The puzzling media hype aimed at selling the idea of Ukraine seizing battlefield initiative in the war against Russia has continued since the middle of spring, but it only became clear in June what it was leading up to. Ukraine and the E3 powers — France, Britain and Germany — have resolved to bury the legacy of the Anchorage summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin by reverting to the policy of maximising pressure on Russia so it alters its conditions for the end of the war.

Behind the performative show of confidence by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s administration and its European partners is a dangerous gamble by compromised politicians who see the continuation of the war as a lifeline for their expiring careers.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron form a trio of uniquely unpopular leaders slated to be removed in upcoming elections. Their Ukrainian partner is a lame duck dogged by a massive anti-corruption investigation which targets his immediate entourage, including his once omnipotent former chief of staff, Andriy Yerman. Their collective effort smacks of desperation compounded by magical thinking, which has been a feature of the Ukraine discourse in the West for years. 

More ominously, the entire situation is reminiscent of 2021 when Joe Biden’s accession to the White House prompted Zelenskiy and his Western allies to ditch tangible progress he achieved in talks with Putin in favour of pressuring Russia on every conceivable front — from clamping down on Kremlin’s Ukrainian allies to sending a British destroyer into what Russia deems its territorial waters off Crimea. After a year of brinkmanship, this policy resulted in full-blown catastrophe in the shape of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine. 

Today, the conflict stands on the brink of a new phase of escalation that could involve Putin engineering a humanitarian catastrophe in Ukrainian cities as well as the conflict spilling beyond Ukrainian borders, with a real threat of a direct clash between Russia and Nato.

Tough rhetoric, shifting goalposts 

Wrapped in the language of belligerent defiance, the statement released by E3 leaders on June 7 sounds primarily like an ultimatum. However, it differs from an even more defiant declaration adopted by a larger group of European leaders, led by the E3, in Berlin last December. It is a also a far cry from the maximalist end goals set out by Ukrainian and Western officials in the first two years of the war, like the de-occupation of Crimea or Russia’s strategic defeat.

Like the Berlin declaration, the E3 statement demands a ceasefire before any negotiations — something Russia is unlikely agree to because its ongoing offensive is its main leverage in the talks. Even if it stalls completely, Moscow will be more inclined — as it did before — to adapt to Ukraine’s new capabilities than to seek ceasefire. 

To give an idea of how the positions of the two sides on this issue have shifted over years, Reuters reported in 2024 that the Kremlin had approached the US with the suggestion of a ceasefire along the current battle line, but Biden’s administration rejected it. This was accompanied by a media campaign striving to claim that Putin needed a ceasefire to get a breather while Ukraine had the upper hand on the battlefield.

Moreover, back in 2019, the Paris talks between Zelenskiy and Putin resulted in a de-facto ceasefire along the existing frontline, which left far more territory under Ukrainian control. But it was upended by Zelensky’s U-turn on peace talks in 2021.

Today, Russia insists on the Ukrainian withdrawal from a part of the Donetsk region it still holds, but agrees to a ceasefire along the current frontline in other areas. The E3 statement, on the contrary, insists that the current line of contact should be the starting point for negotiations.

E3 leaders also want a multinational force to safeguard peace in Ukraine. Unlike the Berlin declaration though, their statement doesn’t define this force as “European-led”, which de-facto means “Nato-led”, making this demand unacceptable to Russia. Non-Nato peacekeepers, on the other hand, is something Russia might agree to.

Finally, there is a demand for Russian compensation to Ukraine. But that’s what Moscow has repeatedly signalled its willingness to compromise on, depending on how this issue is framed. Moscow deems its assets held by the EU all but lost, while their redirection for the reconstruction of Ukraine could help its political goals in the country in the postwar period.

What the E3 statement completely omits, compared with the Berlin declaration, is the demand that Ukraine should be able to maintain an 800-thousand-strong army and that the ceasefire monitoring would be led by the US. 

Crucially, the question of Ukraine’s Nato membership is ominously absent from both documents. It was presented as non-negotiable by Kyiv and its partners during the build-up to the all-out conflict in 2021-22, which played the most crucial role in Putin’s decision to invade.

All in all, the declaration leaves a bitter feeling because Ukraine could have made a much better deal with Russia much earlier and at several points in time, avoiding catastrophic losses of land, infrastructure and population, about a quarter of which has fled the country, likely for good. 

Packaging that failure as a good enough result, if not Ukraine’s tentative victory, is what strategic communication experts in Kyiv and Western capitals are busy working on at the moment. The PR surge is the last-ditch attempt to make Putin concede on at least something, like dropping the Donbas withdrawal demand, in order for that make-believe to look remotely plausible.

Success but no turnaround

This is not to say that the battlefield surge, which backs up the “turning point” campaign in the media, is not real. Ukrainian forces have demonstrated a number of achievements in recent months. The most obvious one is an acute fuel crisis they have managed to engineer in the Russian-controlled Crimea and the Azov Sea region. The situation in Sevastopol was so bad last week that the local authorities banned all private customers from buying gasoline, reserving it exclusively for the needs of the army and critical government services. 

This was achieved through midrange drone strikes which placed the overland route connecting Russia to Crimea under effective Ukrainian fire control. The Russians will now need many months to adapt by deploying new anti-aircraft units and building anti-drone netting over the main highway. It will also affect their offensive operations in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region throughout this year.

Long-range drone and missile strikes across Russia, over a thousand kilometres from Ukraine at times, keep generating impressive pictures for TV and social networks, but their impact is far less obvious, especially given additional revenues generated by the closure of the strait of Hormuz. There is also a path for adaption: The government has begun issuing licences to strategic companies to create their own anti-aircraft defence. Also, reservists are being called up to man regional anti-aircraft units. 

On the battlefield itself, the scope of the Russian offensive was getting less and less impressive, falling to just 14 square kilometres in May, according to Ukraine’s Deep State mapping service — the worst result since Ukraine’s failed counter-offensive in 2023 when the Russians retreated in a few places. 

The caveat is that there were visible manipulations with the frontline data in recent months, not only by clearly biased organisations like the US-based Institute for the Study War (ISW), but also by the previously more reliable services. Since the middle of spring, Deep State (DS), which cooperates with the Ukrainian defence ministry, has stopped announcing its updates of Russian advances which it, however ,keeps marking up on near-daily basis. Its battlefield picture lags considerably behind other Ukrainian and Russian mapping services. Russia’s total advances in the first ten days of June are estimated at 20 sq. km, as per DS, but the fog of war is getting foggier and the real picture is unclear. 

It is safe to say that the Russian slowdown is partly due to Ukraine scaling up its drone forces, increasing their capacity to cause havoc in the Russian rear and widen the kill zone that divides areas firmly controlled by the two armies by dozens of kilometres. 

The other reason though is that Russia is now squarely focused on conquering the best-fortified part of Ukraine’s Donbas region — the one it wants the Ukrainians to withdraw from as part of the peace agreement. As Western media was getting flooded with headlines about a “stalled” Russian offensive, the Russians were busy infiltrating Kostiantynivka, the southernmost city of the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration, which pro-Ukrainian war cheerleaders picture as an impregnable “fortress belt”. Ukrainian military observers admit that the city is likely to fall later this summer. 

But whatever Ukraine has or hasn’t achieved in reality, this is so far absolutely incomparable with the gains it made during its counter-offensives in 2022 and 2023. This is the other reason why the optimism about “a turning tide in war” seems utterly misplaced. 

Make-believe culture

However, the wildest claims attempt to prove that Russia is weakening to the extent it could accept Ukrainian and Western conditions were focused on its domestic politics. These are based on a kind of indicators that could be cherrypicked at any point in time, especially while the country is at war. 

But in the memory of living generations, Russia went through far worse economic crisis accompanied by two Chechen wars without its political system collapsing. The result was the opposite — it became better integrated, radically modernised and indeed far more authoritarian in a contemporary, 21st century way. 

If you want to assess the extent of resilience (always blending into submissiveness) look no further than Ukraine. This is what ex-Soviet people can endure in the face of a threat they deem existential, as most Russian see the threat posed by the West, given its support of neo-nazi units in Ukraine (some of them staffed by Russian nazis) and the rhetoric of defeating and dismembering Russia from such highly positioned officials as the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas.

The “turning point” campaign reveals a key difference between the Russian and the Ukrainian/Western approach to waging war. The latter puts infowar at the forefront, which works great for generating the desired political and social outcomes, as in controlling public opinion and facilitating a kind of decision-making that favours prolonged war and avoiding compromise. The emphasis on perception rather than objective reality creates a simulative culture that permeates the Western discourse regarding the war. 

The Russian approach, by contrast, is far more result-oriented, with the Kremlin seemingly resigned to losing in cognitive warfare from the outset, but obsessively focused on realistically attainable goals. 

What that line of thinking has produced in terms of the “turning point” campaign is up for interpretation. Some sources (like RBC.UA, a Ukrainian news wire) suggest the idea is for Ukraine to linger till the US midterms, which may result in a solid pro-Ukrainian majority in the Congress and the US re-emerging at the helm of the pro-Ukraine coalition.

The weakest link in this scheme is Ukraine — a country that’s suffering from this war on a totally different scale than Russia and that will suffer infinitely more if the war shifts into a new phase of escalation.

That’s why there is a far greater sense of urgency in Kyiv than in European capitals. Ukrainian officials, including Zelenskiy, have repeatedly said that the window of opportunity for altering Putin’s conditions in Kyiv’s favour extends till the end of the year. As Zelenskiy former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba recently said: “I don’t want to sound like a killjoy… but by November we’ll get back to the question of how we can survive the winter.” He described the talk of a “turning tide” as “delirium”.