv. But the Americans are refusing to supply any more. So Ukraine flipped the script: rather than beg for more systems to ward off Russian attacks at the last moment, Zelensky’s generals used drones to disable them at source. This sends a clear message to Washington: while we need your support, we can execute high-level operations on our own.

Once again, this technological shift matters politically. That inevitably empowers Kyiv at the negotiating table, while putting pressure on Moscow to update its own air defense systems, designed to counter incoming missiles or aircraft.

Certainly, Spider Web’s timing suggests Zelensky and his generals understand the political ramifications of the drone revolution. The operation hit the day before Ukraine met with Russia in Istanbul for only their second face-to-face negotiations since 2022. This is no coincidence. As well as inflicting serious damage on Russia’s offensive capabilities, Spider Web shifted the power dynamic, given that throughout the negotiations Moscow has maintained its maximalist position.

We must, of course, be careful here: with Russia embarrassed by the fiasco, it will be less likely to make concessions in the short term. Russian officials and commentators in the state media have compared the attack to Pearl Harbor and called for retaliation. State media now call for a nuclear response. Meanwhile, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that, following the strike, he spoke to Putin who has promised, “very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields”. So for Ukraine, it has yielded nothing tangible. Besides, Putin has no interest in ending the war without first crushing Ukraine. Once again, that was clear at the Istanbul talks, when Russian negotiators announced that they would only agree to peace if Kyiv ceded large amounts of territory and accepted limits on the size of its military. A laughable, unserious proposal.

Spider Web may have put a spring in the step of the Ukrainian negotiators, they may feel they can look their Russian interlocutors in the eye more easily. But, alone, it will do little to end the war. As Tim Ripley, editor at Defense Eye tells me, the conflict will likely be decided on the ground, with drones merely supporting a more traditional attritional campaign. Certainly, the Russians seem to understand this. Their summer offensive is already underway: in the northeast, they’ve smashed Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region and continue their push into neighboring Sumy. Now, they’re swarming the Ukrainian lines across the Donbas with heavy assaults, backed by weekly missile and drone attacks — sometimes up to 300 at a time.

The tempo of the Russian offensive is only intensifying as the weather improves. Ground forces are mobilizing for a major push. All told, this is a major strategic moment for the Kremlin. By attacking on multiple fronts, Russia hopes to stretch Ukrainian resources and morale to breaking point. Yes, the Ukrainian air attack has damaged Russian bombers, but the Russian war machine is vast, and it keeps on coming.

And, of course, Putin could also order his own Spider Web. After all, if drones empower Davids, they’re also available to Goliaths: who, let’s face it, have far more cash, infrastructure and human capital behind them. What emerges is a situation where everyone is empowered by the new technology, from great powers, to small ones, to non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah.

How are the Israelis likely to respond to a mass Hezbollah drone attack that overwhelms their Iron Dome defenses and causes destruction and casualties to a degree previously impossible? And what might the Chinese Goliath do to the American one?

In short, drones may auger yet more chaos, more bloodshed, more war.

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And, all the while, the drones buzz on. China, for its part, is developing swarming machines that can operate in coordinated groups to overwhelm adversaries. The Chinese military has also integrated AI-powered drones that can autonomously identify and strike targets with surgical precision — harbingers of intelligent and totally autonomous warfare.

Other countries are rushing ahead too. Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 drones have long helped Ukraine annihilate Russian forces. Israel’s Harop and Heron drones were among the first to showcase the technology’s versatility in intelligence gathering and strike capabilities. As all these nations advance drone technology, they shift the calculus of modern conflict by removing human risk from the battlefield and increasing the scale and precision of military operations.

We in the UK are yet to fully embrace the technology’s potential. Yes, Defense Secretary John Healey recently wrote in the Strategic Defense Review that “technology is changing how war is fought”. But what the Army needs now is action not words. Clever governments understand the need to balance expensive weapons systems with cheap, flexible drone technologies. States that refuse to learn waste billions on aircraft carriers.

To be sure, and as Russia’s summer offensive so luridly proves, many of war’s fundamentals remain: manpower and an industrial base are both crucial to victory. But morale of course matters too, and on that point Spider Web surely inflicted a deep psychological blow on Russia, one set to linger long after those smashed aircraft have been replaced. Indeed, the war in Ukraine is unlikely to end with a single battlefield defeat, but rather when one side’s morale fractures, finally leading to serious negotiations, regime change, or a collapse.

For the moment, both sides still fight with determination, and this psychological tipping point has yet to arrive. How we reach that point is the question. Thirty or even 20 years ago, it wouldn’t have even been in play. The Ukrainians might have been able to wage a guerrilla war against an occupying Russia — but holding off the enemy in the field would have been practically impossible.

Now, though, for all Russia’s resources, it’s not difficult to imagine its morale imploding if a particularly devastating drone assault obliterates a Russian target of monumental importance — or indeed Putin himself, who would once have been almost entirely safe over 1,000 kilometers from the frontline. But this is an age of power dispersal, and that changes things, if not as much as David might have hoped.

Meanwhile, in an interview with NBC, Trump struck an even more pessimistic tone, stating that “maybe it won’t be possible” to reach a peace agreement. Indeed, the conflict seems to be escalating once again — and with the White House’s approval. On 4 May, The New York Times reported that a US-supplied Patriot air defense system currently stationed in Israel is being redirected to Ukraine. Since all Patriot exports require formal US approval under American arms transfer laws, the move indicates direct White House authorization. Just days earlier, Washington approved a possible $300-million deal for F-16 training and support. The package includes aircraft upgrades, spare parts, software, hardware and training for Ukrainian personnel. In addition, Ukrainian media reported that the White House had green-lit $50 million in new arms exports to Ukraine. The deal reportedly includes unspecified military hardware and defense-related services. 

On Tuesday, Ukrainian drones targeted Moscow for the second night in a row, forcing temporary flight suspensions at four airports in the Russian capital and nine more in surrounding regions. The strikes came just days before Russia’s annual Victory Day military parade, an event expected to host international dignitaries including Chinese President Xi Jinping. In the lead-up to the celebrations, Putin announced a unilateral three-day ceasefire in Ukraine, citing “humanitarian considerations”. Zelensky, however, rejected the truce as insufficient, stating that Kyiv would only consider a ceasefire lasting at least 30 days. In a pointed message to leaders traveling to Moscow for the 9 May festivities, Zelensky warned that Ukraine “cannot be responsible for what happens on the territory of the Russian Federation” while hostilities continue. 

Trump places the blame for the collapse of peace talks on Zelensky and Putin, yet he himself bears a significant share of responsibility. Upon taking office, he began the negotiations on the right footing — acknowledging that the conflict was fundamentally a proxy war between the United States and Russia, and that it could only be resolved through a direct agreement between the two powers. This is why the Europeans and Ukrainians were initially excluded from the talks. This approach, though controversial, had a certain logic: a durable settlement required engagement between the actual power brokers. 

But it didn’t last. Within weeks, the administration reversed course. The US repositioned itself as a neutral mediator rather than a direct party to the conflict — despite continuing its military and intelligence support to Ukraine (following a brief pause). That contradiction was always bound to undermine the negotiation process. One cannot be both a participant and an honest broker. Following the recent arms deals, the pretense of neutrality has become even more untenable.  

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In a broader sense, Trump’s diplomatic efforts faltered for several reasons. First, he underestimated the unwillingness of Europe and Ukraine to accept any compromise that might be politically toxic. Both had powerful incentives to maintain the status quo. For European leaders, a peace deal that acknowledged Russian gains would be politically ruinous. The war has become a legitimizing narrative, justifying economic hardship, technocratic centralization and even authoritarian tendencies. Admitting defeat would expose their failures and embolden political opposition.

Zelensky faces even higher stakes. For him, ending the war could mean not only the end of his political career but possibly his personal safety, as he would be far more vulnerable to reprisals from his numerous political adversaries. These domestic political constraints made a negotiated peace deeply improbable without overwhelming external pressure — which the US has proven unwilling to apply.

Had the United States fully withdrawn military support for Ukraine, and acquiesced to Russia’s core demands, there arguably would have been little the Europeans could have done to sustain the war for any meaningful length of time. So why didn’t Washington take that path?

The answer lies less with Europe or Ukraine than with the internal dynamics of the United States itself. For Trump, negotiating such a deal with Moscow was always going to be politically fraught. The American national security establishment — and Trump’s own administration — is filled with hardliners committed to prolonging the conflict. While Trump and a small circle of close advisers may have been serious about reaching a deal, the internal resistance was overwhelming. Faced with this pressure, Trump appeared unwilling to take the political risk necessary to follow through.

Compounding the challenge was a critical miscalculation: Trump likely underestimated the firmness of Russia’s position. He seems to have believed that offering a framework that included recognition of Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine would be enough to secure a breakthrough. He likely expected Moscow to respond with significant concessions in return.

But from the outset, Russia made it clear that any deal had to address far more than the status of annexed Ukrainian territories. For Moscow, the war is about redrawing the global security order. Its demands have always included a new European security architecture on the model of the Helsinki Accords, with limits on NATO expansion and a broader restructuring of the international system — a restructuring that reflects the rise of new centers of power, particularly Beijing and Moscow. In this view, global governance should be based on sovereign equality, regional balances of power and negotiated spheres of influence, not on the universalization of Western norms or the expansion of Western-led military alliances. In short, Russia is not seeking a truce on narrow terms, but the formalization of a multipolar world order in which Western hegemony is replaced by a balance among great powers.

Given that, Trump’s insistence on an immediate ceasefire as a precondition for negotiations was never viable. Moscow has long insisted that a truce can only follow agreement on the broad contours of a settlement — not precede it. Trump also misstepped in entertaining a European proposal to deploy “peacekeeping” troops to Ukraine as a stabilizing force. For Russia, such a move was unacceptable and would have been seen as a direct provocation rather than a confidence-building measure. Equally unacceptable from Russia’s standpoint was the Kellogg Plan, which envisioned a frozen conflict and deferred NATO membership.

On the Ukrainian side, moreover, the US made another strategic error by pushing Kyiv to formally accept Russian control over Crimea. That demand — which, notably, Russia never actually issued — was politically untenable for Ukraine and predictably rejected.

Achieving a settlement would have required a phased approach: a gradual normalization of diplomatic and economic ties with Russia, a slow drawdown of support for Ukraine and carefully managed, trust-building negotiations over a prolonged period — potentially years. But Trump, in his characteristically impatient fashion, sought to force a comprehensive deal within an arbitrary 100-day window. The result was not a breakthrough, but a breakdown.

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Overall, the US approach to the negotiations amounted to a textbook case of strategic and diplomatic incompetence. This is in part due to the inclusion on Trump’s team of figures like Steve Witkoff and Marco Rubio, who lack diplomatic experience and underestimated the complexity of the conflict.

However, the failure of Trump’s peace initiative also reflects deeper realities within American foreign policy thinking. While his rhetoric may appear to break with the bipartisan interventionist orthodoxy of the past, his “America First” doctrine remains grounded in a belief in US global supremacy — as evidenced by his aggressive trade tactics. This is why Washington could not engage seriously with Russia’s broader demands. As noted, Moscow does not merely want recognition of territorial changes; it seeks an acceptance of the multipolar reality of the international landscape. For the US foreign policy establishment — even under Trump — that remains an unacceptable proposition.

Thus, even though Trump may have been genuinely committed, on a rational level, to ending the war in Ukraine, the institutional culture that helped initiate and sustain the conflict remains deeply entrenched. As a result, Trump has not only failed to end the war — he has, to some extent, deepened US entanglement. This leaves him politically exposed. He cannot claim the mantle of peacemaker, yet he clearly has no appetite to serve as Biden 2.0. Walking away entirely might have preserved some consistency. But by staying in, he has made the war his own. Paradoxically, the much-criticized mineral deal may turn out to be more advantageous for Ukraine than the US. It ensures continued American involvement and shields Kyiv from complete abandonment, even if the mineral wealth in question ultimately proves illusory.

But lukewarm US military support will not reverse Ukraine’s battlefield fortunes. A Russian breakthrough remains likely, and with it, a potential Ukrainian collapse. Whether this outcome would force the West back to the negotiating table, or else drive further escalation, is uncertain. In either case, a fundamental problem remains: all parties understand that whatever is agreed on today could be overturned tomorrow. This mutual distrust means that Russia, Ukraine — and by extension, the West — are likely to remain locked in embittered relations for years to come, even if a formal deal is eventually reached.

At the same time, Russia is likely to maintain a robust military posture in the region for the foreseeable future — especially in the context of Europe’s rearmament plans and aggressive rhetoric. This, in turn, will provoke a response from Europe, prompting yet another round of Russian countermeasures. All this will unfold within a deeply toxic political environment, where distrust runs deep and the cycle of escalation remains difficult to break.

For now, then, the most likely scenario remains prolonged conflict, rising costs and deepening divisions — not only between Russia and the West, but within the West itself. The war will not end until Washington and its allies are willing to confront the core issue: the persistence of a hegemonic doctrine that brooks no rivals. Until that happens, peace will remain elusive and the bloodletting will continue. And Donald Trump, whether he likes it or not, risks being remembered not as the man who ended the war — but as the one who inherited it and let it burn.

Inevitably, Trump’s most recent plan will not be the final one. We’ve seen diplomacy playing out in the days since, most visibly in St Peter’s Basilica, where Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky sat down for an impromptu encounter. But also online, where Trump threatened to take action against Vladimir Putin unless he stopped the nightly bombings of residential areas in Ukraine. Given the President’s unpredictability, none of us knows what the final version will look like.

But objectively, this deal is an unfair one. Russia’s leader is a dictator who invades foreign countries, who has killed opposition politicians at home, and who has thought nothing of deploying chemical weapons abroad to assassinate former spies. His annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine violate international law. Europe has every right to be outraged at a peace deal that would appear to vindicate Moscow’s actions.

And yet, this deal should be accepted. Of all the possible bad outcomes, it is the least worst.

Ukraine is fighting an overwhelming enemy while backed by an underwhelming alliance. Europe is far better at debating than actually fighting, preferring posing for photo ops with Zelensky than making hard choices. Europe promises to support Ukraine for however long it takes. But it doesn’t have what it takes. It wants a Second World War-style happy ending; Trump isn’t about to hand it to them.

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But if the Europeans had paused even for a moment to consider, properly, the military situation on the ground, they would have realized by the summer of 2023 that Ukraine was not winning. That it wouldn’t ever win. Instead, the media kept writing stories about the desolate state of the Russian armed forces; British tabloid newspapers treated us to tales of Vladimir Putin suffering from cancer; sanctions packages with gaping holes in them were reported uncritically, while the continued availability of iPhones and Mercedes cars in Moscow was practically ignored. Remember how we waited with bated breath for the Ukrainian spring counter-offensive that year? It happened; it failed.

Like it or not, Trump’s deal will save lives. It will stop the escalation of a regional war that could become a pan-European catastrophe. The West will still need to think hard about security architecture after the war ends. But this plan, or most probably a version of this plan, will trigger that discussion. If accepted, it could pave the way for Ukrainian EU membership. It would allow Europe to wean itself off its military dependence on the US without having to fight a hot proxy war at the same time, because, let’s not forget, Europe is in this bind because it relied too much on the US for defense and overspent the peace dividend as a result. Ideally, we would not start from here.

But since we are here, Europeans should reflect upon how peace diplomacy works. Peace negotiations, always and everywhere, start from an acceptance of the current military situation. This does not prejudice the final agreement. The Versailles Treaty imposed borders that did not reflect the military situation, they reflected the reality that Germany and Austria had been totally defeated. Most wars do not end with a clear winner; most wars end when both sides judge the cost of continued fighting to exceed the benefit of what they can realistically achieve. That is what is happening here.

Peacemaking is intrinsically unpopular, especially among those who want victory, not peace. It is the fate, then, of the peacemaker that they will either fail or be seen as a traitor. To succeed, you cannot take sides. If the Norwegians, who know a thing or two about peace deals, had been given the job to mediate, they would have come up with something similar. So would any of the non-aligned states in the world. And by becoming a peacemaker, Trump has automatically taken himself out of the alliance that supports Ukraine.

The first thing all peace makers do is to start from the existing military situation. Without an acceptance of the current state of play, there would be no point in peace talks. The purpose of the peace talks is to fill in the blanks. The two sides may trade off one piece of land against another. Money will buy stuff. But peace deals are never about who is right, and who is wrong. They are not about historic claims. Nor are they about recognition. Of course, no peace treaty can force Ukraine to formally recognize Crimea as Russian. Other countries decide that for themselves. West Germany never recognized East Germany. Other Western countries did.

I am reasonably hopeful that Ukraine and Europe will accept a version of Trump’s deal because the alternative is just so bleak. But this is not something we can take for granted. Misjudgments abound. Putin misjudged the extent of the Ukrainian resistance; the West misjudged the impact of sanctions, and the resilience of the Russian economy.

But what if one of the two parties made another big misjudgment and rejected the peace process? If Trump were to conclude that Putin is not serious about a deal, as he suggested in a tweet over the weekend, the diplomacy would end, and the war would continue, albeit with reduced US involvement.

Meanwhile, if Ukraine and Europe were to reject the deal, the US would no longer provide critical services to Ukraine like satellite communication and the sharing of military intelligence. Europe would have to step up its financial and military support for Ukraine dramatically, which could involve troops on the ground — not on the frontline, but in the background. The US may at this point start to question the NATO security guarantee. If European countries are supporting a war the US administration has judged to be unwinnable, why would the US want to ride to Europe’s rescue? Once the US retreats, the Europeans would be on their own.

I know EU officials who want this to happen. But not everybody does. Is post-Brexit Britain ready to break with the US over Ukraine? What about Germany? It is hard to say what kind of chancellor Friedrich Merz will be if elected by the Bundestag next week but for Europe to go it alone without the US, this would at the very least require the UK, Germany and France to be willing to lead, and ideally to co-opt Poland, Spain and Italy into their alliance. Spain and Italy are definitely out. The Poles trust the US more than Germany. Emmanuel Macron speaks the language of European integration, but puts French interests first. Europe is fractured and is weakened as a result.

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Just look at what happened in the diplomacy behind the UK participation in the EU’s €150bn defense fund. Despite the impressive headline number, this is a relatively small fund, stretched over many years. Its main purpose is to establish an important principle: that Europeans are much more efficient when they pool their defense spending and avoid duplication. France thought these negotiations would prove a good moment to settle some old Brexit-era scores about fishing rights in the English Channel. What this is telling us that narrow national interests, unimportant in the grand scheme of things, often supersede the common European interest. Putin has many problems of his own. But at least he does not have to deal with fish.

Perhaps one day Europe will be in a position where it could fight a war against Russia. But that is abundantly not the case with the dysfunctional Europe we see today. Apart from anything else, it took bullying from Trump to provoke European countries to only now start to raise defense spending to undo the damage they did to their militaries over the past few decades. The idea that this Europe, in its current divided, petty state, can fight and win a war against Russia is delusional.

We should accept the deal and move on.

The world of February 2014, when Vladimir Putin’s “little green men” began popping up in Crimea has now — beyond doubt — irrevocably disappeared. That was the world of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, European demilitarization and global interdependence. Back then, Russia provided Europe its gas and the United States its defense, while China provided the entire world with the raw materials needed for the technologies which would drive the future. All these assumptions now lie in tatters; that era finally brought to a cataclysmic end by Russia’s attempt to finally subjugate Ukraine in February 2022.

Three years on from that fateful decision, a million men at arms are still battling it out in trenches, hunted by drone armies powered by artificial intelligence. Imperial carve-ups are taking place in the marbled halls of Saudi Arabia while the transatlantic alliance teeters on the brink of collapse. And a new trade war is threatening to send the world economy into recession, risking not only the future of NATO but Europe’s entire social-democratic model. Yet behind the scenes in Europe’s capitals, a dispiriting refusal to abandon the dogmas of old still lingers. And among the worst offenders are those who are performatively leading Europe’s response to Donald Trump: the British and French.

Beyond the warm words over the past few weeks, London and Paris are largely sticking to the tired national strategies they have clung to for much of the past 50 years: the French talking of European autonomy but in reality pursuing national autonomy; the British pretending they are a mini America but, instead, becoming an ever cheaper imitation. The irony is that, as much as it might pain either side to admit, each would be stronger if it became a little more like the other.

As the former French ambassador to the US, Gerard Araud, has repeatedly pointed out, the Gaullist insistence to retain some national independence from America has proved more farsighted than Britain or Germany would like to admit. While the British military has long prioritized obtaining the latest shiny piece of American military kit available — even at the cost of becoming ever more dependent on the States — the French have prioritized retaining national autonomy, even at the cost of paying more for less.

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One such example is the French insistence on a sovereign space policy. They spend around three times more than we do on space programs, but end up with an inferior product to the one we access courtesy of the Americans, according to those I spoke with. Another example is the French satellite communications operator Eutelsat, which now wants to replace Elon Musk’s Starlink in Ukraine in order to protect European autonomy. But Eutelsat has far fewer satellites operating at far higher altitudes resulting in slower connections. European autonomy, in other words, means paying more for a worse product — at least in the short term.

The upside of this French insistence on national resilience is that in the event of a genuine American withdrawal from NATO — and, perhaps, even an alliance with Russia — the French would at least have the foundations upon which to construct a genuinely independent military. Britain, in contrast, has built its entire strategy around the principle of interoperability with the United States, and so would be sent into a crisis, forcing it to question everything from scratch.

Yet, the corollary of the French insistence on national resilience is that, for all their talk of European autonomy, they cannot bring themselves to do what is necessary to genuinely move in this direction — since it would inevitably undermine their own independence. The most obvious example of this paradox is the fact that in Ukraine’s great battle for survival against Russia — a war Emmanuel Macron has held up as an existential test of European security — France has fallen far behind the UK and Germany in supplying the necessary arms for Kyiv to prevail. Why? The answer, it seems, comes in two parts: first, France continues to prioritize national self-reliance over European solidarity; and, second, as one analyst put it to me, France appears “more genuinely broke” even than Britain.

In total, Britain has contributed around €10 billion in military aid to Ukraine, compared with just €3.5 billion from France. As part of this, Britain has been prepared to run down its military stocks. “We’ve given it all away,” said one official I spoke to. By one estimate, Britain has just 14 pieces of heavy artillery left in Estonia, I was told. The French would never entertain this level of exposure. The result, however, is that in the fight for Ukraine’s national survival, Britain has shown more European “solidarity” than France.

Talking European but acting French is the straitjacket Paris seems unable to escape, limiting its ability to lead the Continent into the European revolution it has long championed. Again and again this conundrum plays out. Twenty EU states — including Germany — have called for greater coordination with the UK defense industry to boost the Europe’s resilience, but the French rejected the proposal. Britain has sought a defense pact with the EU in recent months, the process has been held up by the French insistence on negotiating access to Britain’s fishing waters. The inevitable result: French autonomy, European weakness.

A similar story has played out on the biggest question of all: nuclear weapons. In France, the independence of the country’s deterrent is sacrosanct. There is understandable pride — especially today — that it is less dependent on American cooperation than British equivalent. Yet, for this very reason the French have proven unable to move beyond the Gaullist doctrine which states that its nuclear deterrent serves only its vital national interests. Yet, this means it cannot be extended to Europe. And so it is stuck.

Britain, in contrast, has always been much more willing to be dependent on American cooperation, but also to place its deterrent at the service of NATO. In the event of full-scale American isolationism, the cost for Britain of maintaining its nuclear deterrent would be prohibitive. As such, the lack of interest in strategic national autonomy has left it in the similarly invidious position of being tied to a superpower that increasingly fails to hide its contempt for its supplicant partners. Whatever happens over the coming months and years, Britain will at some point be forced to confront the question it does not want to answer: what will it do when the Americans are gone and there is no NATO?

The costs of real independence from the United States, then, remain too high for either Britain or France to seriously entertain. The scale of our dependence was revealed by the former head of British intelligence, Alex Younger, this week when he said there were “no circumstances” under which European troops could be sent to Ukraine without a peace deal — and that even with an agreement it would be “irresponsible” to do that without strategic support from the US. According to one senior military adviser I spoke with, Europe needs to spend around 3.5% of its GDP for the next decade simply to get its armies into a position to independently deter Russian aggression. Until then, Europe’s collective forces would be vulnerable to a Russian incursion into the Baltics without the Americans.

Yet, even at this level of spending, Europe would still have to remain under the American nuclear umbrella. Without it, military advisers believe, Europe remains vulnerable to nuclear coercion. “We don’t have the answer to tactical nukes,” as one official put it to me, bluntly. An answer would cost Britain and France more like 4.5% of GDP — unless the Germans finance it. But while nuclear autonomy remains “the big play” for France and Britain in the coming years — the grand offer reshaping the continent for the 21st century — neither seems capable nor willing to make it.

In Ukraine, as many as two million drones are now produced each year, an increasing number of which are being controlled by artificial intelligence. Ukraine now trains its soldiers to launch combined operations with drone armies at land and sea, while its traditional military is dependent on high-end American intelligence and technology that Europe does not have. The nature of war itself is changing, which in turn, will force the armies of Europe and the United States to revolutionize themselves irrespective of the outcome.

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In turn, both Ukraine’s drone production and America’s military might are dependent on the supply of critical minerals — including rare earths — which are sourced via an extraordinarily complicated global network which must be protected, in the end, by military power. Strip away everything and there is a Leviathan holding a sword and a scepter — the only question is who that is.

If Europe is serious about its autonomy, then, it will need not only its own militaries, but its own supply of critical minerals, artificial intelligence, semiconductor plants and reliable sources of energy. It is for all these reasons that neither Britain nor France today is rushing to grasp the opportunity presented by Trump of “independence” from the United States. Neither can afford it.

Here is the rub. Britain and France are far too poor to play the role they want. Last year, the French government ran a deficit of more than 6%, far outside the limits demanded by the European Commission. Yet it has so far proved impossible to assemble a majority in the National Assembly to pass a budget to bring this under control. Instead, Paris has relied on constitutional powers to enact the budget without a parliamentary vote. In Britain, meanwhile, which has similar levels of national debt, the Government has a large majority, but is gearing up for a Spring Statement which most analysts believe will contain fanciful forecasts of undeliverable spending cuts.

The painful truth facing both London and Paris is that while Britain will need to become more French to thrive in a world of American withdrawal — and France will need become more British in its willingness to rely on others — both countries will need to become something new if they are ever to become truly independent in this new world. Henry Kissinger did note that Donald Trump may be “one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. The trouble is, neither Britain nor France seems willing to stop pretending.

This marks a significant shift in the US approach to ending the conflict. Previously, Washington sought to pressure Ukraine into accepting a US- and Russia-brokered deal largely on Moscow’s terms. Now, America is attempting to strong-arm Russia into accepting a ceasefire as the first step toward a broader peace plan — warning that if Moscow refuses, “we’ll unfortunately know what the impediment is to peace here,” as Rubio put it.

Whether Russia will agree remains uncertain. Moscow has repeatedly stated that it does not view a ceasefire as viable without a broader framework for negotiations. But the parties are far from agreeing on this broader framework. Russia’s demands are clear: above all, legal recognition by Ukraine and the West of Russia’s annexed territories as part of the Russian Federation.

Yet, just days ago, Zelensky reiterated his opposition to any territorial concession, while all European leaders (except Orbán) outlined a “peace strategy” that involved boosting Ukraine’s military capabilities (including through the delivery of air defense systems, ammunition and missiles) in order to improve its position at the negotiating table and achieve a deal that “respects Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity”. In other words, no territorial concessions. This would be followed by strong security guarantees in the form of European (ie, Nato) troops on the ground — a demand echoed by Zelensky but firmly rejected by Russia.

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It’s difficult to see why Moscow would accept a ceasefire under these conditions — especially as it continues to make gains on the battlefield. But that may be precisely the point from the perspective of Zelensky and European leaders: to “put the ball in Russia’s court”, anticipating that Moscow will reject the offer — thus allowing them to portray Russia as uninterested in peace. If so, it would mean that Trump has been cornered by the pro-war party.

Indeed, ever since Trump began negotiations with Putin to end the proxy war in Ukraine, European leaders have been doing everything in their power to derail his peace efforts, hijack the negotiations and prolong the conflict. After all, their insistence on a “just and lasting peace”, and their emphasis on Ukraine’s “territorial integrity”, is, in effect, a recipe for continuing the war under the guise of “peace through strength” — the same failed strategy that has landed Ukraine in this mess in the first place. Meanwhile, the Europeans have unveiled a sweeping rearmament plan, aimed at deterring Russia’s alleged expansionist ambitions — if not actually preparing for a war with Russia.

This is not the behavior of those genuinely seeking peace. The same can be said for Zelensky’s insistence on territorial integrity and European peacekeepers — both non-starters for Russia. Adding to the contradictions, just hours before the US-Ukraine meeting in Jeddah, Ukraine launched its largest drone strike yet on the Moscow region, killing at least three people — an unusual way to enter peace talks.

At this stage, the most probable outcome is therefore a continuation of the war — at least in the short term. This would be the worst possible way forward for Ukraine: the longer the war continues, the worse Ukraine’s position will become. However, from Zelensky’s standpoint, it makes sense. If the war were to end, his political career would likely be over — and, in a more extreme sense, his very life could be at risk. In other words, Ukraine’s interests aren’t necessarily the same as Zelensky’s.

The same goes for Europe. From the perspective of Europe’s core interests, it is entirely irrational. Far from protecting Europe, the continent’s military build-up could very well create the very danger it purportedly seeks to avoid. Russia has neither the means nor the intent to invade Europe, yet the continuation of the proxy war, and Europe’s rearmament plans, only increase the risk of escalation. This is the exact dynamic that we saw play out in the case of Nato’s eastward expansion, and then in Ukraine.

Yet for the current European leadership, admitting defeat in Ukraine would be a massive political blow — especially given the steep economic toll borne by ordinary Europeans. The war has arguably become the sole source of purpose for EU leaders; without it, their failures would become painfully obvious. Meanwhile, the massive increase in defense spending, and the escalation of tensions, will further empower military-industrial lobbies and solidify the elites’ grip over European society by undermining welfare states and continuing their stifling of democracy under the guise of “fighting Russian interference” — as we are seeing in Romania.

Escalating tensions with Russia also offers a chance to further centralize power within the supranational arm of the EU — the European Commission. As Politico reported: “National capitals fear European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will exploit this crisis to extend Brussels’ powers to new areas and strengthen her influence vis-à-vis national governments.”

Yet it would be a mistake to view the current transatlantic rift solely through the lens of the diverging interests of the European and American leaderships. Beyond these differences, there may be deeper dynamics at play: a coordination between Europe, the Democratic establishment and the liberal-globalist faction of the US permanent state — the web of entrenched interests spanning American bureaucracy, security state and military-industrial complex. These networks all have a shared interest in derailing peace talks and disrupting Trump’s presidency.

The US has, of course, a long history of political influence in Europe. Over the decades, it has built strong institutional ties with the state apparatuses of Western European countries, particularly among their defense and intelligence services. Additionally, the US establishment exercises considerable influence over European public discourse through mainstream English-language media outlets and think tanks. These organizations, such as the German Marshall Fund, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council, help shape the political narratives that dominate European society — and indeed today are at the forefront of pushing the idea that “no agreement is better than a bad one.”

Its origins lie in the Cold War, with the US actively promoting European integration as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. In other words, the EU, especially through its earlier iterations, has always been wedded to Atlanticism, and this has only intensified post-1991. This is why the EU’s technocratic establishment — specifically the European Commission — has historically been more aligned with America than European national governments. Ursula von der Leyen, dubbed “Europe’s American president”, is a prime example of this alignment, working tirelessly to maintain the EU’s commitment to America’s hawkish geopolitical strategy, particularly regarding Russia and Ukraine.

A key tool in this alliance has always been NATO, which today plays a key role in countering Trump’s efforts to shift the US approach towards Russia. In this context, Europe’s stance, though ostensibly aimed at Trump, stems from the recognition that elements within the US ruling class strongly oppose Trump’s overtures to Putin, harbor deep animosity toward Russia, and view the President’s threats to disengage from NATO and undermine other pillars of the post-war order as a strategic challenge to the systems that have upheld American hegemony for decades.

In other words, what on the surface appears to be a clash between Europe and the US may actually be, in a more fundamental sense, a struggle between different factions of the US empire — and, to a large degree, within the US establishment itself — waged through European proxies. After all, many of today’s European leaders have strong connections to these networks.

This could explain the “irrational” policies of those leaders, at least from the perspective of Europe’s objective interests — first, their blind support of the US-led proxy war in Ukraine, and now their insistence on continuing the war at all costs. According to this telling, the objectives of the transatlantic establishment appear quite clear: to demonize Trump, portraying him as a “Putin appeaser”; and to stoke European anxieties over their military vulnerability, including by inflating the Russian threat, in order to push the public into accepting increased defense spending and the continuation of the war for as long as possible.

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Neither side in this transatlantic civil war truly has Europe’s interests at heart. The Trumpian faction deems Europe as an economic rival, with Trump himself repeatedly criticizing the EU, calling it an “atrocity” designed to “screw” America. Just last week, he announced plans to impose 25% tariffs on European goods “very soon”. On the other hand, the liberal-globalist faction views Europe as a critical front in the proxy war against Russia.

In this context, a scenario in which Europeans prolong the war in Ukraine — at least in the short term — could be seen as a compromise between the two factions. The US can extricate itself from the Ukrainian quagmire while pursuing rapprochement with Russia and shifting its focus to China and Asia-Pacific, all while placing the blame for the failure to achieve peace squarely on Zelensky and the Europeans.

Meanwhile, Europe’s continued involvement in the war ensures its ongoing economic and geopolitical separation from Russia, and reinforces its continued economic dependence on the US — especially in the context of its defense spending hike, much of which would flow to the US military-industrial complex. At the same time, the European representatives of the liberal-globalist establishment would continue to use the Russian threat to entrench their power. Overall, this arrangement could be seen as acceptable by both sides.

In other words, as the geopolitical researcher Brian Berletic has suggested, what is often presented in the media as an unprecedented “transatlantic rift” may, in fact, be more of a “division of labor” in which the Europeans maintain the pressure on Russia while the US turns its attention to China. What’s worse, the scenario wouldn’t change that much even if some kind of peace deal were eventually worked out. Europe would bear both the cost and the responsibility for post-war security arrangements, while remaining locked in a new Cold War with Russia — all while the United States secures its control over Ukraine’s resources.

The long-term effects of this strategy would leave Europe in a perpetual state of instability, its resources drained by ongoing defense spending and its political autonomy further undermined. The true losers in this arrangement would be the people of Europe — and, of course, Ukraine — who will continue to bear the burden of this geopolitical tug-of-war.

Over the weekend, Trump and Vance ordered Ukraine’s President Zelensky to “make a deal with Russia or we’re out”. In the ensuing international pandemonium, Keir Starmer stood up and promised that Britain would step into the breach, along with a “coalition of the willing” and perhaps even with all 25 of our tanks. Now, Britain’s well-fed Gen X commentariat is working itself into a bipartisan militaristic frenzy, all Churchill, Union Jacks, and “standing up to bullies”.

From the Right, Julia Hartley-Brewer encouraged everyone to watch the Second World War movie Darkest Hour to “learn something about how you should deal with the threat from dictators like Putin”. From the Left, Dan Hodges suggested that anyone who supported Trump’s ceasefire plan over Zelensky’s desire to continue fighting was no better than the Nazi propagandist “Lord Haw-Haw”. And LBC’s Matthew Wright lectured John, a 70-year-old Cockney, on the lessons of Munich in 1938.

This generation came of age in the End of History era, in which the kind of hard-edged patriotism that inspires young men to enlist in armies seemed obsolete, hopefully for good. In its place emerged something softer: a vision of nationhood as without enemies, only friends we hadn’t met yet. Now, though, the world is changing. Can this kind of inclusive patriotism still awaken the fighting spirit, in an emergency? The Britpoppers have, until now, presided over a world sufficiently peaceful that this question never really came up. But as the world has grown more dangerous, the shrillness of their bellicosity suggests they’re worried the answer might be “no”.

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Starmer himself is arguably himself a post-national Britpopper par excellence. He declares himself “proud of being patriotic”, though the Tories demur; for example Robert Jenrick recently called him a “quisling” for seeking to hand control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. More generally, conservatives of both small and large C varieties accuse his regime of harboring deep animus toward Britain, as expressed in Labour policy toward anything even tenuously English-coded, from independent schools to small farmers, provincial churches, and even history itself.

How does this add up? The explanation is simple: Starmer is all for Britpopper patriotism, of the Spice Girls Union Jack and globalization variety: the kind where national identity is lightly worn, inclusive, and adequately expressed by “British Values”, like a Three Lions football shirt, for sale to anyone who wants to wear one. By contrast, the older, harder style of patriotism saw nations as having both friends and enemies. But since the war, and especially since the End of History, this version has become indelibly associated with racism, jingoism, and hostile, exclusionary sentiments. Starmer’s not for that.

The gap between this End of History Britpopper patriotism, and the harder-edged one that preceded it, was captured in vivid microcosm in the LBC exchange between Matthew Wright and John the Cockney. John tried to explain to Wright that Britain going to war today would be a non-starter, simply because patriotic solidarity has ebbed along with ethnic homogeneity. He was circumspect in his phrasing, saying only that Britain can’t fight because “we haven’t got the people any more”. He continued with the example of how the East End Cockneys left London and “ran for refuge”. And though he doesn’t say what they were running from, the clear implication is that he’s referring to that area’s well-documented postwar demographic change. In John’s view, those who replaced the Cockneys are unlikely to be as willing as they were, to fight for Britain: “If you went by these schools in the morning…you know…it’s unbelievable. Them kids wouldn’t be fighting.”

He doesn’t say so explicitly, but the clear implication is that John believes the children of immigrants would be less willing than Cockneys to fight for their adopted country. Wright catches the hint and rejects it forcefully: “How do you know? Have you spoken to any?”. John hasn’t, of course, and is dismissed; another smack-down victory for tolerant Britpopperism. For from the perspective of soft patriotism, there’s no obvious reason why the people who live in London now should experience this sentiment any less than those who lived there a century ago.

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Who is right? Just last month, a Times report suggested only 11% of Gen Z would be willing to fight for Britain, which they aren’t proud of and think is “racist”. The published report didn’t break these views down by interviewees’ ethnicity, so there’s no way of knowing if there’s anything to the imputation made by John the Cockney. But when Rishi Sunak floated mandatory conscription for 18-year-olds just before the last election, vox-pop interviews suggested that many young people rejected the idea of British military service out of hand, and in some cases, cited immigrant heritage as grounds for refusal.

In any case, something has clearly gone very wrong with the sense of solidarity upon which military conscription is founded, within the generation upon whom conscription would fall in extremis. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is at least potentially an existential threat to national security. And if there’s a desperate edge to the Britpoppers’ recent spate of Churchill-posting, it surely lies in their dawning, horrified realization of their generation’s contribution to this predicament.

I’m just about old enough to remember Britpopperism coalescing in the late 1990s. As I exited my teens, all was ironic Union Jack iconography and the reclamation and productization of British culture. It wasn’t just London that was to be re-gentrified; it was everything, just this time a bit more inclusive, tolerant, welcoming and non-jingoistic. It was, on its own terms, a sincere utopian vision. It produced a Britain at once shinier, cooler and more optimistic than the dreary Major-era one, but also a Britain indefinably more twee: a culture playing itself in caricature, for an audience of investors and tourists, paradigmatically in the oeuvre of Richard Curtis but also in any BBC costume drama you care to name, and lately, notably, the Paddington Bear movie franchise.

With this twee-ification, too, came a transformation of history and culture proper to the neutered, pasteurized “British Values”: again, a genuinely utopian effort to preserve the solidaristic effect of national fellow-feeling while discarding its more exclusionary aspects. Concurrently, too, something equivalent was afoot on the Continent, in the European Union project: the dream of a permanent end to European conflict, delivered by ever-closer political and economic union of European peoples.

But this continent-wide retreat into soft patriotism always tacitly relied on the stability and enduring existence of the US-led international order: an order that, ultimately, had to be backed up by hard power and paid for by someone. In Europe especially, the identity of this someone remained, for the most part, delicately unstated: after all, how could leadership be safely entrusted to any one European state? That prospect bore too great a risk of reviving unhappy and all too recent intra-European rivalries.

The solution had been, literally, to defang Europe: that is, to subordinate all European defense to hegemonic American power. American foreign policy leaders were always ambivalent about this arrangement, but seem historically to have accepted it as the price of ensuring a relatively internally unified European ally for American geopolitical priorities. Lately, though, Trumpist foreign policy thinkers have been signaling their wish to adjust this arrangement.

So what does this imply for the style of post-national peace and plenty enjoyed by the Britpoppers? We can perhaps understand their dismay: American withdrawal, if it happened, would mean losing the fundamental enabling condition for the entire Britpopperanschauung; perhaps even the return of intra-European conflict. It is a genuinely frightening prospect. So all the current international brouhaha over Ukraine can be understood as a negotiation over whether, or how far, this is actually going to happen. And Starmer’s recent spate of flag-waving, militaristic public pronouncements makes perfect sense, understood as an effort to provide European leaders a face-saving means of acceding to defense spending increases Trump has requested, without looking too slavishly obedient to a POTUS whose style they dislike. Perhaps Starmer hopes that such gestures will forestall an overall American withdrawal, from its longstanding role underwriting European stability.

But assuming this is right, can Britain and Europe follow through on such noises to American satisfaction? The difficulty here is at least twofold. Firstly, as Wolfgang Munchau has pointed out, after some decades of comfortable post-nationalism European defense capability is woefully etiolated. To this we can also add the question of whether the current British regime commands enough public affection to expect patriotic service when a growing subset of the electorate regards their government as fundamentally illegitimate – not least thanks to a perceived cross-party refusal to respond to popular demand and reduce immigration.

But whether or not Cockney John is right about migrants’ likely attitude to conscription, mass migration is arguably an effect of soft Britpopper patriotism rather than its cause. That is: it was the Britpopper vision of national identity as fuzzy, open, and opt-in that enabled the political consensus in favor of mass migration to form. And if it’s really true that only 11% of British youth would be willing to fight for Britain, that means 89% wouldn’t. Recent figures suggest about 25% of young British people are from minority ethnic backgrounds. This suggests that at least some – maybe a lot – of the young people swearing off patriotism must be white British. Even if Cockney John does have a point, migration is clearly not the only thing killing British patriotism.

And this points to the most profound way that Britpoppers have created our defense predicament: it’s their kids who were raised with the soft-patriotic, End-of-History version of national identity. And as it turns out, an ingroup without an outgroup doesn’t seem potent enough to inspire any kind of warlike spirit. So maybe Britpoppers are frenziedly banging the drums of war now, because they’ve realized it was them.

In their certainty that the American security-blanket would last forever, many raised their own kids to believe in a version of patriotism with only friends, no enemies. Now, belatedly, they’ve realized that actually there are plenty of enemies still out there. But their kids don’t believe them. So the yelling is perhaps an attempt, all too late, to be heard over their offspring’s AirPods. Should it fail, we will need to ask, with some urgency: who will don the “boots” Starmer has promised “on the ground”? I doubt somehow it’ll be the Cool Britannia generation.

The absurdity of the European position was perhaps best captured in its full hubris last year by the historian and writer Anne Applebaum when she won a prestigious German peace prize. During her acceptance speech, she maintained that victory was more important than peace, asserting that the West’s ultimate goal should be regime change in Russia. “We must help Ukrainians achieve victory, and not only for the sake of Ukraine,” she said. “If there is even a small chance that military defeat could help end this horrific cult of violence in Russia, just as military defeat brought an end to the cult of violence in Germany, we should take it.” This is the Second World War model in its purest form.

But most wars do not fit that pattern, they generally end with complex peace deals. A far better model for the current conflict would be the Thirty Years’ war that raged in central Europe from 1618 until 1648, and which pitched the Holy Roman Empire against the protestant towns and municipalities supported by Sweden and the Netherlands.

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That war did not end with glorious victory for any of the involved parties. But it did end with one of the most important peace treaties of all time: the Peace of Westphalia. One of the important principles it established was that of non-interference in other countries’ domestic policies. It laid the foundation of the modern nation state and marked the beginning of a golden age of European politics, art and science.

Russia’s conflict with the West has gone on for almost as long. Vladimir Putin has waged war in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine and Syria in an attempt to regain those spheres of influence lost after the breakdown of communism in 1990. And without some sort of peace deal, Putin is certain to keep pressing the Russian advantage, with a strategy that may yet involve the Baltic states and Poland.

It is dangerous for Europe to insist, instead, on victory. For while Trump has talked a lot of nonsense about Zelensky and the war, he is right in one critical aspect. Without America, there is no road to victory for Ukraine. This is not primarily about weapons, ammunition, and financial aid, but about satellite support and intelligence. If the US were to switch off the satellites and stop the flow of information, the Europeans have no way of plugging the gap. Without the US, it’s over for Ukraine.

Not only has Europe failed to grasp this, it has also failed to map out a strategic path to victory. Politicians, journalists and academics parrot meaninglessly, that Europe will do whatever it takes. Or they assert that Putin will blink first, if only the war goes on for a little while longer. Or that the Russian economy will collapse as sanctions take their toll. But solidarity is not a strategy. Virtue signaling is not a strategy. Sanctions are not a strategy if the primary goal is to minimize the pain to ourselves.

A strategy is something that is costed, politically stress-tested, and that responds to different scenarios. A strategy has primary targets, together with an agreed definition of second-best outcomes. A strategy also has a clear exit route mapped out. Europe has nothing.

A credible path for a Ukrainian victory would have started three years ago with a massive expansion of military spending by all European NATO countries. There should have been an immediate expansion of military industrial capacity, which has been depleted in most western countries, and a concerted political campaign to organize trade-offs between other spending priorities and defense.

But Germany, France and the UK, those European countries which matter most, didn’t act back then and now all lack the fiscal headroom to corral such an approach. We have not figured out how we can support Ukraine and stay solvent. The most desperate idea has been to plunder Russia’s $300m in foreign reserves, which are currently frozen. Clearly this hasn’t been thought through. If that were to happen, the risk is that Euroclear, the Brussels-based financial depository where the reserves are held, could face a slew of lawsuits and even bankruptcy. The EU would be forced to spend tens of billions to recapitalize the company — potentially costing more than the aid to Ukraine. The trust in Europe as a safe place for assets would be lost and we could end up with a full-blown financial crisis.

Without a costed exit strategy now, and as America turns away, how then is the EU to defend itself in the future? Even if the EU were to set itself an agreed trajectory towards military spending of 3% of GDP by 2030, and to pool their procurement to make defense spending more efficient, I struggle to see how the continent can find the unity and determination to replace the US as guarantor for our security. Kaja Kallas, High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, laughably exemplified Europe’s myopic attitude to strategy when she said “the free world needs a new leader”. This is preposterous, typical of European grandstanding. The EU, with its veto rights, its qualified majority voting and the explicit exclusion of defense from the single market, is structurally unsuited for foreign and security policy in a Hobbesian world. We couldn’t be further from a Westphalia moment.

We have been here before. Angela Merkel talked about European strategic independence from the US in 2018, after a disastrous meeting with Trump. But she did not put any political capital behind the idea because she did not want to pay the political price.

A structural increase in defense spending would require sacrifice. The US spends 3.5% of its GDP on defense. In 2023, the 27 EU countries spent an average of 1.6% of EU GDP. This gap of almost 2 percentage points arises because we Europeans spend the money on other things. Germany has a gold-plated social system. People are entitled to a basic citizens’ income whether they work or not. Germany has also given itself a budget of €150bn for the energy transition. The US, meanwhile, has food stamps, and no net zero policy. You cannot do it all. There are necessary trade-offs involved which the Europeans have not even begun to discuss.

In their desperation, though, the Europeans are now talking about funding an increase in defense spending through debt. This is economically insane. For that reason, it will also fail to achieve its declared goal — to deter an enemy attack. The credibility of our security policies depends on a willingness to finance them. Defense spending should be funded through current revenue. If you do try to do this through debt, the bond vigilantes are going to get you before Putin does.

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Putin must surely see that Europe is desperate. The UK only managed to increase its 2027 military spending target from 2.3% to 2.5% by cutting its foreign aid budget. Meanwhile, France’s divided politics has left the country on an unsustainable fiscal path, even as the Germans are grappling with their own fiscal rules. This molly-coddled, self-absorbed Europe is not about to fight and win a war against Russia. We applaud speeches calling for regime change in Moscow. But we want someone else to do it for us just like in the Second World War. The difference is that back then, America was willing to play a progressively stronger part. This time, the US is in open retreat.

If the Europeans were smart, they would take Zelensky to one side, without the cameras, and tell him that the game is up, and that he should cut a deal with Trump now. They should insist that what the President was trying to negotiate before the Oval Office showdown is as good as anything Ukraine will ever get — the minerals deal will keep the US engaged in the besieged nation’s future. For now, though, it seems clear that Europe and Ukraine are currently asking for more than Trump is willing to concede, especially since the White House is convinced that they aren’t ready for peace.

Seeking victory, Zelensky walked straight into a trap in the White House last week. He may have been more at ease with his European friends in London who cajoled him with warm words and big promises. But their shared illusion that there is a path to victory will inevitably lead to a more dangerous future for us all.

And yet, amid all this butchery, Putin’s war machine has a steady stream of volunteer fighters — though recently these numbers had to be augmented with the help of North Korea. These “meat-grinding tactics” are rooted in a deadly combination of historical precedent, cultivated society attitudes, and ruthless economic calculus — and they present a significant challenge to Ukraine and potentially Europe.

For much of its pre-revolutionary history, what we now know as Russia was ruled by foreigners who would treat their population as slaves. Vikings, Mongols, and even the Europeanized Romanovs — all behaved as conquerors or absolutist despots. Whatever the dynasty, governance was predatory. Alien rulers had no obligations to their subjects and often acted as their worst abusers. In the polity of Kievan Rus’ established by Vikings, one of the primary commodities were Slavic slaves, often sold to the Arab Caliphate. During the Mongol era, meanwhile, the warrant to rule was typically granted to the Rus’ princes who extracted the highest tribute from their people. In Imperial Russia, roughly 40% of the country’s male population were serfs well into the 19th century. Peasants were bought and sold by owners, with families left behind. And a particular branch of serfdom was military service: those conscripted were considered as good as dead.

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That disregard for the individual has echoed through time, and is reflected in the attitude of Russian commanders towards their subordinates that could be summed up in the well-worn phrase: “Don’t spare the soldiers, Russian women will give birth to more.” Attributed to Marshal Zhukov, Stalin’s most celebrated commander during the Nazi invasion, the attitude was rooted in modern Russia’s geopolitical realities. Active expansionism, particularly after the 16th-century conquests of Ivan the Terrible, led to consistently larger populations compared with Russia’s immediate Western neighbors. Given the low technical and industrial development of the Russian state, rulers leaned on manpower to win wars.

The pattern was established in Ivan the Terrible’s Livonian War, whose enormous military and civilian casualties depopulated Russia and plunged it into large-scale political turmoil. Later, in Peter the Great’s army, conscripts were recruited for life, and discharge typically came in the form of death. Know much about Peter’s wars and that’s unsurprising. Fought against Sweden for 21 years, the Tsar’s Great Northern War “axed the window into Europe” as Russia’s newly acquired dominance in the Baltics was rendered in the Soviet textbooks. Yet that came at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives lost in battles and famines.

That model, in which rulers treated their subjects as disposable tools, was reproduced by the Bolsheviks. While proclaiming unity between the Communist Party and the people, the Soviet state was its people’s worst enemy, grinding down millions in civil wars, purges, repressions, artificial famines. The Nazi invasion did not stop those murderous practices. The only thing the poorly armed Red Army feared more than the Germans was their own NKVD secret police units, ordered to shoot anyone retreating, reflecting Stalin’s infamous “Not a step backward” order. The USSR endured the highest human losses of any nation during the Second World War.

This long history of bloodshed is essential to understand the Russian war calculus. Dying for the motherland is not a natural state of being; few are born martyrs, and Russians are no exceptions. Recognizing this, the state invests heavily in cultivating values of self-sacrifice. “We need one victory, one for all of us — for any price,” went a line from a widely popular Soviet-era song about the Great Patriotic War, which I heard countless times growing up in the USSR. Our field trips were not to nearby play parks, but to memorials like Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, a battle which claimed the lives of 1.1 million Soviet soldiers. “The Soviet nation is the nation of victors,” was another maxim that appeared most frequently in the shape of faded billboards adorning our grim apartment buildings. “Russians don’t surrender,” the boys playing war in our communal yards shouted, a staple of countless movies.

These Soviet “memes” remain ever-present in Putin’s war on Ukraine, adjusted to a post-modern, post-truth world. The amount of state muscle that goes into the 9 May celebration of Soviet victory over Germany — complete with parades, reenactments, and “immortal regiment” processions — would make you think the war finished last month. Even kindergarteners are indoctrinated to be defenders of the motherland, encouraged by their teachers to play games like “mine the field” and “gather the munitions”. All the while, at the real front, soldiers often commit suicide rather than surrender; the cultural tropes used to shape the consciousness of Soviet citizens are revived and reapplied. Russian society tolerates the heavy toll of the Ukrainian war because, in their traumatized collective memory, “this is how it’s always been”.

There’s something different about this war, though, even with the adjustment to Russian history baggage and the way it’s exploited in propaganda. Unlike the country’s other modern quagmire, the decade-long Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which hovered menacingly over my male high school classmates — “If you don’t get into a university, you’ll be drafted!” their parents warned them — this war is a matter of patriotic pride for many Russians. Having lost about 10 times more people in the three years of the Ukraine war than in the 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan, Russians gamely knit anti-tank nets, sing ecstatically “I’m Russian” and line up to sneer at captured Nato weapons. Even those tired of war want to end it on Russia’s terms. According to a recent poll by Levada, for instance, two-thirds of Russians who want the war to end are against returning occupied territories to Ukraine.

To be sure, dissent is deadly in a totalitarian country. Initial anti-war protests were ruthlessly suppressed, and draconian laws were enacted shortly after the start of the “special military operation” — imposing harsh prison sentences for the mere act of calling the war a war. About a million people left the country. Yet the majority stayed, and now either actively support the war or try to live as though it has nothing to do with them. Their acquiescence gives their leader carte blanche to continue until Ukraine surrenders, and to throw more of their own into the war’s meat grinder. In his customary New Year address to the nation, on the eve of 2025, Putin pledged “to only go forward” and promised that “everything will be well” before declaring 2025 the Year of the Defender of the Motherland.

This collective indifference to human losses may be baffling to Ukraine’s Western allies, who operate on the assumption that their soldiers’ lives are valuable, and casualties should be minimized. Russia’s strategic interest is one consideration.

For the Russian state, near 700,000 dead and wounded to capture one-fifth of Ukraine — a region home to millions of people and rich in critical resources like coal and lithium — might just seem like a decent bargain.

As for the Russians themselves, their jingoistic bullishness is surely fueled by the fact that many casualties are simply out of sight. The lion’s share comes from the lower rungs of Russian society, including impoverished ethnic minorities and convicts. Most have enlisted voluntarily: the state offers generous payments to “contract fighters” (kontraktniki) exceeding the average salaries in their regions by the magnitude of tenfold or more.

That the life expectancy of a recruit in Ukraine is measured in weeks doesn’t seem to deter these lower-class volunteers. And their death at the front will allow their families to get “coffin money” in their place. It surely helps Putin, too, that these troops, which are running low, are reinforced with fighters from North Korea, avoiding another mobilization.

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And woe betide any lower-class trooper who tries to back out of service after signing up. “You can get discharged only if you don’t have two legs, two arms or a head,” is how one unfortunate sums up the situation. According to the same kontraktnik, he and his comrades were forced into suicidal missions, taking wild chances because otherwise they’d get killed by their own officers. Almost a century on, little has changed from Stalin’s “Not a step backward” order.

This kind of adversary presents a formidable challenge to Ukraine and any European country that Russia might target. From a military standpoint, it means that the “peace dividend”, earned from winning the Cold War, is long spent. Europe will need to rebuild its conventional forces to prepare for a conflict with an adversary that doesn’t value the lives of its soldiers. This means mass producing munitions, mines, artillery shells and drones. European nations may also have to consider the unthinkable — reinstating the draft. Any hope for a peace deal with Russia and a return to pre-2022 “business as usual” is a delusion.

Politically, meanwhile, Europe must find a way to confront a revanchist regime that is likely to persist even once Putin exits the stage. As long as Russia remains an expansionist empire, it will pose a constant threat to smaller democratic states on its borders. It will continue to meddle in internal affairs and the political process of Western democracies. It will continue building alliances like the Brics, attracting more states from the Global South, dissatisfied with American hegemony. The only happy ending for this story is if Russia stops being a “nation of serfs, a nation of masters” as the Romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov once put it. Only then can it learn to recognize the value of individual human life, both inside and outside its borders. But if history is our guide, don’t expect that moment to arrive anytime soon.

The reality is that, in many respects, Merkel paved the way to today’s crisis. Her advocacy for stringent austerity measures, implemented both across Europe and within Germany after the 2008 financial crisis, ushered in over a decade of stagnation and underinvestment. Her policies left Germany’s infrastructure — bridges, roads and railways — to crumble; her doubling down on Germany’s neo-mercantilist, export-driven economic model, especially during the euro crisis, stifled internal demand by compressing wages and encouraging precarious employment, while leaving the economy overly dependent on exports.

By pursuing an industrial policy that emphasised traditional manufacturing sectors — automobiles, heavy industry and mechanical parts — she left Germany lagging in the high-tech revolution. By phasing out nuclear energy, she deprived the country of a clean and cost-effective energy source. By opening the door to over a million asylum seekers, she created serious challenges in social cohesion and public safety. By embracing a paternalistic and TINA-driven approach to politics, exemplified in her concept of “market-conforming democracy”, she starved the German democratic discourse.

Yet, despite these shortcomings, Merkel remained one of the world’s most popular politicians upon her retirement in 2021 — both at home and abroad. Following Donald Trump’s 2016 election, Merkel was often hailed by the Western liberal establishment as the torchbearer of the global liberal order and even as the “leader of the free world”.

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Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since then, Merkel’s legacy has come under increased scrutiny. She has been heavily criticised for maintaining good relations with Russia and allegedly fostering “an irresponsible dependency on Russian gas”. “No German is more responsible for the crisis in Ukraine than Merkel”, Politico bluntly declared.

Her mammoth memoir, Freedom, is an attempt to salvage that reputation, the title encapsulating her opinion of herself as a defender of the liberal world order. Merkel uses its 720 pages to staunchly defend her record across issues such as austerity, nuclear energy, migration and Russia. On most topics, however, she deploys moral and psychological arguments, leaving the reader wanting for a deeper analysis of the broader economic and structural dynamics at play. Hence her management of the euro crisis was purely aimed at saving the blessed European project, with no mention of the way in which it benefited German banks. Similarly, her open-door immigration policy is justified on humanitarian grounds, with no acknowledgment of how it expanded Germany’s pool of low-wage labour to the benefit of domestic capital.

Merkel’s account of the Ukraine crisis, however, is the exception — probably because Merkel herself admits that, on this issue, her approach had little to do with morality and idealism, but was rather guided by hard-nosed realism, or realpolitik, as she puts it.

More than a decade ago, it was already clear to Merkel that the global balance of power was shifting away from the West towards the then-emerging Brics bloc, and that the “the United States struggled with relinquishing power”, blocking demands for the reform of international institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. Merkel favoured a more pragmatic approach, advocating for cooperation based on mutual interests, even as she acknowledged the profound ideological differences between Germany and non-Western countries like China.

The same logic applied to Russia. Merkel recalls how many Central and Eastern Europeans “seemed to wish that their gigantic neighbor would disappear from the map, simply cease to exist”. While she understood this sentiment, she also recognised a fundamental geopolitical reality: “Russia did exist and it was armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. There was no wishing it away geopolitically, and there still isn’t.” One might not have liked Putin, but “that didn’t make Russia disappear from the map”.

Merkel recalls delivering an opening speech, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, less than two years into her tenure as chancellor in which she highlighted the need to “seek dialogue with Russia despite our many differences of opinion”. Following her remarks, Putin delivered his now-famous speech, in which he vehemently criticised the inequities of the US-led unipolar order. Alluding to the Iraq War, he spoke of “an almost uncontained, hyper use of power”; he also vehemently condemned the missile defence system that the US planned to install in Europe. Unsurprisingly, he also criticised Nato’s eastward expansion.

While acknowledging that Putin’s speech was self-serving, Merkel admits that there were points that weren’t “completely absurd”: America’s invasion of Iraq, for example, and the failure to reach an agreement on updating the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Her grasp of the risks involved in ignoring Russia’s security concerns became a defining factor in her decision to block George W. Bush’s proposal to offer Ukraine and Georgia a formal pathway to Nato during the 2008 Bucharest summit. She understood that Russia viewed Nato membership for Ukraine, in particular, as an absolute red line — also due to the presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea — and that Putin would have responded aggressively to such a move. Indeed, she argues in the book that, if Nato membership had been offered to Ukraine, war would have broken out even earlier at a greater military disadvantage for Ukraine. In light of subsequent events, this is hard to dispute.

But Merkel also makes another important point, noting that Nato should also be concerned about its own security risks when drawing countries into the alliance — whether formally or de facto. On this point, the risk of nuclear war that looms over the continent today has also proved Merkel right. In the end, she blocked the official pathway, but found herself with little alternative but to agree to the final communiqué, which declared that “these countries will become members of Nato”. Viewing this as a necessary compromise, she also recognised that the damage had already been done. By merely opening the door to the possibility, the alliance had fundamentally altered Russia’s military-strategic calculus. This effectively invited Putin to take pre-emptive measures to prevent what he now perceived as an inevitable outcome. As he warned Merkel: “You won’t be chancellor forever, and then [Ukraine and Georgia] will become NATO members. And I’m going to prevent that.”

A few months after the summit, Russian forces invaded Georgian territory. This followed an assault by the Georgian military — funded, armed and trained by the United States — on South Ossetia, which borders Russia. Although relations between the West and Russia grew increasingly strained from this point onward, Germany continued to deepen its economic ties with Moscow. In 2011, the 1,200-kilometre Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline was inaugurated, linking the Russian coast near Saint Petersburg to northeastern Germany. The agreement had been signed in 2005 by Putin and then-German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, just before the elections that brought Merkel to power.

Merkel defends the deal on straightforward economics: gas transported via pipelines was significantly cheaper than liquefied natural gas (LNG). Furthermore, the route eliminated additional transit fees associated with pipelines running through countries such as Ukraine and Poland. She also highlights that, as early as 2006, both the European Commission and the European Parliament had officially designated the project as “a project of European interest”, emphasising its role in promoting the sustainability and security of Europe’s energy supply.

From Merkel’s perspective, strengthening economic ties with Russia was not just an economic necessity but also a geopolitical imperative, as Europe had a vested interest in minimising the risk of conflict. In this context, economic interdependence was seen as a form of peace diplomacy. However, such an approach required other European countries — and, most crucially, the United States — to address Russia’s legitimate security concerns as well. As events in Ukraine would later demonstrate, however, the US had other plans.

Interestingly, Merkel offers little commentary on the critical period between the 2008 Bucharest summit and the 2014 Western-backed coup in Ukraine — or even on the coup itself. Germany, she insists, alongside other countries, had been working on a plan to defuse the increasingly violent protests. However, the protesters rejected the proposed agreement, ultimately forcing the democratically elected president to flee the country. Reflecting on the turn of events, Merkel admits: “I had trouble understanding what had happened in the previous eighteen months”.

This is surely disingenuous. While it is plausible that she was not directly involved in the regime change, she openly acknowledges her role in bringing Ukraine closer to the European Union. This, however, proved equally destabilising for Ukraine, as it compelled the country to make a zero-sum geopolitical — and even “civilisational” — choice between the West and Russia. This heightened the political divisions in the country, which ultimately resulted in the Euromaidan events following president Yanukovich’s decision to reject the proposed EU-Ukraine agreement and instead choose Russia as his country’s most important partner.

The eight years between the 2014 regime change in Kyiv and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 remain a subject of intense speculation. It is widely known that Germany and France played pivotal roles in brokering the Minsk agreements in 2014-2015, which were intended to bring an end to the civil war in eastern Ukraine. Among other things, they proposed constitutional reforms in Ukraine, including provisions for greater self-government in certain areas of the Donbas region.

However, the Minsk agreements were never fully implemented, and this failure ultimately contributed to the escalation of tensions that culminated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Throughout the conflict, each side has blamed the other for the collapse of the negotiations. Russia has consistently argued that Ukraine was never genuinely committed to implementing the terms of the agreements. But what about the Western powers, particularly France and Germany, who acted as the brokers?

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In 2022, Merkel gave an interview that seemed to lend some credence to Russia’s interpretation of events. Speaking to Die Zeit, she stated that the Minsk agreements were “an attempt to give Ukraine time” and that Ukraine “used this time to get stronger, as you can see today”. Many interpreted this as an admission that the Western parties involved in the negotiations — including Merkel herself — were never genuinely invested in securing a peaceful resolution. Instead, they saw the agreements as a ploy to buy Ukraine time to prepare for a military solution to the conflict. I am not convinced.

I have always read Merkel’s comments as an attempt to retroactively justify what critics perceive as her irresponsible appeasement of Russia. The US might have had a vested interest in escalating the situation in Ukraine — in part precisely as a means of driving a wedge between Germany and Russia, a longstanding US geostrategic imperative. But what conceivable interest would Merkel have had in passively enabling a full-scale conflict between Ukraine and Russia, especially when such an outcome would inevitably dismantle the German-Russian economic ties that she had spent over a decade cultivating?

It was no surprise, then, to find that in her book Merkel strongly defends her efforts to secure peace — or at the very least a ceasefire — in Ukraine. Her approach was grounded in the belief that “a military solution to the conflict, that is to say a Ukrainian military victory over the Russian troops, was an illusion”. She advised Ukraine’s new government that a resolution would not be possible without dialogue and diplomacy. This, she emphasised, did not mean “that Ukraine must not defend itself when its territory is invaded, but ultimately — and incidentally, this is not the only part of the world where this is true — diplomatic solutions must be found… I could even go so far as to say: there will be no military solution.”

However, it quickly became evident that the US had a different agenda. When President Obama informed her of plans to supply Ukraine with at least defensive weapons, Merkel voiced her “concern that any delivery of weapons would strengthen the forces within the Ukrainian government who hoped only for a military solution, even if that offered no prospect of success”. In her view, such actions risked emboldening extremist and ultranationalist factions within Ukraine — a development that, arguably, aligned with US strategic interests.

Her account also reveals that Putin was resolute in his desire to reach a diplomatic solution. However, it became increasingly clear that “the Minsk agreement wasn’t worth the paper it was written on”. Powerful forces — within Ukraine, the US and even Europe, particularly hawkish nations like Poland — were advocating for a military resolution to the conflict. Over time, these voices only grew louder.

Merkel, however, continued to go against the grain by further deepening Germany’s ties with Russia through the construction of a second gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. Despite repeated efforts by the Trump administration to halt the project, Merkel remained steadfast. Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she has faced relentless criticism for allegedly creating “an irresponsible dependency on Russian gas”. Yet, in her book, she contends that US opposition to Nord Stream 2 was not driven by concerns for Germany’s security interests but rather by American economic ambitions.

“In truth, I felt that the United States was mobilizing its formidable economic and financial resources to prevent the business ventures of other countries, even their allies”, she writes. “The United States was chiefly interested in its own economic interests, as it wanted to export to Europe LNG obtained through fracking.” This sheds further light on what the Americans’ motivations may have been in escalating tensions in Ukraine: did they view it as a way of bringing the pipeline project to an end?

In 2019, Zelensky was elected on a platform promising to bring peace to Ukraine, largely by implementing the Minsk agreements. And it’s clear from Merkel’s account that she believes Zelensky took his mandate seriously, at first at least. However, he soon came under intense pressure from ultranationalists in Ukraine not to implement what was deemed a “capitulation”. At the Paris summit, later that year, Macron, Zelensky Putin and Merkel collectively committed in writing to the full implementation of the Minsk agreements — but in the end Zelensky refused to accept the agreed text.

The pandemic, she writes, was “the last nail in the coffin of the Minsk agreement”. The absence of in-person meetings made it virtually impossible to resolve the lingering differences. And, by 2021, the agreements were dead. Nevertheless, shortly before leaving office, Merkel made one final attempt to broker peace by proposing a summit between the European Council and Putin. While Macron supported the initiative, Poland, Estonia and Lithuania opposed it, and the meeting never materialised. Merkel paid one last farewell visit to Moscow in August 2021, just months before the conclusion of her tenure.

Two decades of mutual encounters lay behind them — “an era during which Putin and, with him, Russia, had changed from a position of initial openness to the West to one of alienation from us”. And though Merkel does not state it explicitly, she evidently attributes at least part of the responsibility for how events unfolded to the attitude of Nato countries, particularly the United States. Her account makes it equally clear that she was steadfast in her commitment to avoiding war — and, frankly, there is little reason to doubt her sincerity.

This stance aligns not only with Germany’s economic and strategic interests, evident in her efforts to advance Nord Stream 2, but also with her understanding of the catastrophic consequences of a military conflict between Nato and Russia — “one of the world’s two leading nuclear powers along with the United States, and a geographical neighbor of the European Union”. This is a scenario that should be avoided at all costs, she writes. For her, along with that older generation of European politicians, this was not merely a matter of strategic calculation but basic common sense — two things that appear to be largely absent in the post-Merkel era.

A striking example of this shift can be seen in her successor. After the Ukraine invasion, Olaf Scholz drastically reversed Merkel’s Russia policy, announcing plans to wean Germany off Russian gas entirely. Scholz not only immediately halted the launch of Nord Stream 2; his government was also allegedly informed about a Ukrainian plot to blow up the pipeline and chose to remain silent. The dramatic economic consequences of this decoupling are currently playing out painfully. This approach would have been more logical if it had at least been accompanied by diplomatic efforts to de-escalate tensions in Ukraine. But this was not the case; indeed, Scholz waited over a year — several months after the outbreak of the war — before initiating any direct communication with Putin.

Would events have unfolded differently if Merkel had remained in power? Probably not; the forces she was up against were formidable and entrenched. But it’s difficult to imagine that she would have allowed Germany’s interests to be trampled over so blatantly, especially by its supposed American ally. Indeed, her entire tenure appears to have been guided by a persistent effort to balance Germany’s strategic interests with its transatlantic ties. If anything, her greatest shortcoming was failing to recognise that these goals had become fundamentally incompatible. Yet, it is emblematic of the paradoxical times we live in that, despite the many questionable decisions Merkel made during her chancellorship, the one aspect of her legacy that is most criticised in official Western discourse is the one thing she was unquestionably right about: trying to avoid war with Russia.

Yet while the incoming Trump Administration has won a mandate to end the Ukraine war, whether it has the capacity to safely do so, let alone in a manner distinguishable from strategic defeat, is another question entirely. Following the costly failure of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, intended to threaten Russia’s access to Crimea and enable Kyiv to enter peace negotiations able to dictate terms, the United States has had no workable plan for satisfactorily concluding the war. Trump’s incoming National Security advisor Michael Waltz, who warned this weekend that “we need to bring this to a responsible end. We need to restore deterrence and peace and get ahead of this escalation later rather than responding to it”, is entirely correct in his withering analysis of the Biden Administration. “‘As long as it takes’ is a slogan, not a strategy,” he wrote last year.

While the Biden Administration still gives lip service to Kyiv’s rhetoric of pursuing total victory, defined as a return to the country’s 1991 borders, in reality a humiliating Russian defeat represents a serious risk to the West, by pushing Putin towards nuclear escalation. That one of the war’s two great missed opportunities for peace talks — Ukraine’s successful Autumn 2022 Kharkiv offensive — also apparently saw Pentagon officials assess the odds of a Russian nuclear strike in Ukraine as near even, highlights how finely balanced the calculations are. In the West’s current strategy, Ukraine must be strong enough to bring Moscow to the table but not so strong as to make Putin escalate the war beyond the point of no return; that would drag the United States into a direct conflict it does not want and Europe into one for which it is unprepared. Biden’s pained, years-long deliberations over weapons deliveries, each of which have so far kept Ukraine in the fight without delivering victory, are the product of this delicate calculus. So, too, is the muted European response to the apparent escalating Russian sabotage campaign on EU soil.

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This being the case, Western and Ukrainian interests are fundamentally misaligned, as the eminent American diplomat Richard N. Haass, who is apparently running back-channel talks with Russia, recently observed in Foreign Affairs. For Haass, “instead of clinging to an infeasible definition of victory, Washington must grapple with the grim reality of the war and come to terms with a more plausible outcome.” To do so, the United States government — and here Haass means the outgoing Biden Administration, seen as more sympathetic to Ukrainian interests than its replacement — “must take the uncomfortable step of pushing Kyiv to negotiate with the Kremlin — and lay out a clear sense of how it should do so”. Yet the Haass plan, which revolves around an armistice on the current front lines and accepts Ukraine’s de facto loss of its territory currently occupied by Russia, may no longer be in America’s power to achieve.

Instead, the unfortunate dawning prospect may be that Ukraine will suffer both for its early success and for Biden’s earlier disinclination to push the country towards peace talks. When the 2022 invasion began, the United States worked on the planning assumption that Russia’s swift victory was more or less inevitable. The spirited Ukrainian defence, and the Russian failures of planning and capability that saw the initially fast-tempo advance bogged down and then forced to retreat from vast areas of the country, came as a surprise, forcing all parties to improvise plans for a longer and more costly war than anyone expected. Two major opportunities for a negotiated solution, at the war’s very beginning and then following the dramatic Kharkiv counteroffensive, were rejected by Kyiv, the latter against the Pentagon’s advice and the former in circumstances which historians will debate for many decades to come. Yet the war’s initial successes, and the promises of unlimited Western support, now seem distant. In allowing the Zelensky Administration to commit itself to maximalist terms of victory, the Biden Administration’s apparent support for Ukraine may have delivered a worse outcome for the country than pressure to have accepted a negotiated solution, even involving loss of territory, years ago.

As a Kyiv official recently told the I newspaper, “If we’re going to be forced into accepting where we were around two years ago, then it may have been better to have agreed this in 2022 and we would have saved so many lives on both sides.” Yet it is surely optimistic to assume that, following years of gruelling and costly warfare, Russia’s terms now will be as amenable for Kyiv as those which Ukrainian negotiators once toasted with champagne. While Russian officials suggest the 2022 negotiations may be a workable starting point for talks, the war’s dynamics have slowly shifted against Ukraine so starkly that Putin may hold out for a more decisive conclusion.

Outnumbered and outgunned, Ukraine’s exhausted defenders are falling back across the eastern front, losing vital strongpoints they successfully held for years. While Russia is now advancing at the fastest pace since the war’s opening days, it is testament to the dogged Ukrainian defence that the invading troops are not moving faster still. Ukraine has so far staved off a collapse on the Donbas front, though Ukrainian commanders on the ground fear that the slow retreat may not be tenable for many more months. But should the Ukrainian defensive line collapse before peace negotiations begin, the war’s outcome will be far worse for Kyiv than even the most painful concessions mooted in 2022. As the RUSI analyst Jack Watling observes, one plausible scenario for Ukraine is an analogue to the Brest-Litovsk negotiations of 1918, where the losing side’s attempt to renegotiate unwelcome concessions is met by increased military pressure from the victor to enforce compliance. Indeed, given this scenario, even the advent of peace negotiations may not bring an end to the current escalatory spiral, but instead heighten it for the duration of talks, pressuring Ukraine by threatening its Western backers. If the current phase of the war is a tense and anxious one, the road to peace may be yet more fraught.

Seeking to shore up its negotiating position, Ukraine has attempted to circumvent the worrying battlefield trends through bold surprise attacks, across the Dnieper at Krynky or into Russian territory near Bryansk. Yet these diversionary attacks have proved costly, and ultimately counterproductive. The Krynky operation, apparently planned by British defence officials, was a costly disaster, and has now been abandoned to no gain. The Bryansk incursion, while significantly more successful in seizing both territory and appreciative Western headlines, has ultimately failed on its own terms, as Putin declined the temptation to withdraw troops from the war’s pivotal Donbas front. Instead, the redeployment of Ukraine’s best-equipped brigades to a sideshow weakened its own defensive capacity in the theatre in which the war’s outcome will be decided. With 40% of the seized Russian territory now lost, the primary effect of the Bryansk operation has been to accelerate the escalatory spiral for no meaningful strategic gain.

As a direct result of the incursion, Russia has brought in North Korean troops; while to defend Ukraine’s shrinking toehold, the long-delayed British and French permission to use long-range airborne missiles in Russian territory led directly to Putin’s demonstrative use of experimental, nuclear-capable missiles as a direct warning to the West. Fears of an immediate direct conflict with Russia are, for now, overstated. The risks of escalation run both ways, and Russia’s advance warning to the United States of its missile launch proves that de-escalatory lines of communication remain open. In any case, there is little incentive for Putin to cross the Rubicon before seeing what can be extracted from Trump. But this phase of the war is a genuinely uncomfortable one, whose passing will be met with relief in Western capitals. As it stands, continuation of the current strategy presents greater risk, in terms of escalatory potential, than it does the reward of meaningful bargaining chips in negotiations which are still yet to begin.

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Instead, the Trump Administration will enter the White House with the aspiration to wind the war down as quickly as possible. That the Zelensky Administration now publicly welcomes the new approach signifies that Ukraine has been caught in a trap partly of its own making. Being forced into peace negotiations it cannot avoid, whose painful concessions it can later blame on Western disengagement or malfeasance, instead presents an escape route of sorts for Kyiv. Certainly, the fact that most Ukrainians now support peace talks helps Zelensky’s new dose of realism. Yet nearly three years into the war, it is difficult to see what leverage Trump holds to persuade Russia to urgently enter talks. The most realistic bargaining chip available to Ukraine remains abandoning further risky offensive gambits and making its remaining territory too costly for Russia to comfortably seize. The Biden Administration’s last-minute delivery of antipersonnel mines, perhaps more militarily useful than the more-publicised ATACMS missiles, highlights the heightened, if belated, emphasis on defence. Yet all the weapons deliveries so far have only delayed rather than averted the current trajectory of the war, while Ukraine’s greatest strategic deficit, its dwindling reserves of manpower, is not in the West’s power to resolve. From what we know of the new administration’s thinking, as expressed by J.D. Vance on the campaign trail, the Trump peace plan more or less accords with that proposed by Haass. But much now depends on whether Putin, scenting victory, will be content to exit the war with what he already holds.

Absent a miraculous feat of Trumpian diplomacy, to favourably conclude the war now, Ukraine requires some deus ex machina hard to conceive; yet to achieve victory, Russia merely needs to pursue its current winning strategy to its full conclusion, costly and painful though that will be. For nearly three years, the prospect of peace negotiations with Russia was presented by Ukraine’s most strident Western backers as a defeatist concession to Putin. Now that urgent talks to end the war are American and Ukrainian policy, the risk is that it may not immediately be in Washington’s power to initiate them, let alone direct them towards Kyiv’s advantage. The United States and Ukraine now just want the war to end, while Russia retains an incentive, tempered only by Putin’s unknowable appetite for risk, to pursue a wider victory. Ukraine’s closest European allies, including Britain, find themselves uncomfortably caught between these opposing visions. Trump’s self-image as a historic deal-maker has long been a subject of right-thinking mockery: for Ukraine’s sake, and our own, we must hope the coming months will reveal it to have a sturdy basis in fact.

And if the ultimate value of this support remains dubious — what North Korea is providing Russia pales in comparison to the over $175 billion worth of supplies Ukraine has received from Washington — it nonetheless speaks to the fact that the DPRK is one of the most militarised societies on earth. From an immense army, to an intensive if rickety arms industry, this is a country that can make its presence felt thousands of miles from its borders, especially once you factor in Kim Jong Un’s remarkable ability to circumvent sanctions and supply weapons to terrorists. Dovetail too the country’s long-running nuclear programme, and Trump must clearly take North Korea seriously, especially compared to the laxness of his predecessor.

In North Korean studies, one often hears of the country’s “military-first” policy or songun. This is the country’s stated policy of allocating as many state resources as possible to military development. In the event, songun is somewhat controversial, not actually appearing in writing until after nation-founder Kim Il Sung died in 1994. Yet it’s clear that the younger Kim believes his country needs to keep expanding its arsenal, both of conventional weapons and nuclear bombs. And if that explains why multiple rounds of diplomacy with the US and South Korea have failed — Kim never had any intention to denuclearise — the songun philosophy also speaks to recent domestic developments.

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Right through Covid, for instance, Kim Jong Un only continued to double down on military development. Despite the rest of the world masking up and staying indoors, the country still held a lavish military parade in 2020 to mark the 75th anniversary of its Workers’ Party. The Korean People’s Army (KPA) is estimated to have over 1.3 million active personnel. Like its southern neighbour, military service is mandatory for all men, but women are also included via selective service. In theory, men must serve up to 10 years, and women eight, though the country’s richest elites are always finding ways to reduce their time through loopholes and bribes. This still makes North Korea one of the most militarised countries on earth and its people are instilled in warmaking from a very young age.

Channelling his father and grandfather, meanwhile, Kim has mobilised millions of young people to join the country’s army, even as North Korean children have “volunteered” to work in coal mines, farms, and factories. According to one defector, factory workers enjoy just one day off a week. Agricultural labourers have it even worse, getting only one day off in 10. Like most socialist countries, meanwhile, one’s own labour is framed by government propaganda as essential in furthering revolutionary state goals. While North Koreans are typically required to work eight hours a day at minimum, this can be stretched much further if issued quotas are not met. Children are also mobilised to participate in the workforce so they are instilled with a sense of loyalty toward the regime as early as possible.

Certainly, this mass conscription helps explain why the DPRK has managed to send Russia so much military equipment, even as far richer nations are struggling to meet the demand. Not that the West should look to North Korea for inspiration anytime soon. That’s clear enough ethically: UN reports have consistently shown that forced labour and abysmal working conditions are rampant across the DPRK. More than that, though, the products of these sweatshops aren’t proving very useful. Experts assert that the DPRK’s munitions being found on the battlefields of Russia are highly unreliable, unsurprising given they come from old stocks.

That’s equally true when you look at specific weapons. Debris recently recovered from a crashed projectile appears to show that Russia is employing KN-23 or KN-24 missiles sent from North Korea. The KN-23 and KN-24 share similar hardware, which can make it difficult to distinguish which is which from wreckage. But, in theory, they can strike targets from 400 to 690 kilometres away and are particularly challenging to intercept. In practice, however, Ukraine’s forces were able to shoot one of these missiles down, while experts from NAKO, a Kyiv non-governmental organisation, believe it may have been faulty to begin with.

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Not that the role of the DPRK’s military equipment should necessarily be underestimated. After all, a war of attrition like the one in Eastern Europe can be prolonged indefinitely as long as both sides have enough ammunition and weapons to keep it going. North Korea is also not alone in exporting weapons to Russia: Iran and Chinese firms are providing Putin with everything from missiles to components. As any kind of peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine looks extremely unlikely for the foreseeable future, these shipments will undoubtedly continue as the war enters its third year in February.

And while North Korea’s aid may not be cutting-edge, the bigger question here is how it actually gets to Eastern Europe — especially given the mountain of foreign sanctions theoretically there to cripple the Kim regime. Things are especially given NAKO found that electronic components from the felled missile included parts from at least nine Western manufacturers, including ones based in the US and Britain. The chances of the West intentionally helping Pyongyang build weapons are obviously slim. Rather, it speaks to how deftly Kim has been able to sidestep outside sanctions.

The sanctions regime enacted by the United States and its allies has thus far been one of the most important tools for stopping North Korea’s illegal activities. But that hardly means it’s foolproof. As Mads Brügger has shown, officials in countries like Uganda are willing to look the other way if North Korean investment projects can benefit them. That’s even as shell companies can be used as fronts. Certainly, Kim Jong Un’s growing collection of luxury goods has still continued despite the pandemic. North Korea is also infamous for ship-to-ship transfers, which allow it to acquire sanctioned goods by using decommissioned and rebranded vessels flying under different flags.

No less important, North Korea is now fashioning itself as an arms exporter far beyond Russia. Sanctions monitoring organisations have long known that Pyongyang regularly deals with the likes of Syria and Iran in selling them old weapons stock, while also exchanging technical information on how to develop new missiles. Long before the war in Ukraine, North Korea has been a longtime supporter of terrorist groups like Hezbollah. While it’s unclear whether Kim Jong Un himself truly cares either way about the territorial disputes between Israel and the Palestinians, or between Moscow and Kyiv, North Korean support for the West’s enemies clearly makes sense. Having suffered terribly due to its self-imposed isolation during the pandemic, Pyongyang needs all help it can get. If this means aiding international terrorism, then so be it.

At the same time, this feeds into the future of North Korea-Russia relations. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Moscow can continue vetoing all new sanctions proposed against Pyongyang, even as the North Koreans themselves keep developing new weapons — and deliver them to the West’s ideological rivals. The DPRK is continuing to test and improve its ICBM technology, which is technically capable of reaching American shores. Then there’s the nuclear elephant in the room. With the West’s hopes of denuclearisation little more than a pipe dream, Kim Jong Un’s biggest priority is being recognised as a legitimate nuclear power. No wonder the country has conducted six nuclear weapons tests since 2006. South Korea’s military intelligence has long warned that Pyongyang is poised to conduct a seventh at any time, but when this will happen remains to be seen.

All this might matter less if the US were taking this threat seriously. As it is, and notwithstanding some new sanctions, the Biden administration largely treated North Korea as a side issue compared with China or the Middle East. But given Trump was the first sitting president to hold a summit with a North Korean leader, could he coax Kim Jong Un back to the negotiating table? The chances are slim, unless both leaders know that they can come away with something substantial. And given Kim is now adamant that the DPRK will never give up its nuclear weapons, it seems that future talks will only be around arms control, if they even happen at all. Though given how much of a threat North Korea poses from Lebanon to Ukraine, that’d surely be a start.

Ukraine has launched occasional smash-and-grab raids on Russia over the last two and a half years, but this attack is on another scale entirely — it is a bona fide invasion. Ukrainians are justifiably cock-a-hoop. Putin’s three-day war to conquer their country has resulted in what many commentators have claimed is the first invasion of Russia since the Second World War. The mood in ruling Russian circles could, meanwhile, hardly be bleaker. Moscow is struggling with a spluttering economy and a growing military recruitment problem — despite offering increasingly large cash bonuses to recruits, the number of newcomers is still matched by the number of casualties. Ukraine’s “terrorist” attack on Kursk, as the Kremlin is labelling it, adds more fuel to these fires. It is the most serious issue that Vladimir Putin has faced since February 2022.

Putin has a knack of escaping dire situations with his reputation intact. If we cast our minds back to his first days in power, we are reminded that his Russia has been marched on before — and that the president responded mercilessly. Will he do the same this time?

Twenty-five years before Ukrainian troops crossed the border on 6 August, the militant Shamil Basayev led roughly 2,000 men from Chechnya — legally a part of Russia but de facto independent since Boris Yeltsin’s embarrassing failure to suppress the territory in a war that ended in 1996 — into Russia’s Dagestan region. The troops killed Russian border guards, captured several settlements and declared an independent state. Basayev’s men would remain in Dagestan for a month before Moscow’s armed forces finally dislodged them. After the humiliations of the Nineties, Russia’s superpower status had been replaced by bankruptcy, the loss of empire and now the inability to militarily control its own territory.

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Three days after Basayev’s attack on Dagestan, Putin was appointed Prime Minister of Russia. The attack was just what the new man in the Kremlin needed to underscore the difference between him and his impotent post-Soviet predecessors: a casus belli to win back Dagestan, re-invade Chechnya, make Russia whole again, and thus prove that a new leader would usher in an era of safety, stability and national pride.

Putin’s rhetoric in 1999 was, if not quite that of a firebrand, then certainly uncompromising. In September of that year, as the war in Dagestan turned into a war in Chechnya, and the war in Chechnya led to terrorist attacks on Moscow and other Russian cities, Putin declared: “We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. You will forgive me, but if we catch them on the toilet, we will wipe them out in the outhouse.” Within five years, the Chechen capital, Grozny, had been obliterated and 50,000 Chechen civilians were dead. Putin’s forces had piloted the scorched earth form of warfare that they have recently reprised in Ukraine. When it came to Russia’s “stability”, any means justified the ends.

The Chechen insurgency took half a decade to finally subdue, but the war made Putin’s name as somebody who would keep Russia safe, no matter the cost. In the minds of Russians, the war was a vital part of kickstarting a decade of unprecedented wealth and success. National humiliation was replaced by national pride.

Can Putin, now an ageing incumbent, repeat the trick? Will the Kursk incursion be the “proof” that Russia needs to be “saved” from Ukraine — drawing international support? Threading such a fine-eyed needle will be tough for Putin. At the moment, Russian troops seem to be making no headway in responding to a well-equipped and trained Ukrainian army. The local population of Kursk are fleeing the invaders. Russians are expecting Putin to solve the problem, but few are leaping at the chance to help: only the promise of earning outlandish sums of money — between $1,600-$4,000 — for digging defensive trenches is drawing them in. Young conscripts, who are being deployed en masse for the first time in this war, seem more likely to surrender than to throw themselves into battle. But withdrawing experienced troops from occupied Ukraine to send to Kursk risks Putin’s gains after years of war.

Putin’s own behaviour this week stands in marked contrast to that of the arriviste of 1999. His response to the invasion — a mere “provocation” staged by a handful of “saboteurs” — has been conducted from the confines of the Kremlin. Publicly at least, it has been restricted to a single televised Security Council meeting. During this session with regional governors, Putin appeared either short tempered, cutting one politician short, or indifferent, as he listened to reports of evacuations and military preparations. His own words were limited to vague affirmations that something would be done: “We must assess the developments unfolding there, and we will offer our evaluation.” Unlike in 1999, Putin seems unwilling to associate himself with the invasion, and therefore unable to inspire the masses as he then did. Putin appears as impotent as Boris Yeltsin in 1999, when he meekly handed the baton over to his young successor.

Yet this apparent unwillingness to take the lead does not mean that Putin is helpless. In the early 2000s, the Chechen war was characterised by similar difficulties with conscription, bungling military failures and immense internal corruption. At times, the president was deluged with questions about his slowness to act. “Our army”, he explained, “is strong enough to “go all the way through [Chechnya] and back again. But that’s not the point. The point is to totally destroy the terrorists’ bases.” In the end, Putin waited for the moment to strike, then used every military means at his disposal to win. He might do the same again today. The question is: would Putin be willing to annihilate parts of Kursk to win back his territory? With his legacy at risk, he may yet restore his reputation as a man willing to sacrifice anything for victory.

Putin and his propaganda machine would seem to be carrying on as normal, referring in typical Moscow Newspeak to the advance as a “terrorist attack” or “provocation”, or even merely as “the events in Kursk”, and launching a media blitz to reassure Russians that they are in control. But it is obvious to everyone, including the Russian people themselves, that things are different this time — more threatening even than the short-lived Wagner mutiny, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, in July 2023. Ukraine has not only turned the tables on Moscow, but has fundamentally altered the rules of the game, extending the frontline to include the entire Russo-Ukrainian border — areas where Ukrainian forces can strike decisively at Russia’s soft underbelly. Now, Russia is being forced to defend its own sovereignty too.

Something else, however, is happening on the home front that may be even more dangerous. As the illusion of security and disconnect from the war in Ukraine disintegrates for those Russians living in Kursk, residents across the country’s southwestern border are feeling increasingly abandoned by the Russian state itself. Some are even holding Putin personally responsible. At the same time, dissatisfaction with Russia’s military brass, which in part fuelled Prigozhin’s insurrection last year, is continuing to escalate within the country’s nationalistic military blogosphere. Influential voices are furious not just with the military’s handling of the crisis in Kursk, but also with the state media’s ongoing obfuscation of the realities on the ground.

A growing realisation is setting in that these lies from the Russian establishment have led to a real and immediate threat to Russian national security. And for Putin to have allowed such a threat to continue unabated for over a week undermines the central guarantee he had made to the people about his war in Ukraine from the start: rebuilding Russia’s imperial sphere of influence and keeping Nato at bay would make the Russian heartland safer and more prosperous.

The Kursk incursion won’t convince Russians that the war in Ukraine was a bad idea — that ship has long sailed. But it may finally convince a growing number of Russians that the people running the show in Moscow are no longer up to the task of executing the national vision that Putin set in motion in 2022.

So far, it appears locals from Sudzha, the largest town captured by Ukraine in Kursk, have taken this red pill. “Vladimir Vladimirovich, tell your officials responsible for truthful information to show the real situation,” said a Sudzha resident in a video addressed to Putin and posted on Telegram before the town was fully captured by Ukraine. The residents complained about the wholesale downplaying of the realities in Kursk even as the town was on the brink of conquest by Ukraine. “These lies are causing civilians to die.”

Russia’s military bloggers echoed such sentiments.

“We knew that the Ukrainian Armed Forces would go to Kursk Oblast,” wrote Anastasia Kashevarova, an influential blogger with over 245,000 subscribers. “We knew everything as usual, the guys from the fields reported it, but the higher-ups did nothing.”

Another blogger writing under the pseudonym Philologist in Ambush went further, claiming that the Russian military’s concealment of the facts “shows a desire to cover up the reputational damage to the top military leadership… by all possible means”, calling out “the biased media propaganda, which continues to serve not the national interests of Russia”.

Explosive as such statements may seem, this is not the first time that pro-war bloggers have attacked the Russian Ministry of Defence and the country’s military leaders. But they do show that dissatisfaction with not just the army but also the Kremlin’s propaganda machine is reaching a boiling point. It may even be spreading beyond the usual cadre of online hyper-nationalists.

As far away as Russia’s Arctic Coast, ordinary people have started feeling the impact of Ukraine’s incursion; in Murmansk, parents of recently conscripted young men are petitioning Putin to stop their sons from being sent to fight in Kursk, claiming they were promised that such deployments wouldn’t take place. Meanwhile in Perm, on the edge of Siberia, a mother whose son had gone missing after being captured by Ukrainian forces complained on Facebook that military officials lied about his whereabouts.

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How will the Ukraine war end?

By Aris Roussinos

Russians are of course no strangers to being deceived and treated with contempt by their own government. But, when the safety of their own children is at stake, their veil of tolerance will inevitably begin to break down. This is especially the case given that the story they’ve been sold for years by Putin and his circle about Russia as the eternally victorious bulwark against foreign invasion has now been irrevocably tarnished. The legacy of the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War as it is called in Russia, forms the cornerstone of Putinism, and the war in Ukraine has always been presented as an extension of this legacy by the Kremlin.

The historical implications of Ukraine’s violation of Russian territorial integrity at Kursk — which, incidentally, is also where the largest tank battle in history was fought between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany — hasn’t been lost on Russia’s domestic observers. This is the first time that foreign troops have occupied Russian territory since the Great Patriotic War, and high-profile figures like media personality Andrei Medvedev were quick to compare the incursion to the start of Germany’s Operation Barbarossa in June 1941.

Throughout the war in Ukraine, Putin has succeeded in dodging blame for the failures of his state through a “good tsar, bad boyars” approach — he has been able to shift the blame for the war’s shortcomings to his generals, ministers, and other lower-level officials. But it is Putin who is ultimately the face of the Russia that has emerged since 2022, and it is he who declared the “special military operation”. Now, the war has come back to bite him where it hurts. There is a 1,000 square kilometre hole in his public image as the inheritor of Russia’s triumph in the Great Patriotic War, and his own credibility is on the line.

Putin may well survive to fight another day after this crisis as he did in the wake of the Wagner uprising, when he shuffled some chairs in the Ministry of Defence, eliminated Prigozhin, defanged the group, and moved on. But whereas Prigozhin’s insurrection was stopped in its tracks after 24 hours, the same isn’t the case in Kursk. Ukrainian forces have started digging in and building trenches, and, according to one Russian analyst, it could take Russia up to a year to win back control over the territory under Ukrainian occupation.

What Putin has tried to present as a mere inconvenience could balloon into the most significant challenge to his legacy. Russia’s militant nationalists may not forgive him this time around — and ordinary Russians may well follow suit.