The process is brutally simple. Draft officers, often accompanied by police, snatch military-age men off the streets, before delivering them to recruitment centers. There, many are pressured through threats, intimidation, and physical abuse to pass military medical examinations and sign draft papers. Men with serious conditions — including HIV, tuberculosis and even cancer — are routinely declared fit for service. Whether they like it or not, the recruitment officers must meet quotas; the only question is who fills them. Yet with Ukraine’s wealthy elite reluctant to heed the call, Kyiv’s recruitment crisis is becoming a class crisis too, one that could cause chaos long after the guns fall silent.

Ukraine currently mobilizes around 30,000 men each month — yet many never make it to the front. Some flee training centers at the first opportunity, while others are later discharged as medically unfit. By autumn 2025, according to official figures, roughly 300,000 servicemen had gone AWOL or deserted. The numbers have become so politically sensitive that the authorities now keep the data secret. But the direction of travel is clear: Ukraine’s pool of willing fighters is shrinking. As a result, coercion has moved from the margins to the very center of national life.

Straightforward coercion, however, is only part of the story, as mobilization becomes a social scourge too. Today’s Ukrainian army is, increasingly, an army of the poor. Members of the upper-middle class — and especially the political and economic establishment — possess the resources, connections, and influence necessary to shield themselves from military service. Through a combination of legal work-arounds and bribes, they can avoid donning uniforms for a range of reasons, from illness, to having several children, to caring for disabled relatives. Others are exempt because they’re university students or academics, or work at strategic companies, particularly those linked to the defense sector.

A significant portion of Ukraine’s cultural and academic intelligentsia belongs to this privileged group. Many have received exemptions from military service while continuing their professional activities uninterrupted. In return, the state expects ideological loyalty and intellectual labor in support of the war effort. This includes promoting “decolonization” narratives that often amount to anti-Russian ethnonationalism. It also means deliberately ignoring the deep penetration of far-Right groups into the military, and remaining silent about the normalization of Nazi symbols within parts of the armed forces. But, most importantly, it means justifying coercive mobilization as a necessary instrument of national survival in what is routinely described as an “existential war”.

Suggested reading

Why I went to Moscow

By Yanis Varoufakis

A substantial number of Ukrainian intellectuals have willingly embraced this arrangement, placing themselves in the service of state interests while convincing themselves that they’re fighting on the “information front” in a war for independence from Russia. Others are motivated by more pragmatic considerations: preserving the privileges that come with exemption from military service. Still others remain loyal out of fear.

Fear, after all, is not an abstract concern. The costs of dissent have become increasingly visible. A recent example is the Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist Ivan Katchanovski, who became the target of a public campaign of denunciation by Ukrainian and Western scholars over his interpretation of the war. Katchanovski has argued for a more nuanced explanation of the conflict — one that looks beyond Russian imperialism and Putin’s ambitions to include the role of the Ukrainian far-Right, Nato, and a post-Cold War security architecture that excluded Moscow. Rather than confronting these arguments on their scholarly merits, many of his critics simply accused the scholar of spreading “Kremlin propaganda”. Whatever one thinks of Katchanovski’s views, the episode sent a clear message: questioning dominant wartime narratives can carry serious professional and reputational consequences.

Meanwhile, justifying mobilization, regardless of how coercive, violent, or degrading it may be, has become a central task of Ukraine’s liberal intelligentsia. In May 2026, for instance, the prominent historian and public intellectual Yaroslav Hrytsak argued that patriotic appeals and financial incentives alone are insufficient to sustain effective mobilization in the country. In his view, society must also rely on fear and moral condemnation. As an example, Hrytsak invoked Britain’s experience during the First World War, when women handed white feathers to men who didn’t enlist, publicly shaming them as cowards.

What is striking is that Hrytsak offered no criticism of this practice, despite its deeply controversial legacy. The white-feather campaign stigmatized not only those unwilling to fight, but also veterans, disabled men, the seriously ill, and countless others who were unfit for military service. Yet in contemporary Ukraine, this history is increasingly presented not as a cautionary tale but as a model worthy of emulation.

In reality, of course, the public shaming of men who avoid military service is already deeply embedded in Ukrainian public discourse. For example, the popular singer Alyona Alyona, who represented the country at the 2024 Eurovision, mockingly referred to such men as “Mama’s little boys” and publicly defended the harsh measures employed against draft evaders. Oleksandra Ustinova, an MP, has similarly attacked men who leave Ukraine to avoid service, arguing that the current civil penalties should be replaced by criminal prosecutions. Yet there’s an irony here. Ustinova’s own draft-age husband left Ukraine for the US after Russia’s invasion in March 2022, bought a house and a car there, and has shown little intention of returning.

There are other ironies too. In September 2024, Yaroslava Kravchenko, a celebrity TV host, published a report on male artists who had left Ukraine under the telling title “Those Who Escaped from Ukraine”. Like many women who publicly denounce supposed draft dodgers, Kravchenko herself enjoys unrestricted international travel for both work and leisure. Many other female celebrities are in the same boat. Women, after all, remain exempt from the travel restrictions imposed under martial law — restrictions that prevent millions of Ukrainian men from leaving the country regardless of their personal circumstances, political views, or willingness to fight.

This asymmetry lies at the heart of growing social tensions. Those who champion moral condemnation often do so from positions of relative safety and freedom. They can cross borders, pursue careers abroad, and retain control over their own lives. The men they shame cannot. From the very first days of the war, Ukraine has cultivated the image of the ideal man: self-sacrificing, strong, courageous, and unfailingly committed to defending his family, his home, his nation. He is prepared, if necessary, to give his life for this cause.

His opposite is the ukhyliant — the draft evader. In the dominant narrative, he is portrayed as a coward who’ll resort to any means necessary to evade what is presented as his “natural” masculine duty. Public shaming of such men has become normalized, routine, and Ukrainian media has played a significant role in this process. Flippant headlines like “Draft Dodger Stopped by a Bear at the Romanian Border” or “Grandma Draft Dodger: Odesa Man Dressed as an Elderly Woman to Cross the Border” have now become commonplace. And though Article 35 of Ukraine’s constitution theoretically guarantees the right to alternative service for conscientious objectors, that right has effectively ceased to exist. A recent investigation into the “Skala” regiment alleged that some men who refused to serve were beaten into compliance.

All the while, some Ukrainian feminists have directed their criticism at draft evaders while largely overlooking a wartime system that casts men as protectors and women as those in need of protection — precisely the gender hierarchy feminism claims to oppose. This flirtation with militaristic nationalism has left many feminists blind to the women whose lives are shattered by busification. Behind every man dragged into a recruitment van, then tortured or beaten to death by draft officers, let alone killed at the front, stands a mother, a daughter, a wife, bearing the fear, grief, and trauma that follow. But because their suffering complicates the dominant wartime narrative, this reality is largely met with silence.

Suggested reading

The Ukraine war's big lie

By Thomas Fazi

A similar silence greets another group of inconvenient women — those who have become active in the grassroots struggle against forced mobilization. Gender in Detail, Ukraine’s leading gender website, has had remarkably little to say about the women standing in the way of busification. These women are threatened, attacked, prosecuted, and publicly shamed for defending relatives — or complete strangers — from recruitment vans. The courage of these women, from teenage girls to pensioners, can be seen in countless videos confronting recruitment officers and the police. Their courage is visible, their suffering documented. Yet their invisibility, in the end, is political.

That, of course, raises a broader question. With the frontlines mostly stagnant, and with the meatgrinder war annihilating Ukraine’s demographics, why is the government so intent on continuing with busification at all costs? Ukraine no longer appears to have the final say over its own future. That decision is increasingly shared with — or subordinated to — its Western sponsors, who view Ukrainian men less as citizens than as expendable military assets. The EU’s plan to refuse protection to Ukrainian men of draft age exposes this logic. By denying them refuge, Europe is effectively forcing them back to the front. Their bodies have become instruments in a larger geopolitical project: bleeding Russia. That’s further suggests that the war has become a Western proxy war against Putin. In return, Ukraine’s venal political elite, led by Volodymyr Zelensky, enjoys Western political protection — whatever the moral and legal problems with busification.

There’s another question here too. If Ukraine is being bled dry for Brussels, why not end militarization altogether? Unfortunately, those who suggest this path, advocating diplomacy or negotiations, are marginalized. When Yuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s former press secretary, told Tucker Carlson that the Ukrainian president had sabotaged peace talks with Russia, much of Ukraine’s mainstream media and a number of prominent liberal commentators responded not with debate but with a coordinated effort to discredit her, branding her a purveyor of “Russian narratives”.

Liberal intellectuals share responsibility for silencing these unwanted voices. Yet neither the state nor its intellectual allies can suppress these realities forever. Beneath the surface, they are fueling growing resentment and social anger. Every attempt to silence grievances only deepens the sense of injustice, and if the pressure continues to build, it may eventually spark a political and social explosion.

There are signs of this already. In the village of Ozero, for instance, locals blocked a military recruitment vehicle, smashed its windows, and freed a mobilized man. Elsewhere, confrontations between recruitment officers and civilians have involved dozens of people, often escalating into verbal abuse and physical violence. Attacks on recruitment officers with knives, shovels, and clubs have become increasingly common too. As the military’s manpower crisis deepens, mobilization grows more coercive — and public resistance more intense. The way things are going, no amount of “intellectual mobilization” will be enough to contain public fury.

We have been here before. At regular intervals since Putin’s invasion, the Western political-media complex has worked to convince the public that victory for Ukraine was just around the corner, and that Russia itself was on the verge of collapse. In 2023, for instance, Western journalists and agenda-setters spent months hyping Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which was going to “turn the tide” in Kyiv’s favor. The campaign was a catastrophic failure, producing mass casualties and negligible territorial gains.

The latest alleged game-changer is Ukraine’s drone-strike campaign inside Russia — reaching as far as Saint Petersburg and Moscow — targeting logistics, fuel depots, refineries and supply lines. Several civilian targets have also been hit, causing numerous casualties. On Monday, Moscow suffered the largest drone attack so far. President Zelensky has now announced a 40-day operation against Russian targets to “influence the aggressor state in order to press for an end to the war”, which is likely to mean many more such attacks. These measures coincide with the EU’s disbursement of the first €3.2 billion installment of its €90 billion loan to Ukraine.

The timing is not coincidental. On Tuesday, a crucial Nato summit began in Ankara, where the pro-war lobby — both in Europe and in Washington — is desperate to make the case that Ukraine is winning. It’s a narrative that Trump himself appears happy to indulge, probably to compensate for the Iran fiasco: he even signed the G7 leaders’ recent statement committing to “increase the delivery of air defense capacities, additional systems and interceptors, and long-range capabilities”; to consider extending production licenses to Ukraine; and to “strengthen our sanctions, including those on the oil and gas sectors”.

It is also, in all likelihood, a response to mounting war fatigue in the West, confirmed by the refusal of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary to finance the aforementioned loan — an opt-out that Hungary’s new pro-EU government has strikingly not reversed so far — followed by the new Bulgarian government’s decision to prohibit arms supplies to Ukraine.

Kyiv’s drone campaign is certainly having an impact. Russian oil production has been affected; there have been serious fuel shortages across the country, as even Putin has admitted. Ukraine has also disrupted Russian supply routes north of the Sea of Azov, causing power outages in Crimea and in the Russian-held part of Ukraine’s Kherson region nearby. But these attacks are unlikely to change the course of the war. The Russian economy is faltering, yet it remains in a better position than much of the EU. Indeed, citing higher oil prices, largely a consequence of the Iran war, the International Monetary Fund in April raised its forecast for Russia’s 2026 GDP growth by 0.3 points, to 1.1%. Meanwhile, it revised the forecast downward for the EU’s top three economies — Germany, France and Italy — to 0.8%, 0.9% and 0.2% respectively.

More crucially, though, the Russian army continues to advance on the battlefield. It is steadily closing in on its goal of conquering the entire Donbass. Just the other day, Moscow announced the capture of Kostiantynivka — a town in Donetsk and the largest settlement it’s taken since Mariupol. The city was one of the last strongholds on the road to important Ukrainian-controlled cities, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, whose capture is the Kremlin’s ultimate objective in the Donbass. Russian troops are also advancing around Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, making gains in urban fighting and on elevated positions, and continue to advance around Lyman and Rai-Oleksandrivka. All this flatly contradicts the prevailing “Ukraine has turned the tide” narrative.

More from this author

Nato is a dangerous grift

By Thomas Fazi

If further proof were needed that things are going badly for Ukraine, one need only look at the increasingly widespread “busification” policy — the kidnapping of conscription-age men off the streets to be sent to the front, which is fueling growing domestic opposition to the war — or at the EU’s proposal to exclude military-age Ukrainian men, in practice all men aged 23 to 60, from the bloc’s temporary protection scheme.

In this light, the drone campaign looks less like a game-changer than a sign of desperation: given Ukraine’s inability to turn the tide on the battlefield, Kyiv and Nato have decided to “bring the war to Russia”. Yet there is no evidence that Ukraine’s drone campaign will turn the war around — much less force Putin to capitulate. Indeed, over the past few days, Russian forces launched some of the largest drone and missile strikes on Kyiv so far, killing dozens of people.

How much Ukraine’s campaign is affecting public support for Putin is hard to say. It is true that it is having an effect on Russian morale, but as Leonid Ragozin has written, the situation in the country remains relatively stable: for all the dramatic visuals of burning refineries and queues at petrol stations, most Russians have seen worse in their lifetimes, and the vast majority still enjoy a standard of living comparable to that of the poorer EU countries — a far cry from what they endured throughout the bad old days in the Nineties.

The most reliable “poll” will come on 20 September, when Russia holds elections to the State Duma; some analysts predict that the ruling United Russia Party will suffer a humiliating result at the hands of the Communists to its Left and the (confusingly named) Liberal Democratic Party to its Right. But anyone hoping this might pressure Putin into ending the war will be disappointed: both parties have taken an even more hardline stance on the conflict than Putin’s United Russia party. The Ukrainian attacks are, if anything, emboldening the more hawkish voices in the Kremlin, who accuse Putin of mismanaging the conflict and are demanding a far more forceful response. After all, history suggests that when Russians feel pinned against the wall, they do not capitulate; they harden. Thus, the greater the pressure on Russia becomes, the more likely it is that Putin will find himself compelled to escalate the war.

Regardless of the short-term effects, Ukraine’s drone campaign is a textbook example of how drones are rewriting the rules of warfare in real time. Strategic deep strikes — the ability to reach the enemy’s cities, industries and leadership far behind the front — were until recently the privilege of countries with powerful air forces and missile arsenals. But low-cost, mass-produced drones have democratized it. A country losing the attritional contest on the ground — as Ukraine, on paper vastly inferior to Russia in material and manpower terms, plainly is — can now inflict vast damage deep inside the stronger power’s territory. And once the weaker side exercises that option, whatever incentive the stronger side may have had to exercise restraint collapses.

It is, after all, a matter of historical record that so far Russia has refrained from inflicting mass destruction on Kyiv and other major cities far from the front line, and throughout most of the war has conspicuously spared government decision-making centers — despite having the means to do so. For the first eight months of the conflict, Moscow also left Ukraine’s energy grid untouched; strikes began only after the Kerch Bridge attack of October 2022. In this sense, drone warfare does level the playing field, but it also invites escalation, by stripping the weaker side of the indirect protection that asymmetry itself — its inability to inflict mass damage on the enemy — once afforded it.

This is what makes the current moment so dangerous. A nuclear superpower is being subjected to a sustained campaign of strikes against its principal cities, its strategic infrastructure and, by extension, its leadership — supported by Western intelligence, executed with Western weapons and now backed by an explicit G7 commitment to “accelerate” the delivery of long-range capabilities.

As Matthew Blackburn of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs recently has warned, if Moscow decides its restraint within Ukraine is being exploited to impose humiliating damage on the Russian heartland, it may abandon strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure in favor of the European supply hubs and manufacturing sites that make Kyiv’s deep-strike campaign possible in the first place, thereby correcting the asymmetry and restoring deterrence on its own terms. Indeed, Moscow has repeatedly signaled that its patience is not unlimited; voices within the Russian establishment increasingly speak of restoring deterrence by striking targets in Europe itself. The reason Russia has so far refused to do so is obvious: such an attack could easily spiral into an all-out war that Russia has no interest in fighting — as even General Alexus Grynkewich, Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the alliance’s top military commander, recently noted. Simply put, the cost of retaliation has thus far exceeded the cost of tolerance. But if the latter keeps increasing, Russia’s calculus could very well change.

Suggested reading

Why Europe keeps losing

By Wolfgang Munchau

The essential fact is that nobody in the West knows where Russia’s red lines lie — and indeed Western policy seems to proceed on the assumption that they do not exist at all. Meanwhile, the Europeans keep arguing that there is no alternative to continuing to support Ukraine indefinitely because “Russia refuses to negotiate”. But as Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute recently wrote, it is the EU — not Russia — that has so far refused to negotiate. While Moscow has spent the past year in sustained talks with Washington and progressively abandoned several of its core demands, the Europeans have made negotiations conditional on an unconditional ceasefire that Russia cannot accept without surrendering its only leverage, and have wrapped this precondition in “principles” that amount to a demand for Russian capitulation.

The main victim of this posture has been Ukraine itself, condemned to a grinding war of attrition it cannot win militarily. Should exhaustion eventually produce a ceasefire without a settlement, meanwhile, it could lead to a Kashmir-style condition of permanent insecurity. It is in Ukraine’s interest — and in Europe’s interest as a whole — to negotiate a comprehensive peace settlement instead. We know in broad terms what any realistic settlement would entail: territorial concessions from Ukraine in exchange for security guarantees (short of Nato membership and Western troop deployments). Whether such an offer would suffice for Putin to claim his measure of victory and end the war, nobody can yet know. But what we do know is the cost of the status quo.

In the election’s final days, the tone of campaigning has become unusually dark, with both sides accusing each other of being the playthings of foreign intelligence services, conjuring apocalyptic visions of the other’s victory. The news cycle is now dominated less by campaign pledges than by competing leaks of wiretaps, intelligence service interrogations, arrests and accusations of treachery and espionage. The claims and counter-claims, simultaneously dramatic and unprovable, are as dizzying as they are plausible. Even independent commentators, like the former leader of the Green Party András Schiffer, now allege the British, French, German, Polish and Baltic security services have involved themselves in influencing the election’s outcome, while journalists and activists supportive of the opposition assert Russian interference and looming false flags to keep the incumbent in power.

In the meantime, Volodymyr Zelensky’s face looms everywhere here in Budapest: in posters depicting him smugly reaching out his hand for Hungarian taxpayers’ money, or cackling evilly at passersby. As Hungary’s relationship with Ukraine, frosty at the beginning of the war, has dramatically worsened, it feels as if Ukraine itself, personified by its leader, has become Orbán’s primary antagonist in the election.

According to Gábor Győri, a political analyst from the progressive Policy Solutions think tank, this focusing on Ukraine is a tried-and-tested Fidesz tactic. Aware that the opposition’s strength lies in Hungary’s faltering economy, Ukraine is a useful external enemy for Orbán — one previously played by transnational migrants and their NGO lobbies; Brussels; and the international LGBT movement. “Since the war seems like a stalemate from a Hungarian perspective,” Győri told me, “and it hasn’t moved that much in Hungary’s direction, the recent effort has been to portray Ukraine as an active threat.” At the beginning of the war, Hungary condemned the Russian invasion, sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and opened its borders to Ukrainian refugees, despite Orbán’s amicable relationship with Vladimir Putin. Yet since then, Győri observes, “it has shifted to saying that, well, Russia was provoked, to now saying that, essentially, Ukraine is the culprit, the really aggressive power, so much so that they are a threat to Hungary. And I’m not sure if they can sell this, to be honest, but that’s the effort now.”

At least in liberal Budapest, not everyone is on message: it is common to see posters linking Magyar to Zelensky torn off advertising columns, or defaced with stickers saying “Vile, Deceitful Propaganda”, “Dirty Fidesz”, or simply, “Shit”. But at the Peace March, the message seemed to play well enough among the crowd, which had thronged to Budapest’s vast neo-Gothic parliament behind a banner declaring: “We will not become a Ukrainian colony!” “Viktor Orbán is one of the few in politics who is proud to be Hungarian,” attendee Marco, 42, told me, “But Tisza and Péter Magyar, I think he will make steps outside of Hungary, maybe in Brussels against his own country, against the government, and this I think is not correct.” The crowd cheerily waved placards demanding “Stop War!”, and when Péter Szijjártó, the foreign minister, gave his speech railing against the “Ukromafia” the crowd booed Zelensky’s name like a pantomime villain.

The Kyiv government, which has at times exasperated its European allies with a demanding and sometimes alienating approach to diplomacy, is partly to blame for the worsening of its relationship with Hungary. The European Union has sided with Hungary and Slovakia in the dispute over Ukraine’s closing of the Druzhba pipeline, which carries the cheap Russian oil on which both countries depend, and whose smooth operation, despite the war, is a central plank of the Fidesz electoral offer to voters. By apparently directly threatening Orbán, Zelensky recently earned another direct EU reprimand. As relations worsen, Hungary has used its veto to block the EU funding package on which the Ukrainian state survives, while Hungarian intelligence officers recently arrested their Ukrainian counterparts transporting a shipment of money across Hungary for what was heavily implied to be nefarious purposes.

In response, Zelensky’s security services arrested a Hungarian alleged to be running Budapest’s spy network in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia oblast, home to the country’s Hungarian minority, and long an area of contention between the two countries. Despite multiple requests, neither Tisza nor the Ukrainian foreign ministry agreed to an interview for this piece. The Hungarian government was more accommodating, offering unusual access to some of its senior leadership. Framing a Tisza electoral victory as a risk to Hungary’s energy security and neutrality, Péter Sztáray, State Secretary for Security Policy and Energy Security, told me “We [would] have to let through weapon deliveries through the Hungarian-Ukrainian border… while, at the same time, Ukraine is closing our energy supply, Ukraine is shrinking the rights of the national minority communities, including the Hungarian community. So why should we do that? And their political messaging is very insulting at the same time.”

Now, the war next door has moved from a source of background anxiety for Hungarian voters to the very foreground of Fidesz’s campaign. As polling day nears, it is more openly being alleged by government figures that Tisza is directly funded by Kyiv, and that it is infiltrated by the Ukrainian intelligence services. In a rather dubious riposte to claims of electoral inference, the Ukrainian government last week launched a 24-hour Hungarian-language radio broadcast, aimed directly at Hungarian voters. Should Orbán pull off a last-minute victory, despite the strong polling lead claimed by the opposition, it is difficult to see how the relationship with Kyiv could be salvaged. For Fidesz, it may not matter. Hungarian government policy is driven by the assumption that, however long it takes, Ukraine will eventually lose the war, and the rest of the EU will slowly come around to this reality, just as it eventually did on Hungary’s isolated stance on the 2015 migrant crisis. As a consequence — and fueled by equally hostile rhetoric from Kyiv — a working relationship with Hungary’s larger neighbor is seen as an acceptable sacrifice for a domestic election victory.

A few days after the march, I asked one of the most powerful men in Hungarian politics, Balász Orbán — Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor, and campaign manager — whether the temporary demands of the election were setting up a longer term enmity with its larger neighbor.

“The conflict between Hungary and the Ukrainian leadership is based on three issues where we have complete disagreement, and there is no in-between,” he replied. The first, Orbán said, was active financial and logistical support for the war against Russia. “We don’t want to finance the war, we don’t want to give our weapons to them, and we don’t want to send soldiers for Ukraine.” The second issue is European Union membership for Ukraine: “it goes also against the interest of Hungary, because if anything happens in Ukraine, it would mean that we are in the war. And the second thing is, we don’t want to be a net contributor.” The third issue “is the Russian energy. In this situation, when the Middle East is blowing up and energy prices are again skyrocketing, we cannot say no to Russian energy, simply it goes against the interest of Hungary, and I think it goes against the interest of all other European nations. These are the three critical issues, and these are just black and white issues. So either we give it up and we surrender, or we keep our positions.”

Yet while the Tisza party is portrayed by the Hungarian government as zealous pro-Kyiv radicals, and is indeed heavily promoted by Ukraine’s excitable online fanbase on this basis, Magyar himself has avoided talking about the war on the campaign trail. Indeed, in his rare interventions so far, Magyar, a former Fidesz functionary and conservative nationalist, has seemed to echo Orbán’s policy platform, opposing sending weapons to Ukraine; insisting that Kyiv’s EU bid should be subject to a Hungarian referendum it would almost certainly lose; and stressing that weaning Hungary off Russian energy would take at least a decade. Hopes in Brussels or Kyiv of a post-election about-turn in Hungarian attitudes to Kyiv seem unlikely to survive the apparent inclinations of Magyar himself, let alone the broader suspicions of the Hungarian electorate.

Four years ago, the risks and uncertainties brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped turn the tide in an election campaign where Hungarian voters seemed, until the results came in, to be leaning toward the opposition. The Fidesz messaging at the time, that Orbán’s long track record of steady governance was the safest option in a volatile international situation, is now being replayed, in an election where the opposition would rather focus on Hungary’s domestic problems. But the rhetoric has, since 2022, dramatically escalated, with the added novelty of Ukraine itself now being presented as a direct threat to Hungary’s sovereignty and security. Now both sides are trading accusations that their rivals are deeply enmeshed with foreign security services, working against the national interest.

If it is confusing and exhausting for foreign journalists, it must be doubly so for Hungary’s voters, 79% of whom believe foreign intelligence agencies will attempt to meddle in the election. On Easter Sunday, the Hungarian government, alongside its regional ally Serbia, revealed what it has claimed to be a plot to sabotage the vital Turkstream gas pipeline with explosives, a development that Magyar has immediately claimed to be a false flag to sway or delay the election. As Hungary’s hard-fought and ill-tempered campaigning season approaches its climax, the European Union’s most important election of the year has now fully adopted the murky and paranoid tone of a spy novel.

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.

Suggested reading

The new Cold War will divide the West

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.

Moscow can feel encouraged by the beginning of discussions. By agreeing to a summit with Trump, Putin has avoided punishing new energy sanctions. Meanwhile, the Russian leader’s exact offer has been shrouded in confusion. US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff has reportedly been the source of misunderstandings, while European officials have requested multiple calls with the American side in a bid to understand the exact nature of Putin’s offer. Still, one aspect is clear: on Friday, Trump announced that “we’re going to get some back, we’re going to get some switched. There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.”

It seems highly unlikely that this will be to the betterment of the Ukrainian side. While Russia had previously demanded full control along the entire frontline, Putin reportedly told Witkoff that he would offer a complete ceasefire if Ukraine agreed to withdraw forces from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, along with Crimea, leaving them to Moscow. European officials received mixed signals from US counterparts as to whether Putin would pull out of the other contested regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, or merely freeze the frontlines. One US official indicated that Russian forces would remain at the current lines, negotiating land swaps with Ukraine until Moscow possessed all of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. The prospect of a land swap is puzzling: since Ukraine no longer holds any Russian territory, it would mean offering Kyiv-controlled land in return for the territory that Moscow currently occupies. Trump clearly finds the land swap proposal reasonable, while Zelensky has understandably rejected it, saying that “Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier”.

This is the scenario that Kyiv has long dreaded: that the mercurial US President, even after months of painstaking, behind-the-scenes diplomacy to repair relations between Washington and Kyiv, would strike a deal with Putin over the Ukrainian leader’s head before trying to foist it on Kyiv. What motivates Trump in all this is obvious — after successfully calming conflicts between India and Pakistan, and Armenia and Azerbaijan, he sees Ukraine as the ultimate entry on his Nobel Peace Prize nomination form. Besides, the Russians are still dangling a broader reset of relations between the US and Russia, which Trump sees as an opportunity to make highly lucrative economic deals.

As things stand, Alaska looks set to go down in history as another Yalta, as the two superpowers sit in a room and divide up Eastern Europe as though the Cold War never ended. Or, more precisely, two men. The risks of Trump and Putin meeting privately are stark: beneath the recent bluster, the US President still harbors a deep admiration for the Russian leader’s authoritarian grip on power. Putin, a former KGB officer, brings a spy’s talent for deception and manipulation, not to mention an instinct for flattering Trump and echoing even his most outlandish convictions. This is Putin’s dream scenario.

There is, of course, the possibility that this is all merely a ploy on Putin’s part. He may have felt some pressure from the US secondary sanctions being placed on Russian trade partners, including India, and decided this was the moment to blindside Trump with an offer — with little intention of following through with it. Kremlin messaging has been especially maximalist of late, with the Russian leader claiming back in June that “all of Ukraine” belongs to Russia. And indeed, Putin’s plan to mass-produce Oreshnik missiles and place them on Belarusian territory does not suggest a man eager for peace. A source told Reuters that the Russian General Staff believes the Ukrainian front will “crumble” within two or three months. The Russian military often provides excessively optimistic projections to the leadership, but these are also the views being whispered in the corridors of the Kremlin. From Putin’s perspective, therefore, there is no military impetus for him to make a deal other than the fact that Ukrainian forces withdrawing would be easier for him than fighting further battles.

If Russia’s offer is legitimate, where does Ukraine stand? There is talk of Trump hosting a trilateral meeting with Putin and Zelensky, but Putin would never agree to it. He has spent years casting doubt on Zelensky’s legitimacy as a leader and falsely claiming that the Ukrainian government is a “Nazi” regime. To meet Zelensky as an equal would be to confer upon Ukraine a sovereign status that Putin does not want to accord it.

In terms of timing, European officials have indicated that Trump and Putin’s proposal would have two phases — first, Ukraine would withdraw from Donetsk and the frontline would be frozen; second, Trump and Putin would agree on a peace plan to negotiate with Zelensky. Yet this plan is clearly flawed, setting Kyiv up for a scenario whereby Trump would be persuaded by Putin to back a deal that is disadvantageous to Ukraine, and then try to bully Zelensky into it. To lay the foundations for any lasting peace, the timings must be altered. If Trump is serious about earning his Nobel Peace Prize, he and his team should be going to and fro between Zelensky and Putin. After his meeting with Putin, Trump should announce a summit with Zelensky as soon as possible to make clear that the desires of Ukraine, as the injured party, are foremost in any discussions.

In the meantime, Zelensky has been wise to turn to Europe to shore up support and develop a counterproposal, one that stresses the need for a ceasefire before any other steps taken, for territory to be exchanged in a reciprocal matter, and ironclad security guarantees for Ukraine. Those security guarantees need to be robust — which means far stronger than anything the “coalition of the willing” can currently provide. Yet given the risk of Trump cutting off aid and intelligence to Ukraine if Zelensky rejects these unfair terms, Europe needs to intensively prepare for a scenario whereby it alone tries to supply Ukraine with weaponry.

Suggested reading

How Russia fell out of love with Trump

By Ian Garner

Zelensky is also right to reject a lopsided deal that would involve his forces backing away from fortified defensive lines and which does not mention Russia withdrawing from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant or from positions in Kharkiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolaiv oblasts. For Ukraine to withdraw from the contested oblasts would merely put Russia in a stronger position to attack and make further gains at a later date.

However, many in Ukraine are horrified not merely by the grossly unequal terms of this offer but at the prospect of Ukraine surrendering any land at all — a conversation that frankly had to happen sooner or later. Zelensky has pointed out that the Ukrainian constitution prevents him from doing any such thing, while various Ukrainian MPs have indicated that they would not vote to ratify a deal that would see parts of the country left to Russia to secure an end to the conflict.

It’s clear why Zelensky has maintained the maximalist, patriotic position that he cannot cede any territory to Russia. It is difficult to accept that land acquired through hostilities and atrocities should ever belong to the aggressor. It is similarly difficult to accept that Ukrainian citizens will be lost to Russian occupation. They would be subjected to ruthless suppression of Ukrainian identity and an atmosphere of constant fear and suspicion. They are also likely to face egregious human rights abuses and civilian executions. One wonders how long local resistance fighters can cling to hope once they realize their life under brutal occupation has been quietly accepted by their own government.

But even Zelensky has admitted that Ukraine will struggle to get the occupied territories back by military means. In his New Year address, he called for a “just peace” and reassured those in Moscow’s grip that “one day, Ukraine will return to be together”. Unless Kyiv is able to turn the tide of this war, then any peace deal will likely involve Russia holding on to some of its gains, with Ukraine and the West refusing to legally acknowledge the new borders, and Kyiv planning to take them back through diplomatic means later. As problems with desertion and exhaustion persist, even Ukrainian citizens are now reluctantly coming around to the idea of accepting — de facto, if not officially — Moscow’s occupation of the captured lands, provided that entails receiving security guarantees. However, we should expect stringent Russian demands for Kyiv to surrender further Ukrainian territory — and that will be harder to sell to the public.

There has to be greater public acknowledgment in Ukraine that Russian-occupied land will need to be abandoned, if only for now, for Moscow to agree to any peace. That prospect is not merely unjust — it is monstrous. But it is reality. It is the nature of war. And unless Kyiv can reverse the course of the war and reclaim its occupied territories, we must now finally confront what peace truly looks like.

But unfortunately for Rutte, it is likely too late. In the two months since the last major blow-up between Trump and Zelensky, that infamous Oval Office fight, almost no progress has been made in the Trump administration’s talks to end the Ukraine war. And though the contours of the current standoff are slightly different than they were in February, the crux of the problems remains the same. The only terms Russia is willing to accept amount to the neutering of Ukraine as a sovereign state, something Kyiv is unlikely to ever accept.

For Trump, that leaves just one alternative: abandoning Ukraine to its fate and rushing ahead to reconfigure the geopolitical map with Putin unilaterally. The real question, then, is what’s next for Kyiv’s hapless European partners — whether they’re ruthless enough to finally take the continent’s defense into their own hands, and whether they’ll even be able to focus on Ukraine now that other new threats emerge much closer to home.

Spirits had been high going into last week’s talks, where European leaders were finally given a seat at the negotiating table. But shortly before flying back from Paris, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted the truth: that if no significant progress is made in the coming days, the Trump administration may walk away from the talks altogether. A week later, the funeral dirge duly sounded. The Ukrainians have rejected Trump’s “final offer”, which apart from handing Crimea to Moscow, included a “de facto” acceptance of Russia’s occupation of 20% of Ukrainian territory, a pledge that Kyiv would never join Nato, and the lifting of all sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014.

More from this author

We need to resurrect Eastern Europe

By Michal Kranz

Given these concessions would effectively extinguish Ukraine as an independent state, and leave it deeply vulnerable to future Russian aggression, it’s little wonder that Kyiv promptly dismissed them. It’s also unsurprising that, after Rubio refused to attend, planned talks in London were hastily downgraded to meetings between minor diplomats, and that the European leaders who were beaming in Paris are now panicking.

Of course, understanding the failure of the talks goes far beyond the Ukrainians themselves. Trump’s entire approach was colored by domestic political concerns, a warped understanding of the nature of the conflict, and his own personal agenda. Certainly, the President misunderstood his counterpart in the Kremlin. One mistake was imagining Putin would accept a post-war European peacekeeping force in Ukraine. Another involved dispatching separate envoys to Kyiv and Moscow, which not only led to contradictory messages being sent to both sides, but also made it easier for Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Russia envoy, to buy Putin’s narrative on the war hook, line, and sinker.

That all hints at a broader strategic failure. By jumping haphazardly from preliminary ceasefire agreements to an overarching peace deal, both were doomed to fail, as fundamental disagreements between the Russians and Ukrainians on issues large and small never had space to be resolved. Despite its frequent and determined shuttle diplomacy, the Trump team was never willing to undertake the subtle, painstaking work that conflict resolution of this sort requires, attempting instead to force through particular outcomes rather than figuring out if they actually made sense.

Putin himself also underestimated the role of Trump’s narcissism in the negotiation process. Though he succeeded in getting Trump and his clique to swallow much Kremlin propaganda on Ukraine, Trump’s willingness to regurgitate Russian talking points was superseded only by his desire to feel in control. Zelensky, with few other options, was forced to bend to Trump’s will, while Putin, negotiating from a position of strength, never felt compelled to offer Trump anything more than diplomatic flattery.

Even so, the Russian leader has on several occasions made gestures to appeal to Trump’s ego, including most recently offering to “give up” his aim to annex the parts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts that Russian troops don’t currently occupy — a performative “concession” that European diplomats believe may be just another ruse. Putin knows that any negotiated settlement would have likely ended with a freeze of the conflict along existing frontlines anyway, making it hard to read his offer as a genuine attempt at compromise. That’s especially given he has continued to refuse to budge on every other major issue at play in the peace talks.

Nevertheless, the move was a retreat from Putin’s most maximalist aims, and clearly signalled that he would prefer to reach a deal on Ukraine under Trump’s auspices if at all possible. All the while, the Russian president is clearly aware he has other, less elegant, ways of reaching his goals, as Russian forces have so brutally demonstrated throughout three years of war. Unlike Trump and Zelensky, then, Putin not only has no incentive to end the conflict. He also has the added luxury of time. Failing to understand both of these facts has been Trump’s mistake from the start.

So if the talks have failed, what next? What the Americans want is clear: unilaterally normalizing ties with Russia. Both Trump and Putin would have much preferred to settle the issue of Ukraine diplomatically before moving on to the grand bargain on Europe’s future, something that the Russian leader has wanted to pursue for years. Putin has long seen Trump as the ideal partner through whom he might finally be able to end Russia’s international isolation from the West, establish new rules of play between Russia and the US in Europe, and at last clarify what sort of relationship Moscow will have with Washington on the world stage. Ever the businessman, Trump’s goals are slightly less lofty — opening up trade and gaining access to Russia’s wealth of rare earth metals top his agenda, as does driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing.

Yet without the easy end to the war that Trump had promised, he’s characteristically likely to sidestep the problem instead, moving to remake the US-Russia relationship and establish the limits of American involvement in European affairs — leaving Ukraine and its neighbors to deal with Russia alone.

Based on progress so far, that’ll be challenging. For one thing, the continent has struggled to develop a comprehensive plan to support Ukraine. In summit after summit, well-intentioned proposals have fallen flat on their face. That’s most stunningly last month when, during a session of the European Council, a €40 million aid plan for Ukraine was whittled down to just an eighth of that, before further divisions led the idea being abandoned altogether. The Europeans have equally found it hard to develop their own defense industries since Trump’s election. Though they’ve taken several notable steps here, for instance exempting defense spending from EU budget caps, creating a unified security industry across the continent is difficult precisely because the bloc continues to be an amalgamation of different governments and economies. Whatever the EU’s detractors may say about Brussels overreach, the truth is that Europe is still far too disunited to build a single defense sector — without significant bureaucratic hand-wringing anyway. Even so, as hope for any additional American weapons shipments is effectively nil, the long-running pressure on Europe to fill at least some of that void is only growing.

To be fair, there are bright spots amid the litany of failed summits. One is the Danish model of using frozen Russian assets and other sources to fund domestic weapons production in Ukraine. That might make it easier for Ukraine to get desperately needed ammunition and artillery to the frontlines, while European militaries are increasingly moving away from American suppliers to domestic ones. Giving Ukraine the cash it needs to arm itself might also prevent a looming EU schism, with countries like Hungary increasingly unwilling to fund the Ukraine war. By funnelling aid for Ukraine’s domestic arms production through individual EU states, rather than the bloc itself, European countries can let Hungary have its cake and eat it too.

More from this author

Only Poland can save Nato

By Michal Kranz

Even so, there are only so many ways that European military aid can replace America’s. The US, after all, has the power to dictate life and death on the Ukrainian battlefield beyond merely cutting off weapons shipments, as it so cynically demonstrated in March when it turned off the targeting systems of the Ukrainian army’s HIMARS, Patriots, and other missile batteries. Without such basic capabilities, which Europe would hardly be able to replicate, it is very possible that Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian advances, even in its current limited capacity, would be greatly jeopardized.

Not that Ukraine is the only calculation here. There’s already an unspoken logic taking hold among some states in Nato’s east that, if push comes to shove, they too may have to abandon Ukraine to protect themselves. The departure of American troops from a key base in Poland only heightens these worries, as do Pentagon proposals to withdraw up to 10,000 soldiers from right across Eastern Europe. Despite working with its regional partners to build a wall of fortifications along Russia’s border, and strengthen itself militarily, Lithuania for one is not taking any chances — its capital city Vilnius has just unveiled a sweeping plan to evacuate its entire population in the event of a Russian invasion.

Regardless of how unified Europe ultimately becomes on defense in the years to come, countries with the most to lose from an unrestrained Russia — from Poland to the Baltics — are already coming to the conclusion that acting unilaterally will be the only way to protect themselves. Latvia’s recent exit from the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mine deployment is only one example, with more European states likely to take matters into their own hands as Brussels keeps prevaricating. With competing agendas weakening the EU and NATO at this pivotal moment of crisis, regional alliances that act independently of both are likely to arise. There are already clear precedents for this. In 2020, after all, Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine created an alliance called the Lublin Triangle, which has remained active throughout Russia’s war against Ukraine. Though its function is currently diplomatic, it isn’t hard to imagine the Lublin Triangle, or alliances like it, taking on security functions too.

Nor can you blame the Europeans for such frantic action. After all, they may soon find themselves facing a resurgent Moscow — for the first time able to act with impunity on the continent with the tacit blessing of the world’s premier power. Another D-Day is obviously unlikely anytime soon, indeed, but the Europeans may eventually need to consider the US itself as a rival power. And just as the US has increasingly abandoned them, the Europeans may need to face the fact that there may come a day when they too might have to abandon Ukraine — not out of selfishness, but out of cold, hard necessity.

Yet amid this bonanza, Volodymyr Zelensky faces a looming threat: the prospect of paying out millions of pounds in damages to companies and individuals who argue their assets were illegally nationalised by the Ukrainian government. More than that, opposition lawmakers worry that, unless corruption is addressed, the money of generous Western donors risks being syphoned off and diverted by officials.

Even before the war began, in February 2022, corruption had long been a problem in Ukraine. Yet the situation has arguably worsened since then: earlier this year, to give one example, evidence emerged of a $40 million corruption scheme involving the purchase of arms by the military. Funds earmarked to buy weapons were allegedly stolen by officials and company executives, with some of the proceeds transferred to foreign accounts. Not least given the importance of foreign aid to Ukraine, procurement fraud is a sensitive issue: wartime profiteering could present an obstacle for future funding by the USA and EU.

Suggested reading

Why Ukraine is being blamed for Nord Stream

By Malcom Kyeyune

Yet these accusations pale next to the seizure of commercial assets by the state. At least 17 Ukrainian companies and 1,611 citizens have been sanctioned by Zelensky’s administration, after the Kyiv government invoked special military laws allowing it to take control of private firms. The fear among Ukrainian businesspeople is that this is being carried out as a ploy to nationalise their assets without compensation.

“Nobody is safe,” says Julia Kiryanova, CEO of Smart Holdings, an investment conglomerate, which has been targeted and subjected to police raids and seizure of assets. Kiryanova claims sanctions are being used to force fire sales of profitable banks and firms, which will then be exploited by politically connected Ukrainian businessmen to enrich themselves. Certainly, the alleged redistribution of corporate assets — under the guise of sanctions, and absent the rule of law — is eerily reminiscent of the notorious privatisation of state assets in Russia in the Nineties.

Nor are Ukrainians the only ones to suffer here. As UnHerd can reveal, last month Zelensky received a letter from a Dutch finance company, accusing him of violating international law and claiming it had lost its vast investment in Ukraine’s biggest bank. The letter, a request for arbitration by a Dutch financial company called EMIS Finance BV, suggests the Zelensky government breached a bilateral investment agreement. The treaty supposedly protects Dutch investors in Ukraine — but in 2023, the Kyiv government nationalised Sense Bank without offering any compensation.

In particular, EMIS Finance claims it lost £420 million in non-performing loans to ABH Ukraine Ltd, the majority shareholder of Sense Bank. Thanks to these indirect investments, EMIS Finance argues it has the status of a protected investor.

A spokesperson for the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice confirmed the government had received EMIS Finance’s letter about commencing proceedings. “In accordance with the standard practice of the Ministry of Justice,” a spokesperson said, “we do not comment on pending or potential legal matters which may affect the interests of Ukraine.”

The state takeover of Sense Bank can be traced back to October 2022, when the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation allowing the government to nationalise insolvent banks. But that left a hitch: Sense Bank was solvent. Even the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) admitted as much, stating that despite losses and outflows, the institution was healthy. As Katerina Rozhkov, the chairperson of the NBU noted in January 2023, there were “no factors” that threatened the bank’s solvency.

Not to be dissuaded, the Kyiv government promptly changed the law, last May passing new legislation allowing banks to be declared insolvent if some of its shareholders were sanctioned. In the case of Sense Bank, three of its indirect shareholders had indeed faced sanctions from both the UK and Ukraine, with the latter imposed by a body called the National Security and Defence Council. That, in turn, meant the bank could be declared insolvent, despite the state of its accounts and the positive noises from regulators.

A month later, on 5 June 2023, President Zelensky duly signed a bill authorising the sale of 100% of Sense Bank’s stock to the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance — with no compensation for shareholders. It was now officially owned by the state, and a few days later the Economic Security Bureau seized hundreds of assets belonging to Sense Bank, encompassing everything from shopping centres to apartment blocks. A new CEO and board of directors were swiftly installed too, with the transformed Sense Bank due to be reprivitised next year. The IMF, for its part, is currently choosing an internationally recognised financial advisor to prepare the bank for sale.

Not that the alleged victims here are quietly accepting their fate. Beyond EMIS Finance’s letter to Zelensky, ABH Holdings, the Luxembourg-registered former owner of Sense Bank, has filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Ukraine in the international arbitration court. Based on the bilateral investment treaty between Ukraine and Luxembourg, ABH Holdings seeks compensation for what a spokesperson calls the “illegal expropriation of Sense Bank by the authorities through enforced nationalisation done in an arbitrary, disproportionate, and discriminatory manner. By combining methods of corporate raiding and war profiteering, the Ukrainian authorities have unlawfully taken the bank from its rightful owners”.

Once the case is heard in court, Zelensky’s role will likely become clearer. The president, after all, is also head of the very National Security and Defence Council that enacted sanctions against key Sense Bank shareholders. Zelensky also nominated the National Bank of Ukraine’s governor, who strongly supported the nationalisation of Sense Bank and rejected a proposal to sell the institution to independent non-sanctioned investors.

Suggested reading

Was Ukraine betrayed by its elites?

By Lee Jones

This lawsuit is progressing, but the Ukrainian government is anxious for the court hearings to be held in secret, and for the evidence to remain confidential. ABH Holdings rejected this suggestion, insisting that Ukraine abides by the international arbitration rules stating that “confidentiality is neither agreed nor envisaged”.

In the meantime, the EMIS lawsuit against Ukraine is proceeding — nor do experts expect the legal cases against illegal nationalisation to end there. “This conflict has one primary consequence,” argues Baiju Vasani, a UK barrister who specialises in Ukrainian investor state cases. “It increases the number of arbitration cases against Ukraine brought under international investment treaties for breaching international law. I expect these cases to pile up in the next few years, as foreign nationals and companies seek billions of pounds in damages for their stolen property.”

Together with the latest news from across the Atlantic — with Donald Trump potentially poised to cut off aid to Kyiv and even impose a peace treaty on the country — the next few months could be rocky indeed for President Zelensky. For the moment, though, Sense Bank belongs to his government.

Last year, the Ukrainian government essentially outsourced the entire post-war “reconstruction” process to BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm. They signed an agreement to “provide advisory support for designing an investment framework, with a goal of creating opportunities for both public and private investors to participate in the future reconstruction and recovery of the Ukrainian economy”. In February, J.P. Morgan was brought on board as well.

The two banks will run the Ukraine Development Fund, which aims to raise private investment in projects potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars across sectors including tech, natural resources, agriculture and health. BlackRock and J.P. Morgan are donating their services, but, as the Financial Times noted, “the work will give them an early look at possible investments in the country”. The opportunities are significant, particularly in the agricultural sector: Ukraine is home to a quarter of the world’s chernozem (“black earth”), an extraordinarily fertile soil, and before the war it was world’s top producer of sunflower meal, oil and seed, and one of the biggest exporters of corn and wheat.

From certain perspectives, the war is clearly good for business: indeed, the greater the destruction, the greater the opportunities for reconstruction. At Davos this year, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, said he hoped the initiative would turn the country into a “beacon of capitalism”. David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, also spoke cheerily of Ukraine’s post-war future. “There is no question,” he said, “that as you rebuild, there will be good economic incentives for real return and real investment.”

Seeing opportunity amid the tragedy, 500 global businesses from 42 countries have already signed the Ukraine Business Compact “to help realise its huge potential” — or secure their slice of the Ukrainian pie. “Most are standing on the sidelines for now, given the security threat,” the FT reported. “But there are already companies on the cusp of moving in — especially in the low-hanging-fruit industries of construction and materials, agricultural processing and logistics.”

Over the years, across a series of similar events, Western governments and corporate leaders have made no secret of their enthusiasm to use the post-Maidan regime — and now the war — to radically alter Ukraine’s political economy. The agenda: to open up the country and make it safe for Western capital by transforming it into a special economic zone. This neoliberal shock therapy should, in their view, include “strengthening the market economy”, “decentralisation, privatisation, reform of state-owned enterprises, land reform, state administration reform”, and “Euro-Atlantic integration”, as well as widespread “deregulation” and the slashing of “outdated labour legislation leading to complicated hiring and firing process, regulation of overtime, etc”. In short, the Washington Consensus on steroids.

More from this author

The rise of Europe's military austerity

By Thomas Fazi

This programme has, arguably, been underway since the mid-Nineties, when the West used IMF loans-cum-conditionalities to impose on Ukraine, just as it did on Russia, a series of radical free-market-minded reforms that crippled the economy. As the Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik has pointed out, the IMF played a key role in precipitating the 2014 crisis: Ukraine’s then-President, Viktor Yanukovych, refused to accept IMF demands that he cut wages, slash social spending and end gas subsidies in order to integrate with the EU, and turned instead to Russia for an alternative economic agreement. This was the backdrop for the Western-backed Euromaidan protests and, eventually, the 2014 regime change.

After 2014, the West’s economic agenda was stepped up once again. Western multinationals had long had their eyes on Ukraine’s vast agricultural wealth, but a 2001 moratorium on the sale of land to foreigners had always represented an obstacle to unrestrained privatisation. As post-Maidan governments turned again to the IMF for financing, aid was conditioned on a series of land reforms that would finally allow foreign corporations to acquire vast tracts of the country’s farmland. In the 2015 TV series, Servant of the People — which starred Zelenskyy as the fictional president, Goloborodko — the conditions required by the IMF for a new loan are rejected and the Western delegation is expelled. But in reality, things went rather differently. In 2020, Zelenskyy gave in to the IMF’s demands and finally repealed the moratorium.

“Agribusiness interests and oligarchs will be the primary beneficiaries of such reform,” said Olena Borodina of the Ukrainian Rural Development Network. “This will only further marginalise smallholder farmers and risks severing them from their most valuable resource.” But the World Bank could barely contain its excitement, gushing: “This is, without exaggeration, a historic event.” Even though the new law isn’t set to come into force until next year, US and Western European agrobusinesses have already bought up millions of hectares of Ukraine’s farmland — with 10 private companies reportedly controlling most of it.

As war has raged, the West’s calls for “structural reforms” in Ukraine have only intensified. In mid-2022, the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), an influential European think tank, published a report, Macroeconomic Policies for Wartime Ukraine, which argued that Ukraine’s aim should be “to pursue extensive radical deregulation of economic activity”. Even more troublingly, according to the Oakland Institute economic observatory, Western financial aid “is being used as a leverage by the financial institutions to drive post-war reconstruction towards further privatisation and liberalisation reforms”. The European Union, for example, made it clear that the bloc’s decision to suspend interest payments on Ukraine’s loans would only be activated if there were “compliance with political prerequisites” with regard to labour reforms, for example, and the privatisation of state assets.

It came as no surprise, then, when last year the Ukrainian government adopted wartime legislation to severely curtail the ability of trade unions to represent their members. It gave employers the right to unilaterally suspend collective agreements and effectively exempted the vast majority of employees from Ukrainian labour law — a dramatic rollback for workers but a boon for global capital. Western governments have silently consented to the reforms and, in fact, leaked documents from 2021 indicate that the UK, via its development aid arm, UK Aid, and its embassy in Kyiv, was funding consultants to assist the Ukrainian government in selling the labour market reforms to the people.

As the Ukrainian government has simplified and accelerated the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, Zelenskyy would seem to have gone out of his way to similarly express the country’s “openness” to Western capital. Last September, he virtually opened the New York Stock Exchange, symbolically ringing the bell via video stream. He used the occasion to present “Advantage Ukraine”, his government’s new investment initiative (which relies on another British firm, WPP, for its marketing side). Zelenskyy said that his country was “open for business” — that is, for foreign corporations to come and exploit its resources and cheap labour. “I committed my administration to creating a favourable environment for investment that would make Ukraine the greatest growth opportunity in Europe since the end of the Second World War,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Predictably, the president of the NYSE Group, Lynn Martin, wholeheartedly welcomed Ukraine’s decision to offer “unfettered access to capital”.

Suggested reading

Dodging shells on Ukraine's eastern front

By David Patrikarakos

In January this year, addressing the participants of the meeting of the National Association of State Chambers, Zelenskyy described American business as the “locomotive that will once again push forward global economic growth”. No one would blame Zelenskyy for choosing the lesser of two evils here: Western banks over Russian tanks. Yet, the grim fact remains that even if his nation succeeds in repealing the Russian invasion, the future in store for Ukraine is not necessarily one of sovereignty and self-determination but, most likely, one of Western economic tutelage.

War, the subject of Hemingway’s two most famous books, is perhaps the quintessential subject of such manly writing. From the Mahabharata to the Iliad, it’s the central theme in the ancient world’s most immortal works. But something has happened to war-lit: first, the industrialisation of fighting, which Hemingway himself lived through and documented; then, the development of war technologies so terrible that battle itself came to seem unthinkable.

The world that has emerged since is in many ways (or at least in many places) a safer and more peaceful one. But what has become of those men who actually like danger, and for whom warfare has always been a proving-ground?

Some are still running into danger. There was a surreal echo of Hemingway’s love of danger in a recent wave of young Americans joining a conflict overseas, and then (albeit with less positive consequences) documenting it.

Hemingway was among the thousands who travelled to Spain between 1936 and 1938, to support the Republican side against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In February, Ukrainian president Zelenskyy issued a formal call to foreigners to join an “international brigade” fighting for the Ukrainian side against Putin’s invasion. At least according to Ukrainian reports, an estimated 20,000 have signed up to help — and many view what they’re doing as fightback against “a 21st-century version of fascism”.

More from this author

Incels could become the new Vikings

By Mary Harrington

You would think the Weird Online Right, the contemporary subculture most concerned with masculinity would approve of this risk-taking. A recurring theme in such spaces is the perceived subjection of manliness to the shrunken, heroism-free horizons of modern life and the culture of “bugmen” it has produced. Perhaps the most influential sacred text of this subculture is Bronze Age Mindset, an unclassifiable “exhortation” written in 2018 and now immensely influential among disaffected young men.

Written by the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, it blames modern comforts and the undue influence of women for the stifling and emasculating nature of modern life: “In fact everything that you hate about modern life and that makes it into an Iron Prison … represents a return of the endless sallow night of matriarchy.” BAP extols the virtues of pre-Christian heroes of antiquity, and predicts that “Leviathan will not be able to hold itself together” whereupon “the age of high piracy will return”, enabling the men capable of it to develop “their ability to wage war”.

But instead of lauding their bravery, the Very Online Right tends to dismiss Zelenskyy’s resistance as a “fight to the death for globalist oligarchs like Soros and Kolomoisky” and mock any evidence of fear, regret or incompetence displayed by the young foreigners flocking to help. This so-called “Reddit Battalion” has been widely mocked for having reportedly compromised operational security on the battlefield by continuing to post from their phones while in a warzone: their compulsion to document their experience emitting signals allowing their location to be pinpointed and shelled.

Suggested reading

What men get wrong about masculinity

By Sarah Ditum

What’s going on here? One response might be that simply proving oneself as a man isn’t the only consideration in battle, and if you are there in service of a despised political agenda, you’re still not one of the good guys. But there’s something deeper at work, too: an ambivalence about the idea of masculinity and writing as such that runs through the conflicted contemporary debates about men, warfare, heroism and propaganda that now orbit the conflict in Ukraine.

For while Hemingway is long since a byword for “masculine” writing, there’s also a tragic sense in which his work traces the Twentieth-century demise of an older, more warlike form of masculinity, at the hands not of the “endless sallow night of matriarchy” but of technology itself.

War literature prior to the Twentieth century is often unabashedly heroic, even as it documents horrors. Tennyson’s 1855 Charge of the Light Brigade describes an 1854 battlefield in the Crimea in terms both terrible and stirring, then asks:

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.

“When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality,” Hemingway wrote in 1942, of his experiences as an ambulance driver in World War I when he was just 19. “Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion.” The war that deprived Hemingway of his illusions about immortality also stripped many of confidence in military glory full stop.

Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, published 1921, draws a contrast between the heroic motto about dying for one’s country, and the reality of dying of poison gas in the trenches. In 1935, Hemingway expressed the same sentiment in an Esquire essay, where he stated that “in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason”.

Suggested reading

The rise of the literary noble savage

By Alex Perez

Even so, to Hemingway the Spanish Civil War was a clear-cut moral issue: a battle between good and evil, man and machine, via the horrifying industrial technologies of Twentieth-century total war. And if, as some historians argue, this conflict was in fact the true start of the Second World War, what started as a battle between man and machine ended with the machine’s victory, in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A whole generation, slightly older than I am, grew up in the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction: the fear that either (or both) sides in the Cold War might at any moment launch unstoppable nuclear-powered death through the air, obliterating millions in seconds.

Over the same period, conflict between nuclear powers avoided direct confrontation. Armies have shrunk, nationalism has been widely deprecated, and the world (unless you’re unlucky enough to live in a theatre of one of America’s or Russia’s proxy wars) is generally more peaceful than in Hemingway’s youth.

And while that has many upsides, it has also, paradoxically, created disaffected young men. For when national identity is infra dig, and open warfare is discouraged lest it set off nuclear Armageddon, what’s left for young men who thirst for danger and intensity?

Some find it anyway; some, too, also write about it, including my UnHerd colleague Aris Roussinos. As he said in 2014 of his experiences in Syria: “The hidden awful truth about war is how much fun it is.” But for those in the developed West, this is the exception rather than the rule. Most men remain in the “Iron Prison”. Many chafe at it, and seek to reclaim some form of masculinity, but few seem very certain as to how this might be done in practice.

Suggested reading

Lessons from a war zone

By Aris Roussinos

Some, too, write about the stultifying nature of the world in which they remain. Two realist writers emerging from the disaffected online Right are the short story writers “Delicious Tacos” and “Bad Billy Pratt”, both of whom document the nihilistic landscape of contemporary sex relations in an aggressively unsentimental style. And it’s hardly surprising that writers committed to (as Pratt put it to me) “the unfiltered truth” should focus on the sexual anomie of self-absorbed protagonists.

After all, modern life has become — in BAP’s words — “an economic zone arranged much like a work camp”, a regimented place “of incredible ugliness” and “hateful to the raising of boys”. It’s easy to see how, as Pratt himself might conclude, “the only fiction worth writing is incel fiction”. What, in that context, is left but the self, and the sexual warzone?

And with heroism, action or drama in short supply in everyday life, those hungry for intensity must resort to the world of computer gaming — or fantasy writers such as Mike Ma, described as “Chaotic 21st century pastiche of Hemingway, Kierkegaard, Kaczynski, and the guy in your econ class who wears combat boots”; or else the neo-reactionary sci-fi writer “Zero HP Lovecraft”, a “horrorist” whose self-published short story collection sold out in less than 24 hours.

Hemingway began his life in the shadow of Tennyson’s Light Brigade, and finished it in the shadow of Hiroshima. Over the same period, the raw, elemental struggles between man and man, or man and nature, so characteristic of Hemingway’s work, grew more attenuated. His literary career was both as a “masculine” writer, but also as an elegy for a world where the conventionally masculine virtues of courage, risk-taking, stoicism and heroism were easily celebrated and widely accepted as culturally essential.

Suggested reading

The importance of Bronze Age Pervert

By Murtaza Hussain

Since his time, the world has retreated steadily from conflict, toward mechanised and then mediated life; a process culminating in the radical safetyism and dematerialised common life of Covid lockdowns, and the online-first social life the pandemic ushered in. And now that we have virtualised social life to the point where any physical violence is foreclosed, even most arguments about masculinity now inevitably take place in the feminine key.

Young men, already restive, are growing mutinous under this regime. The lurid and angry literature emerging captures these men’s ambivalence: sickened by, but also usually still implicated in, the banality and perceived effeminacy of a modern world denuded of both danger and opportunity. We can only speculate on what may happen if (or when) such men leave behind the neutered disaffection off the internet, and start searching en masse for danger and heroism beyond the screen.

The first is the war on social media: in this war, a combination of genuine and impressive Ukrainian tactical successes and inspiring but self-evidently dubious propaganda stories meld into a narrative of a shambolic Russian army falling apart after failing to seize Kyiv on the first day of war and sinking into a quagmire it cannot win. Boosted by social media influencers, some online veterans of earlier narrative wars, this is clearly the dominant framework, a heroic David and Goliath story emotionally resonant to external well-wishers.

And then there’s the second war, the one on the ground. Every day, new maps are released by professional and amateur military analysts which make grim reading for Ukraine’s supporters. In the south and in the east, a great pincer is slowly grinding forward to surround the bulk of Ukraine’s troops deployed along the line of contact against separatist (that is, pro-Russian Ukrainian) forces. If these Ukrainian troops do not withdraw soon, and form a new defensive line further to the northwest, they will be encircled, starved of supplies and rendered ineffective. In smaller pockets, like the defenders of Mariupol, they will simply be destroyed by artillery. 

In the northeast, Russian troops have bypassed the near-besieged city of Kharkiv, nearly encircled the strategic city of Chernihiv, and are moving in force on Kyiv’s eastern suburbs. Around a week ago, the first reconnaissance units were seen outside the satellite town of Brovary. Now they have been reinforced with armoured battalion tactical groups (BTGs) and artillery units, which have begun shelling the area around Kyiv’s Boryspil international airport, presumably to soften it up before continuing to tighten their noose around the city.

Both the optimistic and pessimistic interpretations — viewed from a Ukrainian standpoint — are correct, just as both reveal only partial truths. The brave and dogged Ukrainian resistance has definitely caused the Russians greater losses than they were expecting, at a scale unimaginable to far smaller Western European armies, and has surely slowed their advance. The Russians have pursued often mystifying courses of action, barely using their overwhelming air force, and indeed deploying assets they are known to possess like guided munitions and armed drones at a scale far below that seen in the distinctly less existential Syria conflict. 

If the evidence of destroyed and abandoned tanks shown online is any guide, they have preferred to use their older armour rather than their first-line T-90 tanks as the bedrock of their attacking force, perhaps because they are reserving their most modern equipment for a potential military escalation with Nato. On a human level, Russian troops have displayed poor tactical awareness, allowing their convoys to be ambushed by highly-motivated Ukrainian regular and irregular forces, and poor morale, surrendering en masse or simply abandoning their vehicles to capture and destruction and themselves to international derision. 

And yet, every evening the map updates are published, and the Russians are still moving forward and pressing dangerously closer to their objectives. It is undeniable that they are taking heavy punishment, and may not be able to sustain this tempo of movement or of losses for many weeks longer; but, then, it seems possible that this phase of the war will be over by then. We should also remember that a Ukrainian-dominated media campaign does not provide a clear sense of the condition of the Ukrainian army after two weeks of war: it too has been taking heavy losses, and its losses are significantly harder to replace. So while it is of course foolish to pronounce with any great certainty about the outcome of a war that is still less than two weeks old, there are perhaps tentative reasons to think that a negotiated settlement may be closer than it looks from outside.

More from this author

Test article

By Aris Roussinos

If the interpretation is correct that Putin expected his Russian troops to be welcomed by Ukrainian civilians, or at least tacitly acquiesced to, then he has been dramatically shown otherwise. The scale of Ukrainian resistance has been revelatory, perhaps to Ukrainians as much as to Putin, uniting even previously opposed factions in what is little short of a Ukrainian war of independence. A new legend, one of the type essential in the formation and consolidation of any new nation state, has been born, and has won the Ukrainians the admiration of much of the world. Ukrainian regular troops and newly-enlisted Territorial Defence units have fought doggedly and courageously to blunt the Russian advance. Similarly, Ukrainian civilians (perhaps sensing that the Russian military police occupying them will not clamp down too hard on them at this stage), have begun a growing campaign of public protests against Russian occupation. 

Watching all this, Putin must surely sense that even if a narrow military victory is visibly in grasp, the result will only be a political defeat. Ukraine will not happily re-enter the Russian World of his dreams in these circumstances. Even previously sympathetic or ambivalent Russian-speakers in cities like Kharkiv have been lost to Putin by their horrific experience of bombardment.

Instead, the invasion has deepened the common sense of Ukrainian nationhood, as well as deepening its emotional and political enmeshment with the rest of Europe. It is difficult to imagine that, even if they should seize the capital and decapitate the government, the Russians will find occupation an easy or bloodless task. Indeed, the opposite may be true: it is likely the case that the Russians will need to employ the moral and political capital Zelensky has acquired over the course of the conflict in selling a deal to his domestic audience. 

More from this author

Europe must prepare for war

By Aris Roussinos

If we assume that it is preferable for both sides to avoid the destruction of Kyiv, and the death of thousands on each side during its storming that an assault would entail, then the moment Kyiv is encircled would be a logical moment of pause lending itself to a ceasefire (another such circumstance might be the encircling of tens of thousands of Ukraine’s best troops in the East, but the isolation of Kyiv will likely happen sooner). The Russians and Ukrainians are already negotiating, and Zelensky has at the time of writing begun to hint that the status of the Crimea and Donbas are up for negotiation, and that Nato membership seems unachievable for now: all Russian political goals and not far from the terms Russia initially demanded to stave off an invasion. It would be a difficult domestic sell for Zelensky, after so many tactical victories against overwhelming odds and after forging such a fever pitch of unity against the invader, to sign away what would amount almost to a surrender, but the no-fly zone discourse perhaps points at one way he might.

The Nato summit last week at which the Western alliance emphasised that there would be no no-fly zone created, for risk of escalating into a greater European war, was a very public nudge to the Ukrainians to negotiate in earnest. There simply will be no Nato deus ex machina to dismantle Russia’s superiority in the air or on the ground. Equally, Zelensky’s increasing tendency to lambast the West for not providing enough military support (despite Nato doing everything but engage in open war against Russia on Ukraine’s behalf) can perhaps be setting up the conditions under which he can regretfully sign away control of Crimea and the Donbas and blame it on faithless external patrons. Both regions were probably already gone for good, in any case. It would be a stab-in-the-back myth of sorts, perhaps with unintended consequences down the line, but immediately preferable to a continuance of the war into a second, bloodier phase; these, though, are decisions for Ukrainians to make.

For the Nato alliance, there are two opposing paths to choose between. One strategy would be to force Putin to deal with a long Ukrainian insurgency which would bleed Russia, distracting it to a point where it would pose less of a threat to Nato’s eastern flank. To this end, flooding the country with portable anti-tank weapons and anti-aircraft missiles would, as well as being support for the Ukrainian cause, weaken Russia just as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weakened America — most probably more so. Yet against this viewpoint, we can also see that prolonging the war in Ukraine over years or decades would, like the war in Syria, be devastating for the country, for its historic cities and for its people. Two million refugees have already fled for Europe in the war’s first fortnight, and though they are more welcome in Central Europe than Middle Eastern refugees, millions more would be a significant challenge to their hosting nations. 

A prolonged insurgency, organised around a rump Ukrainian state in the country’s nationalist western heartland, might not win support for long from neighbouring European states. The prospect of a European Syria or Afghanistan in Galicia and Transcarpathia, where well-armed militia groups who are already a concern would challenge the authority of a weakened, and perhaps exiled Ukrainian administration, from where untraced weapons would likely leak back into the European Union, and along whose borders Nato would daily run the risk of small military incidents with Russia escalating out of control, is not an appealing one to European leaders.

Suggested article

A Putin puppet government will fail

By Vladislav Davidzon

For Ukraine, Russia and the Nato alliance, the next week or so may present a slim opportunity for a ceasefire and de-escalation, introduced by a sudden tilt of the scales in Russia’s favour, such as the encirclement of Kyiv. All sides involved have a clearer appreciation of the facts on the ground than any of us trying to parse the outcome of the war from glimpses of clashes, losses and troop movements on social media’s restricted window. Nato was right to provide Ukraine with the munitions that have made the Russian advance so costly — and which should give Putin pause before ordering the assault on Kyiv. These munitions have enabled the Ukrainians to negotiate from a position of relative strength: yet once Kyiv is besieged, the Ukrainian position will weaken with each passing day.

Nato’s insistence there will be no no-fly zone also puts the already low prospect of a Ukrainian military victory far beyond reach. The alliance has gone almost as far as it can go in supporting Ukraine, and everyone involved knows it. Negotiating a painful peace deal may seem all stick and no carrot for the Ukrainians, who have fought hard and well. The EU should hold firm in insisting on some closer and more generous form of relationship, including membership candidacy status, with postwar Ukraine. 

The situation for Russia, though better than it may seem online, is worse for Putin than he would wish. Economically and diplomatically isolated, Russia is now rapidly approaching a narrow military victory on the ground, beyond which a bloody and costly war of occupation appears to stretch into the future. If Putin entered the war with more expansive dreams, he must surely realise they are now beyond his reach.

A golden bridge away from war may now be forming, very soon and for a very short period of time. If those involved do not take it, it is very likely they will all soon wish they had.

Certain reflexes remain irresistible in Washington, not only among politicians but in the media, too. One of these is a tendency to see every conflict as a new Second World War. Another is to believe that sufficient force and “resolve” can achieve any objective, whether that is our objectives in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vladimir Putin’s objectives in Ukraine. And a third is the habit of regarding those who fail to fall in line during times of crisis as traitors, appeasers, or the useful idiots of America’s enemies.

These reflexes have been on full display with the crisis in Ukraine. “This is Sudetenland,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of Russia’s attempt to justify its war as a defence of separatist “republics” in Luhansk and Donetsk. It is a grave act of aggression, certainly; but great power irredentism has other precedents besides those of Nazi Germany.

Automatically comparing every crisis with the Second World War is a dangerous habit. It’s a reflex that helped stampede the United States into a needless war in the Middle East 20 years ago. Iraq was an “Islamo-fascist” dictatorship with “weapons of mass destruction”, a threat on par with a nuclear Nazi Germany. Most of America’s policy and media elite bought into the idiotic idea, with disastrous consequences — most of all for the people of Iraq.

Putin’s Russia is a much more serious threat than Saddam’s Iraq. But it’s a new menace, not another Nazi Germany. So President Biden deserves credit for refraining from hyperbole in his remarks this week. He rightly noted — with Cold War lessons and perhaps with America’s own rueful experience in Afghanistan in mind — that “history has shown time and again how swift gains and territory eventually give way to grinding occupations, acts of mass civil disobedience, and strategic dead ends”.

Suggested reading

The Ukraine crisis started with Suez

By Peter Franklin

Biden was then asked whether Putin’s ambitions extended beyond Ukraine, and whether nuclear war was a possibility. Would Putin attack Nato countries — and was the United States ready to fight? While Biden’s answers were measured, the questions show the apocalyptic mindset that the Washington media easily slips into. It’s a mentality that many an ideologue or vested interest is ready to exploit — for arms sales, energy deals, or domestic political advantage. The latter can be seen in the way that liberals and NeverTrump pundits have used the crisis as an opportunity to question the patriotism of conservatives.

“Dear media: Ask Republicans why they are normalizing support for Putin,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin implored. Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Law School went considerably further, suggesting that certain conservatives and Fox News pundits urging the US to get more deeply involved in the Ukraine-Russia conflict might be guilty of treason.

“Led by Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, the GOP’s Trump wing appears to be throwing its weight behind Putin. If Putin opts to wage war on our ally, Ukraine, such ‘aid and comfort’ to an ‘enemy’ would appear to become ‘treason’ as defined by Article IIl of the U.S. Constitution,” Tribe wrote in a since-deleted tweet.

Please be advised that any questioning of US policy or. the prevailing US narrative during this sensitive time constitutes the crime of treason, according to Harvard Law Professor @tribelaw. Treason is punishable by death, so it's probably best to tread *very* carefully. pic.twitter.com/VZHuAqFIlr

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 21, 2022

An editorial in the Kansas City Star likewise claimed that Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley “has clearly provided aid and comfort to Putin and hard-liners in Russia”. As the article acknowledged, Hawley has stated that “America has an interest in Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity. And we have a strong interest in deterring Russian adventurism.” But because Hawley does not believe Ukraine should be part of NATO or that America should “fight Russia over Ukraine’s future”, he is morally libelled in the language of treason.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, those who doubted the wisdom of George W. Bush’s war were subjected to similar obloquy. Then as now, conservatives counseling restraint were denounced as less than truly American. Today Tucker Carlson is the enemy of all right-thinking votaries of liberal democracy. Twenty years ago conservative columnists like Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak were the enemy, branded by David Frum as “unpatriotic conservatives” in the pages of National Review on the eve of the Iraq conflict.

Suggested reading

Vladimir Putin's dangerous madness

By David Patrikarakos

This narrowing of American political discourse did not wind up doing the Iraqis or Afghans any favors two decades ago, and it is not doing the Ukrainians any favours today. Now, as then, there is a need for something other than Washington’s reflexive apocalypticism. Realism, cool-headedness, and scepticism are more important than ever in a time of emergency. This is not the moment for Republicans, in particular, to discard the hard-won wisdom of the last two decades, purchased at great price after the follies of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Far from being unpatriotic, many on the right who insists on clear limits to America’s commitments to Ukraine (and to Nato) are in the best tradition of their party’s foreign policy — and America’s too. Republican realism was in fact the most successful of America’s Cold War strategic philosophies, and it merits a revival in the face of Putin’s challenge.

During the Cold War, Republicans and Democrats alike understood that America could not solve every crisis. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, and again when the Soviets used Warsaw Pact forces against Czechoslovakia in 1968, American leaders acknowledged there was little they could do. That did not mean the West was weak, and it certainly did not bespeak a moral indifference to the suffering of the Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians. The West simply knew that it was not all-powerful, and it had a strategy to follow regardless of whatever new abuses the Soviets perpetrated.

And even worse crimes than those of the Soviets did not prevent Republicans from engaging in necessary and successful diplomacy, as when Richard Nixon aligned the United States with the People’s Republic of China in order to drive a wedge between the world’s two major Communist powers. In the Eighties, Ronald Reagan was willing to work with Mikhail Gorbachev (a far less bloody tyrant than Mao Zedong) to bring the Cold War to a peaceful close, even as some neoconservatives excoriated him for negotiating with what the President himself had dubbed the “evil empire”.

Suggested reading

Putin's next move

By Aris Roussinos

Even George H.W. Bush, who was not averse to foreign adventurism, was guided by sober realism in his actions toward the Soviet Union in its final months. In August 1991, Bush warned Ukrainians to proceed cautiously in contemplating independence from the Soviet Union. Writing in the New York Times, the neoconservative and former Nixon speechwriter William Safire damned Bush for his “Chicken Kiev” speech.

But for once, Bush was right: his words did not dissuade the Ukrainians from declaring their independence from Moscow. But they did minimise the risk that the United States would be perceived as engineering the USSR’s dissolution. A speech that would have pleased Safire would have jeopardised Ukraine, and the entire process of the Soviet Union’s mostly non-violent decomposition.

With China looming as the century’s greatest challenge, Americans must be wiser than they have been in the past two decades. Just as we discovered our limitations in the projects we attempted in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have good reason to believe that Vladimir Putin will meet a defeat of his own making in Ukraine. Russia is much more than Putin — it is a great power that will never disappear from the earth, and one that may never be altogether benign toward its neighbours. The Ukrainians deserve the freedom that they claimed for themselves in 1991, and the West’s horror at Putin’s aggression is righteous.

Yet we must be not only good, but wise, if we want to help the Ukrainians and ensure that Russia does not become a greater and deadlier North Korea. Only realism, and confidence in the enduring power of nations, will lead us to make better decisions than those our leaders have made since the Cold War ended.

The witnesses on the first day were George Kent, a senior State Department official, and William Taylor, a former ambassador to Ukraine, and currently charge d’affaires. They emerged as exemplary foreign service professionals: considered, scrupulously factual and non-partisan — which only made the picture that emerged from their testimony all the more extraordinary.

What it revealed was the extent and depth of US involvement in Ukraine, going back well into the Obama presidency. To describe it as meddling in another country’s internal affairs would be an understatement. The actual trigger for the impeachment hearings — a whistleblower’s charge that Trump had put pressure on the Ukrainian President to help him potentially slur a rival before the 2020 election — came across as just one aspect, if a particularly murky one — of a longer and continuing saga.

The single most striking point to emerge was that the United States regards Ukraine as “vital to its national interest”; not to Europe’s interest, nor to Nato’s, but to its own national interest — despite the Cold War being over and Ukraine being rather a long way from the US.

More from this author

Why Trump's Greenland bid is good business

By Mary Dejevsky

A second point, which might come as news to a lot of people and not just in the United States, was the extent of military assistance being supplied by the Washington to a country that is in no sense a formal ally, and whose prospects of even starting the process of joining Nato in the foreseeable future are pretty slim. With Russia — and China — designated enemies of the United States, Taylor said, Ukraine was a “strategic partner” and at the “front-line” of US defences.

In fact, as can be learned from other sources, both the US and the UK have what amounts to a permanent military presence in western Ukraine, which is where the Javelin missiles — controversially denied to Kyiv by Obama, but supplied early in Trump’s presidency — are kept. Their location suggests that they are under US, or Nato, rather than Ukrainian, control. What does this say about Ukraine’s sovereignty?

A third point to emerge was how casually US officials and others seem to have approached what was potentially another big violation of Ukrainian sovereignty. In the overheard phone call whose contents triggered the impeachment hearings, the US President broached the possibility of Kyiv opening an inquiry into the affairs of a Ukrainian company that had previously appointed Hunter Biden to its board — Biden being the son of Joe Biden, then US Vice President and latterly a prospective Democratic rival to Trump for the presidency.

The question on which impeachment hinges is whether Trump tried to pressure, even “bribe”, his Ukrainian counterpart to agree; was there, in the now celebrated phrase, a “quid pro quo”? Specifically, did Trump make the resumption of US military aid — then suspended — conditional on Ukraine looking for dirt that could compromise a potential rival?

Suggested reading

Will the West ever understand Ukraine?

By Rodric Braithwaite

But look what is revealed almost in passing. The son of the then US Vice President joined the board of a Ukrainian company, Burisma, operating in the notoriously corrupt energy sector. If you wanted to defend Trump, you could almost argue that an investigation into this alone was warranted as a matter of US public interest — but surely in the US, not Ukraine.

In fact, Biden junior was just one of many American businesspeople drawn to the honeypot of Ukraine during its lurches towards a free market economy. Paul Manafort, briefly Trump’s campaign adviser in 2015, now in jail for tax evasion and money laundering, was another.

In essence, what emerged from the first days of the hearings was that the Obama and the Trump administrations both treated Ukraine almost as an extension of US territory and a bastion of its security and other interests. In that context, whether or not Trump was withholding military aid for a particular purpose, hardly matters. For a long time before then, favours seemed to be advanced and withdrawn almost at will, even as a lot of Americans made a lot of money in what was, and remains, a poor country.

Some have hazarded that Donald Trump deliberately set out to exploit the naïveté of the Ukraine’s president, a complete political novice who had been in office barely three months, when he placed the fateful phone call on 25 July. If so, this would have been nothing new, merely the continuation of the US interfering almost unhindered in Ukraine’s affairs on the assumption that it could bend key individuals in Kyiv to its will.

In fact, though, if Trump had hoped to take advantage of a new President, he was very badly informed on two counts. Any linkage he might have insinuated between the resumption of military aid and Ukraine launching an investigation into Hunter Biden, would have meant little, because Zelensky, it seems, was still unaware that the aid had ceased. Even if he had had any inkling, he might well have put it down to uncertainty in Washington about how to deal with Zelensky’s unexpected victory — unexpected, that is, to most of Ukraine’s Western patrons, who had banked on continuing their cosy relationship with his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko.

Suggested reading

Will the impeachment gamble backfire?

By Justin Webb

He would also have been gravely underestimating Zelensky. Contrary to a widespread Western view, Zelensky is not “just” an actor who rode his television celebrity to the presidency. He has a law degree and was highly successful in the production business, alongside his acting career. Both as a candidate and in office, he has also exhibited several qualities rare in a political novice: one is patience; another is an awareness of potential pitfalls, and another is his judgement of people.

In his testimony to the impeachment hearings, Bill Taylor noted that Zelensky had been concerned from an early stage not to become embroiled in another country’s domestic politics. He also said that another US diplomat (Kurt Volker, the US special envoy on Ukraine) had warned him about giving any impression that Ukraine was a US “plaything”. In some ways, Zelensky seems to have been more aware than either his predecessor, Poroshenko, or the US President of the lopsided reality of US-Ukraine relations.

Whether it was Zelensky’s innate savvy that kept him out of trouble or whether, for whatever reason, he never became aware of any linkage between US military aid and a Biden investigation may be clarified in the hearings that follow. US military aid resumed in September, without any evidence of Ukraine having ceded anything in return.

Then again, Zelensky’s has still not been received for a full-dress summit at the White House, despite reportedly angling hard for such a meeting to demonstrate his own, and Ukraine’s, standing, especially to Russia. Zelensky did meet Trump one-on-one in September at the UN General Assembly, but an invitation to Washington remains elusive. Whether this is a mark of Trump’s displeasure is unclear, but William Taylor in his testimony clearly inferred that it was something the US might use as a bargaining chip. “It is one thing to leverage a White House meeting,” he told a questioner; “another to hold up military aid.”