The PR surge which heralded that the “tide is turning” in the Ukrainian conflict is ending up in a debacle.

Ukraine, it turns out, can inflict tangible damage on the Russian economy thanks to its deep drone and missile strikes, with crucial help of US intelligence and two American tech giants, Palantir and SpaceX. Russian, it turns out, can sustain this damage.

Crucially, it can respond with brutal strikes that inflict infinitely more damage on Ukraine, as in effectively shutting down the export of the country’s main commodities - grain and ore - by incapacitating a cluster of ports around Odesa.

Although the latest escalation brought the two sides closer to what the military call “total war”, for Ukraine at least, it didn’t change the basic equation that characterised this conflict since the outset in 2014: Russia’s response will always be disproportionally higher.

It also turns out that Ukraine has almost completely run out of Patriot interceptor missiles, so every ballistic missile launched by Russia is now reaching its target. The number of civilian casualties rose by 30% in July compared with previous months and by 70% compared with July 2025, according to AFP. Government officials and experts warn that Ukraine should be bracing for the harshest winter since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The routine strikes on energy, particularly heat-generating infrastructure are now being complemented by the methodical erasure of main commercial storehouses all around Ukraine which is how Russia responded to Ukrainian strikes on the logistical hubs owned by Wildberries, the Russian equivalent of Amazon. Russian strikes have already led to the deficit of goods in Ukrainian supermarkets.

Zelenskiy is doing his utmost to procure interceptor missiles for the Patriots. He said in a recent interview with CNN that he needs 5% of the current American stockpile of these missiles for Ukraine to linger throughout the winter. With the current stockpile estimated at 850 (Reuters), it means he’ll be satisfied with just over 40 interceptors. But that’s about the number of ballistic missiles Russia has been launching in each of its recent large-scale attacks, while Ukraine’s drone force commander Robert “Magyar” Brovdi claims the Russians could currently launch up to 77 missiles in each attack and that they could bring that number to 200 in near future.

There are an estimated 4,000-6,000 interceptor missiles around the world, but even if Ukraine gets 5% of that, it will be very poorly defended.

Of course American reluctance to provide the interceptors could be explained by greed and selfishness, but it is also possible that US military planners simply regard Ukraine’s air defence case as hopeless, given that math.

The lack of missiles for the Patriots is the result of Western defence industry lobbyists' insatiable and absurdly self-defeating appetite for war. As if Biden’s Democratic administration’s proxy war in Ukraine wasn’t enough, Trump’s Republican administration launched an ill-thought-out direct attack on Iran which prompted the latter to respond by bombing US allies in the Persian Gulf. The global stockpile of missiles for Patriot systems virtually evaporated in a matter of weeks as a result.

Meanwhile, the closure of the strait of Hormuz sent Russian oil revenues soaring while simultaneously creating a serious strain on both the European and Ukrainian fuel markets. The EU effectively gifted an estimated $6bn to Putin by buying a record amount of Russian LNG in 2026, effectively financing his war against Ukraine while simultaneously being the main funder of the latter’s war effort. This example alone underscores the absurdity and the self-defeating nature of the entire policy of seeking conflict with Russia that was gradually mainstreamed by Western hawks over the last three decades.

Europe’s own Israel

Despite unapologetic proponents of forever war, like former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, claiming that “Ukraine is winning”, the conflict is now back to square one. As ever, the choice is between ending the conflict on the terms Moscow would agree to or prolonging the Ukrainian misery indefinitely with exponentially catastrophic results for the country’s future.

Pro-Ukraine cheerleaders claim there is another path - that of defeating Russia, but the last four and a half years showed how illusionary and/or mendacious that narrative has been from the outset. Much advertised black swan events, like Wagner mutiny or Ukraine’s Kursk operation were coming and going without changing the trajectory of the conflict, while Ukraine kept shrinking territorially, while its industrial and urban energy infrastructure turned into fuming ruins. It is abundantly clear now that the only purpose of constantly blowing this PR bubble is to prevent the conflict from ending, because it has formed a whole elite social class that’s too invested in illusionary outcomes it’s been peddling tomns of people, especially to Ukrainians, over many years.

Their latest talking point, primarily aimed at appeasing Donald Trump, is that Ukraine should become the European equivalent of Israel - “a steel porcupine, indigestible for present and future aggressors”, as EU European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put it, using a metaphor that had been in so far reserved to Israel. Pro-Ukrainian commentator Michael Weiss wrote in the Atlantic that Ukraine should become America’s “model ally”, a term MAGA ideologists use to advertise Israel.

What the Israeli template really means is a forever war. What it misses is that Russia is no Hamas or Hezbollah or even both of these lumped together with their powerful patron, Iran. It is one of the world's two major nuclear powers, the fact which prevents West’s direct involvement. It is also one of the world's major economic powers which explains its long-term sustainability in the face of adversity. Ukraine’s eventual defeat, hopefully only partial and not complete as the latter doesn’t appear to be Kremlin’s intention, has always been a given, an inevitable outcome of pushing Europe’s poorest country under Putin’s bulldozer. The only question is at what cost for Russia. That’s what is really at stake for strategic planners in Moscow and Western capitals. It is only Ukrainians, people populating the battlefield chosen by world powers, who have not been informed about it.

There is no argument that Russia is the aggressor, but its aggression is fundamentally reactive, a deliberately disproportional response to hybrid and proxy war against what it sees as its core interests that are not nearly as ambitious and global as those of the US. Besides, unlike the pro-Ukrainian coalition, Moscow has been reasonably clear and realistic about its endgame since the outset. It is still basing its conditions of settlement on the framework agreed upon in Istanbul in the early stage of war and then ditched at the insistence of Britain and the US.

Meanwhile, Ukraine and its Western allies are all over the place, with multiple voices making contradictory statements and goalposts changing at whim. Up until now, the declared goals range from liberating or at least isolating Crimea and delivering a strategic defeat upon Russia on the one hand to freezing the conflict along the current frontline before Russia seizes all of Donbas on the other.

But illusionary goals, upon which Ukraine’s national resilience had been built, have been gradually evaporating over the last several years like dew in the sun, to quote the Ukrainian anthem. The question of what the Ukrainians are sacrificing their lives for looms large over the historical horizon.

As Nato’s secretary-general Mark Rutte confirmed in a recent interview with Handelsblatt, Ukraine has no real path for joining the alliance because of the lack of consensus among its members. Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief and main presidential hopeful Valery Zaluzhnyi put it more bluntly speaking about Ukraine’s Nato prospects at a recent meeting of Ukrainian ambassadors: “Don’t believe in fairytales”.

Zelenskiy’s administration is now trying to secure some kind of security guarantees similar to Nato outside the Nato framework which is the reason why the Israeli or South Korean templates come up. There is also the Anglo-French project of deploying troops from Nato countries on Ukrainian soil in a mission not formally directed by Nato. But all of that hinges on Russia’s agreement which is tantamount to Moscow’s capitulation. These projects just keep bringing us to square one over and over again.

The West’s worst FAFO endeavour

The Western approach to Ukraine is the definition of living a lie - the primordial lie at the heart of this conflict which claimed that Russia is either already finished or could be more or less easily defeated.

US president Donald Trump’s strategy vis a vis Iran famously boils down to his favourite acronym FAFO (fuck around and find out), which basically means there is no strategy at all. The policy is driven by little more than basic instincts and the enormous ignorance of shameless grifters posing as experts on Ukraine and Russia. Millions of people in different countries become hostage to a bunch of men with the mentality of a teenage online gamer.

While the Iran affair is highly personalised and thankfully hasn’t lasted for too long yet, the conflict between the US-led West and Russia over Ukraine is a far more impactful FAFO mission undertaken by several generations of Western leaders, with far more direct and catastrophic results for European security.

Just before the fateful Bucharest Nato summit which launched the process of Ukraine’s and Georgia’s accession in the alliance, British prime minister Tony Blair told a group of US senators, including the recently deceased outspoken pro-Ukraine hawk Lindsay Graham, that the Western strategy was “to make Russia a little desperate with our activities in areas bordering on what Russia considers its sphere of influence and along its actual borders”. He said “Russia has to be shown firmness and sown with seeds of confusion”, according to a Wikileaks publication recently cited by Norwegian expert on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, Glenn Diesen.

The seeds of confusion yielded the grimmest of harvests. It resulted in Vladimir Putin evolving from a partner of the West physically present at the said Nato summit (and perhaps still hoping before it start that Russia could one day become a member) to the US West’s sworn enemy who launched brutal aggression in Ukraine to prevent Nato from “cultivating” that country’s territory, in his own parlance.

It also resulted in the Russian army getting such a boost to the extent that, according to Ukraine’s Zaluzhnyi, it will take twelve years for Nato to get half as strong and modernised as Russian. Of course the Ukrainian army experienced the same kind of boost, but what side of the geopolitical rift it will find itself in the next few decades is a question. A deep disillusionment about the West may sway the Ukrainian pendulum in the direction of Georgia - a former pro-Western showcase that fought a war with Putin's Russia in 2008.

The pro-war community of securocrats, defence industry lobbyists, serviced by an army of experts, academics and journalists, has been trying to prove that the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict can be somehow altered since Minsk agreements in 2015 which offered Ukraine a kind of conditions it can’t possibly dream of today. Their rejection of objective reality has made things infinitely worse not just for Ukraine, but for the whole of Europe.

The war benefits Putin’s regime as well as its Ukrainian and Western cheerleaders, but everyone else is losing out. No society - Ukrainian, Russian, Western - is wholeheartedly buying into the pro-war argument, but warmongers control the infospace and invest most of their effort into intimidating shutting down pro-peace voices and selling madcap illusions. Ukraine’s future is of little concern for them, their only goal is conflict per se.

The Russo-Ukrainian war is not ending because the US-West remains in the FAFO mode, despite the entire operation having long turned into epic clusterfuck, to use a similarly obscene expression, on a scale far greater than Iran’s. Ending war on Russia’s unsavoury terms, recognising grave miscalculations and poor diplomacy that led to it is much costlier for self-interested elites than letting Ukrainians to keep dying - for nothing.

 

Leonid Ragozin is a freelance journalist based in Riga. Formerly at the BBC, Newsweek and Lonely Planet guides. He tweets @leonidragozin