A Note to My Ukrainian Readers
I know what’s coming. Many of you will read the title of this article, feel the heat rise in your chest, and fire off a message telling me I’m a propagandist, a Kremlin shill, a traitor to decency. You’ll do this without reading past the headline. I know this because it happens every single time, and because the messages you send invariably respond to things the article doesn’t say while ignoring everything it does.
So before you write that email, I’m asking you to do something radical: read the piece. All of it. Then disagree with me if you still want to. I welcome informed disagreement. What I cannot take seriously is rage that substitutes for reading.
Let me be direct about what I do and what I don’t do.
I don’t write what you want to hear. I write what the evidence supports. If the evidence supported a Ukrainian victory, I would write that. It doesn’t. If the battlefield situation were a stalemate, I would say so. It isn’t. If your government were leveling with you about the state of the war, I wouldn’t need to be the one telling you things your own leaders refuse to say. But they aren’t, and so here we are.
I am not your enemy. The people who lied to you about what this war would cost, who promised you NATO membership that was never coming, who talked your president out of a peace deal in Istanbul when the terms were incomparably better than anything available today, who armed you just enough to keep dying but never enough to win, who now openly admit they needed you to keep fighting so they could rearm, those people are not on your side. I understand that’s a harder thing to hear than “the journalist is lying.” But difficulty is not the same as falsehood.
Nothing in this article celebrates your suffering. Nothing in it cheers for Russia. What it does is describe the situation as it exists (sourced, cited, and verifiable) because you deserve to know what is actually happening in a war being fought with your lives. Your media is under martial law censorship. Your government has banned opposition parties and cancelled elections. The Western press that claims to support you has spent four years filtering the battlefield reality through a lens designed to maintain public support for weapons shipments, not to inform you.
I am under no such constraints, and I will not pretend to be.
If you read this article and find a factual error, write to me. I will correct it. If you read it and find my analysis wrong, make your case. I will engage with it. But if your plan is to read six words, assume the worst, and send me a message that amounts to nothing more than anguish dressed up as argument, save your energy. I understand your pain. I do not dismiss it. But your pain does not make the facts go away, and shouting at the person reporting them will not change what is happening on the ground.
Read the article. Then we can talk.
Scott Ortkiese/Houston/Throughline Synthesis
INTRODUCTION
As of February 2026, the Ukraine war has entered what multiple independent, non-Western, and realist analysts describe as its terminal phase. The convergence of Ukrainian military exhaustion, systematic infrastructure destruction, aggressive Russian advances, and US-driven diplomatic pressure toward a June deadline has created conditions that make the war’s conclusion, on terms deeply unfavorable to Kyiv and its European backers, a matter of months, not years.
This analysis draws on a February 2026 transcript of a conversation between historian and Russian affairs analyst Gilbert Doctorow and Professor Glenn Diesen, along with reporting from TASS, EADaily, Al Jazeera, South China Morning Post, Indian media, the Middle East Eye, and a constellation of independent analysts who have been systematically excluded from the Western legacy media narrative for the better part of four years.
The picture that emerges when you step outside the information perimeter enforced by the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, and their European counterparts is not merely different in emphasis. It is different in kind. It is the difference between watching a chess match from the losing side’s press box, where every retreat is called a “strategic repositioning”, and watching it from above the board, where the checkmate is three moves away and everyone except the losing player can see it.
I. The Battlefield: What Western Media Refuses to Show
The military picture is unambiguous for anyone willing to look at it honestly.
Russian forces are advancing on the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration, the last major urban defensive complex in Donetsk oblast, from three directions simultaneously. These twin cities have been the anchor of Ukraine’s eastern defenses since 2014, the keystone of an elaborate fortification network built over a decade with Western engineering assistance and billions in funding. Their fall does not represent a setback. It represents the end of Ukraine’s ability to hold any coherent defensive line east of the Dnieper River.
As of early February 2026, Russian units have taken Privolye, driven Ukrainian formations out of Golubovka and Minkovka, and reached the Seversky Donets-Donbass canal, a critical natural barrier approximately 16 kilometers from Kramatorsk. Krasny Liman, once considered a pivotal defensive node, has been outflanked and left behind Russian lines. Ukrainian forces are treating the canal as their last defensible line before the cities themselves, but military analysts note that canals make poor defensive barriers without the manpower to hold them, and manpower is precisely what Ukraine no longer has.
On the southern axis, the capture of Gulyaipole (a town of 13,000 that fell after three months of fighting) has opened a new operational corridor toward Orekhov and ultimately Zaporizhzhia. Russian military planning for 2026 identifies these two axes, Slavyansk-Kramatorsk in the north and Zaporizhzhia in the south, as the decisive priorities, with a major offensive anticipated as early as late April or May.
Gilbert Doctorow, drawing on his monitoring of Russian state television including Dmitry Kiselyov’s weekly Vesti Nedeli program, was blunt in his assessment: when Kramatorsk and Slavyansk fall, which he estimates in “coming weeks or months”, “it’s a clear drive to the Dnieper” and the occupied territory could jump from roughly 20% to 25-28% “almost instantly”. At that point, the only thing left to negotiate would be the fate of Odessa and Kharkiv.
For those who spent years parroting the “stalemate” narrative, that Russia took three and a half years to move from 19% to 20% of Ukrainian territory, Diesen offered the corrective that should have been obvious to any honest military analyst: “During this 3½ years in a war of attrition they essentially bled out a very big army. The manpower is now gone. All the weapon storages across the West, from air defenses to artillery shells, have been depleted. And the fortification lines built since 2014 are now behind the Russians”. The pace of advance was never the point. The destruction of Ukraine’s capacity to resist was the point. And that mission is now functionally accomplished.
II. The Manpower Catastrophe: An Army Bleeding Out
The single most devastating and irreversible fact of this war is Ukraine’s manpower crisis. It is the fact that makes every other discussion (of weapons deliveries, of sanctions, of diplomatic frameworks) academic.
In January 2026, Ukraine’s newly appointed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov made an extraordinary admission to parliament: approximately 200,000 soldiers are absent without leave, and roughly 2 million Ukrainians are “wanted” for evading military service. This was the first time a Ukrainian official publicly acknowledged the scale of the hemorrhage. It was a confession extracted not by conscience but by desperation, a new defense minister trying to explain to parliament why the front is collapsing without having to say the words “the front is collapsing.”
The numbers behind those headlines are even grimmer. Independent tracking shows that by September 2025, combined AWOL and desertion cases had reached nearly 290,000 to 235,646 AWOL and 53,954 desertions. October 2025 alone saw over 21,600 desertion cases, a wartime record. Zelensky himself admitted that Ukrainian defenders are outnumbered eight to one in critical sectors around Pokrovsk. Eight to one. That is not a ratio that produces stalemates. That is a ratio that produces routs, delayed only by the fortifications that are now behind Russian lines.
Professor Glenn Diesen, whose analysis runs through both the Doctorow transcript and his extensive published body of work, has stated the conclusion without euphemism: “The Ukrainian army has suffered huge losses and total collapse is now unavoidable. NATO is out of weapons, Ukraine is out of manpower, the wider world is deepening ties with Russia, and the Western political support for Ukraine is falling fast”. The war will end either with a Russian battlefield victory or on “very unfavourable terms for Ukraine and NATO in a negotiated settlement.”
Nearly 100,000 draft-age young men fled Ukraine in just the first two months after Zelensky eased travel restrictions for men aged 18-22. They voted with their feet, and their vote was unambiguous. The conscription pool is shrinking while the average age of soldiers rises toward 50. Proposals to mobilize teenagers would only accelerate the demographic death spiral that already threatens Ukraine’s long-term viability as a nation. You cannot win a war and lose a generation simultaneously. Ukraine is losing both.
III. The Destruction of a Country’s Infrastructure
Russia’s strategy extends far beyond the front lines, and it is here that the full scope of what has been done to Ukraine, and what was allowed to be done by Ukraine’s so-called allies, becomes most stark.
Approximately 70% of Ukraine’s power generation capacity has been destroyed through systematic missile and drone strikes. In January 2026 alone, Russia launched multiple massive barrages, one involving 653 drones and 51 missiles in a single night, targeting power stations, substations connected to nuclear plants, and distribution networks across multiple regions. Seventy percent of Kyiv lost power after one such strike, forcing supermarket chains to close and the city’s tram system to shut down.
Ukraine’s energy ministry confirmed that attacks targeted critical components including 750kV and 330kV substations connecting nuclear generation to the grid. DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, reported its thermal power plants had been hit for the tenth time since October 2025. The residual generating capacity, as Doctorow noted, is largely dispersed renewables, rooftop solar cells and small wind installations that Russia cannot efficiently target but that cannot power a modern economy or a military logistics chain.
The attacks have now expanded to Ukraine’s railway network, a deliberate strategic choice that Doctorow notes mirrors historical military doctrine: “They are looking back in the military records and seeing what they were doing in the 19th century, destroying the whole railway network is a good way of finishing off the enemy”. Railways are the arteries of a continental military campaign. When the arteries are severed, the body dies, no matter how strong the heart still beats.
The Russian air campaign has also exhausted Ukraine’s air defense stockpile. Doctorow confirmed that “they have exhausted their supply of Patriots, as much good as they were. Certainly, they’re not much good against Russia’s hypersonic missiles”. The Western cupboard is bare. There are no more Patriot batteries to send, and the ones that were sent cannot intercept the weapons Russia is now deploying.
As Doctorow warned: “There will not be much left of Ukraine if this war isn’t concluded soon”. That is not rhetoric. That is a physical description of a country being systematically dismantled while its allies debate the finer points of communiqué language.
IV. Behind the Curtain in Abu Dhabi: What’s Actually Being Negotiated
The public narrative around the US-mediated peace talks and the private reality are two very different things, separated by the chasm that always exists between what politicians say for cameras and what envoys discuss behind closed doors.
On the surface, two rounds of trilateral negotiations took place in Abu Dhabi in January and early February 2026, led by Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with Ukrainian and Russian delegations present. Zelensky announced that the US wants a deal finalized by June, before Trump pivots to midterm election politics: “They express a desire to have everything resolved by June. They are committed to concluding the conflict”.
But the substance of those talks, according to Doctorow’s sources on Russian state television, specifically Kiselyov’s Vesti Nedelireveals a far more consequential architecture. The Abu Dhabi talks proceeded on two parallel tracks:
Track One involved direct discussions between Ukrainian and Russian military intelligence officers on the conditions under which Ukrainian forces would withdraw from the portions of Donbas they still hold, a Russian precondition for any peace treaty. This track also covered the creation of a buffer zone along the new Russian-Ukrainian frontier. Let that sink in. The military track is not about whether Ukraine withdraws. It is about the logistics of how and when.
Track Two involved American and Russian officials discussing the steps toward normalization of state-to-state relations as peace negotiations proceed. This included a new Trump emissary named Gruenbaum reviewing Putin’s proposal to accept Trump’s invitation to join a “Board of Peace,” with Russia’s $1 billion contribution drawn from frozen Russian state assets in the US.
Doctorow is characteristically direct about what this structure means: “The real subject is the terms of Ukrainian capitulation to the Russian territorial and other demands”. When Zelensky publicly insists Ukraine is “not giving up any territory,” Doctorow calls this “an outright lie since the Russians would not have come for talks and would not have agreed to resuming talks if their condition of withdrawal were not met”.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio inadvertently confirmed the narrow scope of the remaining dispute when he stated: “What they’re literally fighting over now is about a 30-to-50 kilometer space and the 20% of the Donetsk region that remains”. Russia has proposed an “economic zone” in the disputed territory as a potential bridging mechanism, and Zelensky acknowledged Russia showed willingness to consider this US proposal. The territorial question, in other words, is being settled. The only remaining discussion is whether it will be dressed up as something other than capitulation for domestic Ukrainian consumption.
V. The Alexeyev Assassination: Who Benefits, and Why Now?
The attempted assassination of Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev, first deputy head of Russia’s GRU military intelligence and a member of the Russian negotiating team, on February 6, 2026, is the single most revealing event of the war’s final chapter. It tells you more about who is truly desperate, and why, than a thousand press conferences.
Alexeyev was shot multiple times at his apartment building in Moscow. He survived and remains in critical but recovering condition. Russia’s FSB announced that the detained suspect admitted to acting on orders from Ukraine’s SBU security service, and extended accusations to Polish intelligence for the suspect’s recruitment and logistics. Lavrov immediately called it “a terrorist act aimed at disrupting the negotiating process”.
But Doctorow’s analysis goes considerably deeper than the official Russian line. He argues this operation bears the fingerprints of MI6, not merely Ukrainian intelligence. His reasoning is detailed and specific:
First, unlike the three previous assassinations of Russian generals, carried out remotely via explosive devices triggered from Kyiv, this was a direct, in-person assassination with a silenced weapon on the 24th floor of a residential building. It was a professional hit, not a remote bombing. The tradecraft is qualitatively different.
Second, the suspect fled to Dubai, raising immediate questions about post-operation exfiltration plans, possibly involving cosmetic surgery and new identity documents. “The possibilities suggest a much more sophisticated operation than just a little Ukrainian military intelligence,” Doctorow observed.
Third, Alexeyev was personally sanctioned by Britain for alleged involvement in the Skripal poisoning and linked to GRU cyberattacks on British soil. The British government spent years publicly blaming him. That is motive, openly declared.
Fourth, and perhaps most damningly, the pattern holds across all the targets. Lieutenant General Kirillov, assassinated in December 2024, was the officer who exposed the White Helmets false flag operations in Syria and the Western-funded biological laboratories in Ukraine. Every Russian officer who has been assassinated had specifically exposed MI6 or CIA covert operations. That is not coincidence. That is a kill list with a logic.
The Israeli analyst Yuri Bocharov framed the strategic calculus with precision: “An attempt by the Kiev regime to assassinate the deputy head of the GRU at a time when the head of the department himself is on the external negotiating line looks like a direct warning: negotiations are unacceptable. Not because they are ‘bad,’ but because they are deadly for the current configuration of power in Kiev”. For Zelensky and the circle around him, peace means elections, and elections mean prison.
Doctorow explains why the Kremlin studiously avoids identifying British involvement: “If you were to identify England as being behind the attempted assassination, the international protocol would require that you declare war on England. And Moscow does not want to do that. One war at a time is enough”. So Russia blames Ukraine, which nobody will shed a tear over. The Kremlin absorbs the provocation and redirects its fury into the destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure. The British get to keep their hands clean in public while their fingerprints dry on the gun.
VI. Europe’s Unconscionable Gambit: Fighting to the Last Ukrainian
Perhaps the most damning revelation from non-Western and independent sources is the growing body of evidence (much of it now stated openly, on the record, by named officials) that European leaders are deliberately working to prolong the conflict. Not to save Ukraine. To buy time for their own rearmament.
The statements are no longer whispered in corridors. They are delivered at podiums:
Germany’s intelligence chief stated that Europe needs to “keep the Ukrainians in the fight until Europe can get ready.” The prime minister of Denmark said “it’s better to keep the war going than having a bad peace.” Sweden’s defense minister warned that it’s “very dangerous if the war comes to an end” because Russia would then have freed-up military capabilities that could be directed toward the Baltic. Wolfgang Ischinger, head of the Munich Security Conference, acknowledged that once the war ends, Russia would no longer be “preoccupied with Ukraine” (which he characterized as a negative consequence for Germany and Europe. To his credit, he added that he still wanted the war to end) a caveat that contradicted everything he had just said.
Let those statements settle. Senior European officials, from NATO member states, are publicly arguing that Ukrainian soldiers should keep dying so that Europe has time to build weapons. That is not analysis. Those are their words.
The EU has moved from rhetoric to budget lines. Member states agreed to establish the SAFE mechanism, intended to mobilize up to €150 billion for weapons production. The broader rearmament blueprint amounts to €800 billion. Armando Mema of Finland’s Freedom Alliance party stated the obvious: “Europe is continuing a proxy war in Ukraine not to resolve it, but to buy time for building up its own military capabilities. This logic also explains why the European Union revised and rejected the peace plan proposed by Trump”.
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was the EU’s and America’s preferred candidate for the Ukrainian presidency, confirmed this reading from Kyiv’s own perspective, tweeting that “our worst fears have been confirmed, the Europeans are just using us to buy time for themselves”. When the woman Washington and Brussels once wanted to install as president of Ukraine tells you that Europe is exploiting Ukraine as a disposable buffer, perhaps it is worth listening.
The Middle East Eye editorial page stripped away the last veneer of respectability: “Since 2022, European leaders have undermined their own energy security, lost competitiveness, hollowed out industrial capacity and embraced deindustrialisation as a virtue, all in the name of a war they are unlikely to win”. Viktor Orban warned that 2025 could become “Europe’s last peaceful year,” pointing to the root of danger not in Ukraine itself but in “a deep and systemic crisis within Western Europe”.
That crisis is not coming from Russia. It is coming from the decisions European leaders made in 2022 and have doubled down on every year since, decisions that have cost their populations dearly in energy prices, inflation, and industrial decline, while accomplishing precisely nothing on the battlefield.
VII. Inside Russia: The Pressure on Putin
One of the most underreported dimensions of this endgame, accessible almost exclusively through non-Western sources and systematic monitoring of Russian media, is the growing internal pressure on Putin to escalate. The Western caricature of Russia as a monolithic autocracy where Putin snaps his fingers and 145 million people salute misses the real dynamic entirely. There is a debate raging inside Russia, and it is consequential.
Doctorow’s transcript reveals that on Russian political talk shows, including Solovyov’s prime-time program, panelists are now openly criticizing Lavrov and, by unmistakable implication, Putin’s restraint. A regular panelist broke protocol by directly contradicting Lavrov’s characterization of the Alexeyev assassination as an attempt to disrupt negotiations. No, said the panelist, this is “a new hybrid warfare,” and Russia should expect it to continue even after a peace treaty. The criticism was sharp: Russia “does not have sufficient security for these people, which is inexcusable”.
Diesen identified the same dynamic from the strategic perspective: “Everyone’s saying the Russians have to be a bit bolder… it’s quite predictable that they will do more to restore their deterrent vis-à-vis the political West.” He raised the question that Russia’s military hawks are asking with increasing impatience: “Why are you still allowing NATO drones to fly across the Black Sea and pick out targets within Russia which will be struck on the decision of American military planners using American weapons fired by American contractors?”.
The economic contradictions are also under sustained attack. Babakov, deputy chairman of the Duma, regularly challenges the Central Bank’s high interest rate policies on national television, an indirect but unmistakable criticism of the president who appointed the Central Bank chair. The military hawks, Doctorow reports, want London “leveled to the ground” in retaliation for what they see as British orchestration of assassinations and attacks on Russia’s nuclear deterrent forces.
What restrains this pressure is, according to Doctorow’s sources, a single strategic calculation: Putin has made maintaining good relations with Donald Trump his highest priority. “Keeping on the good side of Donald Trump has been the highest priority of President Putin,” Doctorow confirmed. This is the gamble. Putin is betting that Trump can deliver a deal (and that the deal is worth the restraint. It is a bet that Lavrov, “in his swan song,” publicly disputes. Lavrov is telling anyone who will listen that “Trump is not reliable”) putting himself “exactly at odds with what his boss is thinking”.
VIII. The Lavrov Question: End of an Era
Doctorow makes a striking claim that is absent from virtually all Western analysis, and it deserves attention: Sergei Lavrov is being pushed out.
“To my view, Mr. Lavrov is on the way out. The only person who doesn’t seem to know that is Mr. Lavrov himself, who denies it and runs for every microphone he can grab these days, giving many interviews, all of which only demonstrate that he’s in trouble”.
Doctorow characterizes Lavrov as “out of the loop,” frantically seeking media appearances, “talking about things that he no longer knows because he’s out of the loop.” The real negotiations bypass the Foreign Ministry entirely. The diplomatic traffic that matters flows between Trump’s personal team (Witkoff, Kushner, and the newly named Gruenbaum) and Putin’s personal representatives. The State Department and the Russian Foreign Ministry are both watching from the sidelines.
Under Lavrov’s tenure, Doctorow argues, Russian ambassadors were reduced from diplomats to “clerks” who “cannot say anything that has not been scripted from Moscow”, a disservice to “one of the finest diplomatic establishments in the world”. The centralization that Putin imposed vertically through the government has been applied destructively within Foreign Affairs. Russian ambassadors in Western Europe are socially isolated, professionally neutered, and unable to perform even basic intelligence-gathering functions because they are not invited anywhere and cannot speak independently.
If Lavrov departs, and Doctorow believes Putin is engineering that departure, his successor could potentially restore the autonomy and effectiveness of Russia’s diplomatic corps at precisely the moment when post-war diplomacy will require it most.
IX. Three Scenarios for How This Ends
Drawing on the full range of non-Western and independent analysis, three scenarios emerge for the war’s conclusion. They are not equally likely.
Scenario One: Ukrainian Military Collapse. This is the most probable outcome and could unfold within 2026. The convergence of manpower exhaustion, infrastructure destruction, and accelerating Russian advances produces a cascading failure of the front. Once Kramatorsk and Slavyansk fall, the decade-old fortified defensive lines are entirely gone. The advance to the Dnieper becomes a matter of operational exploitation, rapid movement through open country, not the agonizing attritional grinding of the past three years. Zelensky’s regime falls through elections, internal pressure, or simply becomes irrelevant as the military that sustains it disintegrates.
Scenario Two: Forced Armistice on Russian Terms. This is the second most probable outcome and is tied to Trump’s June deadline. The deal involves Ukrainian withdrawal from remaining Donbas territory, acceptance of neutrality and severe military limitations, and some form of referendum or political transition that Zelensky’s circle cannot survive. Russia gets its core demands. The United States gets to declare victory and pivot to the Pacific. Europe is left holding the bill for a country it helped destroy, without the strategic outcome it wanted.
Scenario Three: Escalation to Broader Conflict. This is the dangerous tail risk, and it is the one that keeps serious analysts awake at night. European leaders, facing the collapse of their post-Cold War security framework, attempt direct intervention or dramatic escalation (perhaps through the deployment of European troops to western Ukraine, or through strikes on Russian logistics using European weapons systems with European targeting data. Russia responds asymmetrically) or worse. As Diesen warned in the transcript: “The illusion of escalation control is what’s eventually going to be the source of a major war… the assumption that we can just escalate a little bit, do a little bit of strike, kill, assassinate some politicians or generals, and then if the Russians respond too fiercely we can lower the temperature. The assumption that we’ll have full control over this, I think this is the main threat”. The Eurasia Group’s Top Risks 2026 report confirms that hybrid war between Russia and NATO will intensify through the year, with rising risk of miscalculation on both sides.
X. What the Non-Western World Sees
Step outside the Atlantic information bubble and the view is startlingly different, not in the facts, which are the same everywhere, but in the willingness to state what those facts mean.
South China Morning Post reports combined casualties approaching 2 million, “the deadliest major power conflict since World War II”, while tracking how Russia continues its “slow and bloody advance that Moscow believes could enhance its leverage in negotiations”. There is no pretense of a stalemate in Asian coverage. There is a clear-eyed assessment of a war that one side is winning and the other is losing.
Indian media, as documented by NDTV’s and Times of India’s coverage of the 200,000 AWOL admission, frames the conflict through the lens of strategic realities rather than ideological solidarity with either camp. India’s position (maintaining relations with both Russia and the West, refusing to join sanctions, and quietly increasing Russian energy imports) looks less like fence-sitting and more like the most rational foreign policy posture available. When your two major strategic interlocutors are destroying each other’s economies to fight over territory you have no stake in, neutrality is not cowardice. It is common sense.
Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Abu Dhabi talks foregrounds the gap between Trump’s optimism and battlefield reality, noting that Russian forces announced control of additional eastern settlements even as negotiations proceeded. The Middle East Eye editorial captures what might be called the Global South consensus: the EU’s rearmament push is a dangerous escalation masked as defense, and Europe’s military expenditure already dwarfs Russia’s by a factor of four. If Europe is outspending Russia four-to-one and still losing the proxy war, the problem is not funding. The problem is strategy.
The BRICS-aligned analytical perspective, articulated through outlets like EADaily and independent analysts like Doctorow and Diesen, views the endgame through the lens of multipolarity: the war demonstrated that Western sanctions cannot collapse a major economy, that Western military-industrial output cannot sustain a peer-level proxy war, and that the weaponization of the dollar-based financial system has accelerated de-dollarization rather than achieving compliance. Russia’s economy, which was supposed to be “in tatters” by now according to Joe Biden’s 2022 prediction, has instead grown, diversified its trade relationships, and deepened its strategic partnership with China, precisely the outcome that Western sanctions were supposed to prevent.
XI. The Uncomfortable Truth
The uncomfortable truth that neither Western legacy media nor European political establishments can bring themselves to state is simple: this war was lost when the decision was made in 2022 to arm Ukraine “sufficiently to continue fighting but insufficiently to win.” It was lost when the Minsk Agreements were admitted, by Angela Merkel and François Hollande themselves, to have been a time-buying exercise rather than a genuine diplomatic framework. It was lost when Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv in April 2022 and reportedly told Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. It was lost when the West chose escalation over diplomacy at every inflection point, betting that sanctions would crash the Russian economy and that Ukrainian courage could substitute for Western strategy.
The result was the worst of all possible worlds: a prolonged war that has destroyed Ukrainian society, poisoned European-Russian relations for a generation, accelerated the Sino-Russian alignment that Western strategists feared most, supercharged the de-dollarization of global trade, and achieved none, literally none, of its stated objectives. Russia holds more territory than when the war began. NATO is not stronger but more fractured. Europe is not more secure but more vulnerable. And Ukraine is not free but shattered.
Four years. Approaching 2 million casualties. Seventy percent of energy infrastructure destroyed. Two hundred thousand soldiers AWOL. Two million draft evaders. A country’s demographic future in ruins. An entire generation of young men dead, maimed, or scattered across Europe as refugees. And the negotiations now underway in Abu Dhabi are, as Gilbert Doctorow states plainly, about “the terms of Ukrainian capitulation”.
The endgame is not coming. It is here.
Related reading
- Ukraine War Update February 2026: The Forgotten War Nobody Forgot to Invoice
- The Phantom Caucus: Why the Ukraine War Lobby is Losing the Midterms Before a Single Vote is Cast
- The Sabotage of the Istanbul Peace Negotiations: Evidence, Architecture, and Complicity
- The Sabotage of the Istanbul Peace Negotiations: Evidence, Architecture, and Complicity
