Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been calling for Western arms from day one of the war, and has never received enough soon enough.

A few days after Russia’s forces marched over his border, Zelenskiy went on TV with a desperate plea for the West to close the skies. As missiles began to rain down on Ukraine’s cities he became increasingly desperate and berated Nato for failing to act.

“The Nato allies have created a narrative that closing the skies would provoke Russia’s direct aggression against Nato. This is self-hypnosis,” Zelenskiy said. “All the people who will die starting from this day will also die because of you. Because of your weakness.”

It was a brutally blunt message. Zelenskiy rapidly toned down his rhetoric as the first weapons were made available to prevent Ukraine’s rapid and total defeat – starting with Javelin missiles that devastated Russia’s invading tanks. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU)’s spectacular successes with such limited resources – teams of three soldiers armed with Javelins were blowing up tank after tank, and led the White House to reassess Ukraine’s chances of survival.

But since then, Zelenskiy has been pleading with the West for more, and more powerful, weapons. As bne IntelliNews reported, Zelenskiy assessment of Nato’s deep-seated fear of provoking a direct clash with Russia was spot on and resulted in a policy of “some, but not enough” weapons supplies, so that Ukraine could not lose, but could not win either.

First from a lecture, then in his nightly video blogs, Zelenskiy has tirelessly lobbied since spring of 2022 for more, and more powerful, aid: shells, tanks, guns, missiles and planes. However, the half-hearted support by the West was painfully obvious and put on display by the sagas surrounding the supply of the powerful German-made Leopard II tanks and then F-16 fighter jets: the first Leopards didn’t arrive for a year and the first F-16s for another year and a half, in July 2024, and even then they came in such small numbers they had no impact whatsoever on the battlefield. The delivery of both was little more than a political gesture, designed to assuage Western guilt for promising to “stand with Ukraine as long as it takes” but withhold the materiel Ukraine actually needed to defeat Russia.

With the advent of US President Donald Trump things have only got worse. Trump immediately cut off Ukraine again after taking office in January, but was persuaded by pro-Ukraine supporters in his entourage to at least allow the commitments that former US President Joe Biden had made before retiring. However, since then the US has made no new allocations of arms or money and the job of supporting Ukraine has entirely fallen to the cut down EU effort, spearheaded by the Coalition of the Willing. But the EU has neither the money, nor the weapons stockpiles, to supply Ukraine. Indeed, there are many capacities like satellite recognisance, essential for real time battlefield reports, that it lacks entirely, being as dependent on the US as Ukraine is.

Zelenskiy’s bad temper was on show for a second time at the notorious meeting in the White House with Trump in February, which descended into a shouting match between two presidents on February 28. Relations have since improved somewhat, especially following a tête-à-tête at the funeral of the late Pope Francis in Rome in April. But Trump has still not sent any new weapons and it was reported on July 1 that this decision is now final, although the White House has yet to confirm it and Bankova is seeking clarification at the time of writing.

If Trump walks out on Ukraine completely the rest of Nato will have to carry the can. While the alliance’s leaders have promised to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP (actually only 3.5%, as another 1.5% will be spent on “infrastructure”), they have only pledged to do this by 2035 and it is widely anticipated that, like the Welsh Nato summit in 2006 pledge to spending 2% of GDP on defence, most countries will ignore the promise; even today, a third of Nato members have not met the 2% target. Moreover, Putin will be 83 in 2035, in his 35^th year in office, and Ukraine will long since have lost the war by then.

In its latest staff report, the IMF warned this week that Ukraine is already “running out of space” to cope with more economic shocks and its base case scenario that the war will end this year is about to be revised to assuming this will be a long war. Ukraine has enough money and drones to get through this year, but even the Ministry of Finance (MinFin) expects international aid to halve next year, putting Kyiv’s ability to fund its war in doubt.

Darkening mood

The mood is now darkening rapidly. As bne IntelliNews wrote in a substack post, the end of arms deliveries to Ukraine could be the beginning of the end for Ukraine’s heroic resistance. The US also cut supplies off at the start of last year when it ran out of money for Ukraine in January 2024, only to bail it out with a $61bn aid package on April 20. But during those months Russia used the open skies to destroy all of Ukraine’s non-nuclear power generation capacity.

What will happen this time? Clearly the Kremlin is employing the same tactics. It launched a devastating missile barrage on Ukrainian towns and villages in May, again to deplete Kyiv’s stock of precious air defence ammo, and those supplies have clearly run so low that the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) has been forced to deploy its precious F-16s, of which it has only received 24 from European allies, to try to shoot down the incoming missiles. It has lost a second F-16 in the process.

If the first year of war quickly became an artillery duel, by the start of the second it became a drone war. As part of Ukraine’s stunning technological drone revolution that will completely reshape the way modern wars are fought, the AFU has developed new “interceptor” drones that are designed to bring down Russian “fly by wire” drones that have been impossible to counter with electronic warfare (EW) counter measures, but these drones are ineffective against the bigger Iran-designed Shahed drones and completely useless against ballistic missiles.

Kyiv has been trying to reduce its dependency on Western-made weapons and launched an initiative to turn Ukraine into a military production hub in October 2023. It has made great progress since then thanks to the Danish model of cooperating with Western arms-makers. Ukraine now reportedly meets between 40%-50% of its own military supply needs. Drone production has soared by some 500% in the last year alone. Ukraine produced some 1.5mn drones in 2024 and plans to produce 2.5mn this year – more than Russia is making, despite its enormous manufacturing power – and greater than that of all of Europe.

The drones have kept Ukraine in the war. They have made it impossible for the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) to follow through on their missile bombardment advantage, as any Russian infantry that steps into no-man’s land is hunted down and killed by Ukraine’s First Person View (FPV) drones. The drones are the modern equivalent of WWI’s lethal combination of trenches and the MG 08 machine gun, making it impossible to advance. This conflict has currently become a stalemate.

But now Russia is answering by ramping up its missile production, where it has a huge head start. Russia had already developed new hypersonic missiles, which Putin showcased during his 2018 State of the Nation speech and which he claims can penetrate any missile defence system. But Moscow has taken a leaf out of Bankova’s playbook and also developed the low tech glide bombs, recycled WWII gravity bombs with wings strapped to them to increase their range and make them aimable. Last week, the latest iteration of these jury-rigged missiles was used for the first time, the Grom-E1 missile-bomb, that also had a rocket added to the wings to increase its range and speed, making it even harder to shoot down. Russia’s glide bombs are cheap and plentiful and can carry up to 3,000kg of explosive, whereas the typical drone can’t carry more than 50kg.

Poignantly, Russian forces have reportedly taken full control of the Luhansk region on July 1. If confirmed, it would be the first time that Russia fully controls one of the four regions that it annexed in 2023, reported Reuters, citing Russian media. It will be a milestone in the war like the fall of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, which were both seminal victories for Russia, albeit bought with a great cost in blood.

In retrospect Zelenskiy should have taken the Istanbul peace deal struck in April 2022 that would have ended the war after a month. Ironically, that was Zelenskiy's instinct, as he confessed to a journalist in an interview at the site of the Bucha massacre. He is not going to get better terms now, irrespective of what support Europe can offer, and over a million lives would have been saved – not to mention Ukraine’s future as a functioning country.

The mood in the Kremlin has changed too. Putin is no longer interested in a deal. He is going to see the “special military operation” through to its bloody end.

When the ceasefire talks kicked off in Riyadh on February 18 the Russian side was polite and appeared to be genuinely looking whether a deal could be done, seeking for major concessions, but also making it clear they were willing to make some compromises. However, by the showdown in London in April, where Trump made his seven-point “final offer” peace plan, only to have it rejected by Zelenskiy and his counteroffer, the whole process is now dead in the water. Neither side has talked to the other for over a month. Tellingly, at the last round of talks in Istanbul on June 3 the Russian side got aggressive again and the head of the delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, a Kremlin aide and former culture minister, threatened the AFR would take more regions – up to eight more.