For Americans who follow the Russian-Ukrainian war, the past few months must look very strange. In the first half of summer, the story from Kyiv – and the many western media outlets that repeated it – was that Ukraine was winning. Then, not long after the NATO summit in July, Kyiv announced it lacked the interceptors to prevent a winter disaster. The country needed 300 missiles to survive, we were told. Even if these 300 missiles arrive, they are unlikely to protect a country as large as Ukraine from the sheer volume of Russian ballistic attacks and glide-bomb strikes. Now it’s September, and Ukraine says it’s facing a $27 billion shortfall in defense funding. There seems to be a vast difference between the public relations campaign and the reality in Ukraine.
There is a feeling that the western political establishment would rather see Russia burn than Ukraine saved
I know a little about that public relations campaign. I was President Zelensky’s first press secretary, entering office alongside him in 2019. I left in 2021 and remained sympathetic to the President as he fought the Russian invasion. But by 2025, I’d come to the conclusion that Ukraine will never be able to win this war militarily. The only solution is a negotiated peace.
Under the current Ukrainian regime, the chances of peace seem remote. In late June, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy approved a 40-day campaign of long-range drone strikes within Russia to force the Kremlin to end the war. It was supposed to be an “influence operation,” designed to show the Russian people the true cost of the conflict. But it was Ukrainians who suffered the most. The Kremlin instead escalated, bringing more destruction, more death and none of the negotiations that would ultimately save lives. Russia, it seems, was only emboldened by the attacks. The Kremlin merely reiterated its conditions for ending its aggression.
It is, of course, Russia who started this war. Its forces have tortured, raped, deported and killed Ukrainians. There is no moral symmetry between Kyiv and the Kremlin. Yet it is clear that the Ukrainian heroism of 2022 is long gone. Kyiv’s war policies have hardened into permanent mobilization and superficial PR – empty slogans and moral posturing are all that’s now offered. The desperate situation in Ukraine’s streets is concealed so that the refusal to compromise can be dressed up as courage.
In 2022, when the war began, the whole country stood up to defend itself. Men lined up at recruitment offices, and cities that Moscow tried to seize successfully resisted. All this naturally produced admiration throughout the world – and glorification in the western media and political circles. Today, that same glorification has become an unbearable burden. There is a feeling that the western political establishment would rather see Russia burn than Ukraine saved. Our daily losses are treated as an acceptable price for that end.
Ukraine has lost more than half its population in the 35 years since it declared independence from the Soviet Union. The largest collapse in population has happened since Russia’s full-scale invasion. By the most sober estimates, some 20 to 25 million people remain in the territory Kyiv still controls. Roughly half are of retirement age. At most, four million men are of conscription age. Russia can draw on the recruitment pool of approximately 10 times the number of fighting age men. Waging a war of attrition is therefore national suicide, not valor. Yet this is the strategy that the Zelensky government pursues.
The economy tells the same story. Ukraine is now entirely dependent on western aid, which is shrinking. Money that was supposed to be used to rebuild the country is being consumed by war. Public debt has crossed 110 percent of GDP. Russia, by contrast, has not had to borrow anywhere near this scale to wage its war, and it is still selling energy to the European Union. Since 2022, European countries have paid Moscow well over $230 billion for fossil fuels – more than they have given Kyiv in aid of all forms. Despite the innumerable sanctions packages, Russia keeps earning money and has a much stronger fiscal position than most EU states. Meanwhile, Ukraine is being crippled by the death of its people and the destruction of its productive base, while its debts keep accumulating.
European countries have paid Moscow over $230 billion for fossil fuels – more than they have given Kyiv in aid
Since the “influence operation” this summer, more than 90 percent of Ukrainian warehouses have been hit, our energy system has been torn apart and a humanitarian catastrophe will arrive with the winter snow. In the fifth year of full-scale war, the state’s offer to civilians in the worst-affected regions is often simply: leave. People on the front line who have no money and no means are told to go somewhere else.
Every day Ukraine loses more of its people. Those who want their children to have proper healthcare and education are forced to emigrate. The number of people dying in Ukraine is roughly four times the number of births. The nation is perishing, and yet the war grinds on.
Finland lost land after a devastating war, yet it managed to preserve its nation and its future. Ukraine could still become a frontier between the West and Russia: armed, sober and alive. But the present strategy is pushing us down a different path: that of Afghanistan.
The West spent 20 years pouring trillions of dollars into that conflict. All it achieved was flourishing corruption, decades of death and eventually the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. As in Ukraine, there was heavy censorship in western media. Most of those who reported from the region were uncompromising in their support of the Afghan state machine and the war, no matter what.
We see many of the same parallels in Ukraine. Extraordinarily, corruption rivals the war in rankings of public opinion as the biggest national problem. There are those in the Ukrainian government who are making millions of dollars from this war. I have just been sanctioned by the Zelensky government for saying so publicly.
Meanwhile, normal Ukrainian men do not leave their homes for months, for fear of press gangs who hunt them in the streets. There are reports of the disabled being pushed into frontline combat, of men dying mysteriously in recruitment offices, of women fighting to save husbands from being kidnapped in plain daylight. According to the Ukrainian ombudsman, only 2-3 percent of those seized in press gang raids ever reach the frontline. Many pay, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, to buy their way out. The corruption around this system runs into the billions of dollars annually. I do not blame my people for refusing to fight for a machine they no longer believe in.
If the purpose of this war was to create a path for Ukraine to join NATO, that prospect is already off the table. If the purpose was to recover territory, Ukraine is losing more of it, not taking it back. If it was to protect democracy, then the wartime martial law has already killed it. Freedom of speech has been greatly restricted, institutions have been corrupted, basic political rights suspended, the constitution violated, political opponents persecuted. All of this with a casualness about human life that would be recognized as deeply authoritarian anywhere else.
The war in Ukraine has lost any plausible theory of victory. At this point, it only lines the pockets of a corrupt and narrow circle of elites while the country itself perishes. Ukraine can still choose the Finnish road: stop the bleeding, hold what can be held, restore the economy and a way of life to which people can return. The other road is already visible. It is a road down which we lose land and people every day – and with them, the chance that there will be a Ukraine left to win.
Comments