By Ian Proud, Substack, 7/14/26

Ian Proud is a retired British diplomat who served in Moscow from 2014 – 2019.

There is no functional way to end the war in Ukraine, on the basis that NATO and the EU have stolen the sovereignty of their members, refuse to talk to Russia and see no interest for their citizens in peace-making.

In a perfect world, NATO and common EU foreign policy would cease to exist, but that won’t happen this side of the next decade.

So, I predict that at some point over the next year Zelensky will be ousted, and that from 2027, support for globalist mainstream parties will start to crumble across Europe as citizens increasingly come to the realisation that their prosperity and safety have been sold out to prolong a forever war that no one wants.

Peace in Ukraine can only happen if Ukraine and Russia agreed to coexist without war under the UN system. That does not mean a state of friendship between the two countries. It is impossible to imagine that any time soon and it would take a generation to restore any normality in relations.

Rather, it would mean an agreement by both sides to settle future disputes through dialogue and diplomacy — a situation that has not pertained in Ukraine since 2015.

Russia’s Core Conditions for Peace

For Russia, there will be no peace deal for Ukraine until the issue of NATO is finally and irrevocably taken off the table, together with a resolution of the status of Donetsk and protections for the use of the Russian language for those in Ukraine for whom it is their first language.

Ukraine’s Perspective on Security

For Ukraine, peace would require a reassurance against future Russian attack and support from the west in its economic reconstuction.

The Western View of a Potential Deal

The problem is that for European leaders in particular, a peace deal would represent a catastrophic defeat. Having spent years presenting Ukraine as a core and essential part of the NATO family, such a deal would confirm that European efforts had failed, despite years of asserting that the billions invested in the war would eventually secure success.

Russia’s Fundamental Strategic Concern

Ukrainian neutrality is about much more than Ukraine’s rejection of a military bloc.

For Russia, the Ukraine conflict — and now the full-scale war — has always been first and foremost about denying the West’s right to impose its will by force and economic pressure. Specifically, it has been about preventing the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s border, against Russia’s repeatedly stated position that such expansion was unacceptable.

Many argue that Russia does not have the right to decide who can or cannot join NATO. Strictly speaking, this is correct. However, Russia does possess the right, as a sovereign nation, to determine what constitutes its core strategic interests.

It decided decades ago that NATO expansion ran directly counter to those interests — to the extent that it would be prepared to fight to prevent it.

Of course, Ukraine also has the sovereign right to choose its alliances, although the relationship of most Ukrainians with NATO has been ambivalent at best. Even if every Ukrainian had viewed NATO membership as an absolute priority — a situation that has never existed — Russia’s security concerns would remain.

The Requirement for Negotiated Solutions

The only way forward in those circumstances would have been for Ukraine and Russia to negotiate a resolution that addressed both sides’ concerns, as required by the UN Charter. On this basis, Russia and Ukraine held talks about Ukraine’s NATO aspirations on multiple occasions after Putin came to power. At every stage, Russia expressed its strong objections.

When President Putin met Ukrainian President Yushchenko in February 2008, he described the potential military escalation between Russia and Ukraine under a NATO membership scenario as “horrible to say and terrifying to think.”

Ukraine’s NATO aspirations had largely disappeared under the Yanukovych presidency.

NATO expansion was driven primarily by Western powers, above all the United States, which meant that what Ukraine itself wanted or did not want became largely incidental. Even President Poroshenko was initially very cautious about NATO membership, noting that a majority of citizens did not favour it. He did not mention NATO during his inauguration speech.

It was only in late November 2014 — almost three months after he attended the NATO Summit in Wales and with his military campaign in the Donbas backfiring and pulling Russia deeper into the fight — that he stated Ukraine was “decisively resuming its political course for integration into the Euro-Atlantic security system.”

A month later, Poroshenko signed into law the repeal of Ukraine’s 2010 non-aligned status, setting in motion a five-to-six-year programme for Ukraine to meet NATO standards and promising a referendum on membership.

Zelensky was elected by a landslide in 2019 on a platform to bring peace with Russia. He also indicated that any future NATO membership bid would require a referendum.

As of today, no vote has ever been put to the Ukrainian people on NATO membership, although a significant majority of the population that remains in unoccupied Ukraine would likely support it today.

The Shift Away from Bilateral Diplomacy

Prior to 2014, Ukraine and Russia had regularly sought to resolve their differences through dialogue and diplomacy. From 2014 onwards, however, the West adopted the view that so long as it could support a leadership in Ukraine favouring NATO integration, the preferences of ordinary Ukrainian people became secondary. That position has remained unchanged.

In that sense, Ukraine has effectively subordinated its sovereign right to choose in favour of Western strategic interests. While Ukraine retains the appearance of a democratically elected president — although Zelensky has not faced an election in over seven years — elected Ukrainian leaders have been expected to follow the Western directive on the specific issue of NATO.

Even if one accepts the proposition that Ukraine is a fully sovereign nation making choices independently of Western influence, it has not, since 2014, been permitted to settle its disagreement with Russia through dialogue and diplomacy. The US, UK, and European strategy has been to deny that Russia has any legitimate say in the matter and to demand that it unconditionally back down.

This approach denies that Russia’s concerns about NATO expansion — expressed consistently throughout Putin’s presidency — have any legitimacy. It also denies the validity of the argument that NATO expansion escalated tensions and eventually contributed to war.

The UN Framework and the “Rules-Based Order”

No country can remove Russia’s right to advance its interests. The UN Charter repeatedly calls on states to settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

The West’s strategy has been to deny Russia’s sovereign right to articulate its concerns and to resolve those concerns through diplomacy. In doing so, the West has chosen to operate outside the spirit of the UN Charter, subordinating the sovereign interests of both Ukraine and Russia in order to advance NATO expansion.

NATO does not enjoy legal statehood. It is a collection of sovereign states that have chosen to align their national interests with the institution as a condition of membership. Like the EU institutions, NATO is a bureaucratic entity with its own institutional interest in survival and growth and with a leader who has not faced a public vote. It does not possess sovereignty.

Yet it has acquired or assumed the sovereignty of its members. Its policy has effectively allowed member states to pressure Russia into accepting their collective goal of expansion into Ukraine over Russia’s expressly stated objections.

NATO has placed itself in a position analogous to that of the UN in setting the rules of the game. Unlike the UN, however, NATO has no dedicated mechanism for the peaceful resolution of disputes with nations that fundamentally disagree with its purpose or its plans for expansion.

The international legal system built on the UN has therefore been sidelined in favour of what Western powers describe as the “rules-based international order” — a phrase that, in practice, often means “our rules, not yours.” For the record, I had not once heard the term “rules based international order” used in the British Foreign Office before the Ukraine crisis started. It emerged as a confected phrase within a new lexicon to describe the rules that other states should obey.

The Nature of the War

The war in Ukraine has never been primarily about territorial conquest. It has been a battle between two systems: a Russia-favoured UN system in which disputes are to be handled through diplomacy, and a NATO-centred system in which Russia has had no say and has been expected to accept NATO’s terms. In this regard, Russia does not view the current President of Ukraine as an independent actor, but rather as a figurehead of a NATO-aligned system — someone elected on a platform of peace who subsequently aligned with Western preferences against the interests of the citizens who voted him into a power, and who no longer have a right to vote by virtue of the war.

There is little dispute that, at the outset, Russia’s aim was to remove the Zelensky government and install one that would adopt a less confrontational posture toward Russia. That attempt failed, locking both sides into more than four years of bloody war in which the front line has moved only slowly.

It would nevertheless be a mistake to describe the war as one of territorial conquest, even though the collapse of the draft Istanbul Agreement in April 2022 led Russia to advance claims over four additional oblasts.

For Russia, the war has become an existential struggle to prevent the expansion of the NATO bloc to its borders and to resist the imposition of a system of power that runs counter to the UN framework.

NATO’s Character and the Escalation Dynamic

NATO is a military bloc originally established to counter the Soviet Union. Today, its primary focus remains Russia — the only major military power that directly borders the alliance. The claim that NATO is purely defensive becomes harder to sustain when one considers that it accounts for approximately 53% of global defence spending, a percentage that will grow significantly as European nations rearm. Within the next decade, NATO may account for two thirds of global defence spending.

And yet it claims to be a defensive alliance. The Ukraine crisis began because Russia concluded that the NATO alliance sought to determine who governed Ukraine by interfering in its political system and supporting a change of government that installed a NATO-friendly regime.

In 2014, Russia responded by annexing Crimea — partly to secure the Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol — and by supporting separatists in Donbas. This allowed Western leaders to reinforce the narrative that NATO needed to expand in the face of a revanchist Russia.

Russia’s move on Crimea was framed as both a defensive measure and a correction of the Soviet-era administrative decision to transfer the peninsula to Ukraine. Prior to 2014, there is little evidence that Russia had active imperial designs on Crimea, which Russian citizens could visit under visa-free arrangements.

For years, Russia provided military support to separatists in Donbas in response to Ukrainian military operations and to protect the Russian-speaking population. There is little evidence, however, that Russia seriously considered absorbing the region until around the time the full-scale war began.

The key point is that every escalation has allowed Western leaders and commentators to strengthen the narrative that Ukraine needed protection from Russia, and that the best form of protection was NATO membership. This has created a self-reinforcing cycle in which both sides attribute every deterioration to the other, while the absence of sustained dialogue between Russia and NATO prevents any meaningful dispute resolution.

Why the Conflict Remains Unresolved

The Ukraine war is not currently resolvable through existing mechanisms. Russia will not abandon its long-standing objections to NATO expansion. NATO continues to maintain that expansion is the only reliable way to protect Ukraine. The Ukrainian leadership amplifies the NATO position and has shown little interest in realistic dialogue with Russia.

Western leaders keep calling on Russia to adopt a ceasefire.

And yet a ceasefire alone will never be acceptable to Russia, because while it would end the fighting, it would leave the underlying concern about NATO expansion unresolved while Ukraine rearms and seeks to integrate more deeply into a militarising Europe.

Locked in a NATO Narrative Cycle

For now, the war remains locked in a NATO-led narrative cycle which prevents any possibility of resolution through peaceful means. One of the biggest narrative thrusts is that Putin doesn’t want peace and that therefore we should avoid all diplomacy with him because there would be no point in talking to someone who doesn’t want peace.

However, this is an outright falsehood because peace will only be possible through diplomacy. Denying diplomacy is therefore denying the possibility of peace. As peace would require a reckoning with the underlying cause of the war — the role of NATO as a destabilising agent — no mainstream leader in Europe is prepared to countenance any sort of concession on NATO. So, the best form of deflection is to say that Putin doesn’t want peace.

However, Putin’s conditions for peace have been made clear consistently: Ukrainian neutrality, recognition of the current realities in Donetsk, and language rights. There is no evidence to support the allegation that he would reject diplomacy with European leaders. Putin engaged in direct peace talks with Donald Trump in Alaska and they have spoken on the phone many times. NATO and European leaders have said repeatedly that they see no value in direct talks with Putin because he does not want peace.

Yet Putin has said consistently that he is prepared to have direct negotiations. Zelensky has made several performative efforts to suggest peace talks but not in a manner that would suggest he is willing to follow through.

For example, his recent letter piled insult after insult on Putin while making a meeting sound like a throwaway remark. Zelensky has been one of the most vocal in saying that Putin should be forced to negotiate, even though Putin has consistently said that he is ready to negotiate, with no forcing needed.

So there can be no peace without diplomacy, and it is clear that NATO and European leaders have rejected diplomacy because that would require a reckoning with the underlying drivers of the war.

Signalling That Russia Is Losing as a Tool to Avoid Diplomacy

This has placed a huge emphasis on European leaders trumpeting signs of success in Western strategy, specifically proof that Russia is losing and will eventually lose. None of these communications strategies are remotely accurate, but they do help to maintain the position of no diplomacy.

The first is that Ukraine is turning the tide on the battlefield. There is nothing to suggest that this is true. Even Ukraine’s former Chief of the Defence Staff, now Ambassador to London Valerii Zaluzhnyi, recently admitted that the war is stuck in an attritional phase, dependent on which country has the most resilience — in circumstances where Russia has more troops, more money, more energy, and a strong industrial base to sustain the war.

Ukraine has a chronic manpower shortage and is conscripting its citizens in increasingly violent ways. It is totally dependent on the West for financial aid and for a significant part of its military needs. It is energy-dependent and much of its heavy industry has been degraded. At best the war is stuck in a chokehold in which Russia, unwilling to commit more troops through general mobilisation, is seeking to bleed Ukraine dry of men and bleed Europe dry of the economic means to support the war.

Ukraine will not win this on the battlefield, and most people, including many now in Ukraine, accept that. And yet Western mainstream media continue to peddle this line regularly.

The second claim is that Russia’s economy is about to implode. Again, nothing suggests this is true. Russia has undoubtedly suffered fuel supply problems from Ukrainian strikes on its oil refining infrastructure. That is causing inconvenience to the population and affecting views among Russians towards the war. However, that is not the same as suggesting that Russia’s economy is in trouble. It still turns in significant export surpluses, has practically no unemployment, industry working at full capacity, and significant financial reserves of gold to manage external shocks.

Ukraine, on the other hand, has become an economically failed state, totally dependent on Western support at a time when Europe itself is in industrial and economic decline.

Related to this is the repeated call for more sanctions on Russia to ratchet up the economic pain. As I have said countless times, the West long ago passed the point of diminishing marginal returns on sanctions. Each new package now serves only to harden Putin’s resolve and to prevent the possibility of any compromise on Russia’s part.

Related to this, Zelensky now calls for deep missile strikes inside Russia as long-range sanctions designed to force Putin to the negotiating table. Deep strikes inside Russia appear only to precipitate an equal or heavier response from the Russian side – another point Zaluzhnyi conceded – which the West will then spin as evidence that Putin does not want peace and therefore we should not engage in diplomacy with him.

On the basis that European leaders refuse to engage in diplomacy, it is disingenuous to talk of forcing Putin to a negotiating table that clearly does not exist. Once more, this is another press line to prevent the possibility of direct dialogue.

The Claim That Russia Will Attack Europe Next

This is yet another self-serving line that supports massive inputs into the European and Ukrainian defence industrial complex at the expense of productive economic development and social spending in those countries.

It is clearly absurd to suggest that, having been waging a slow attritional war in Ukraine for four and a half years, Russia somehow has the desire and the resources to attack Europe next.

Firstly, that assumes Russia can subjugate the whole of Ukraine so it does not have to fight on two separate fronts which is self-evidently unrealistic given progress made so far in the Donbas.

As importantly, it puts the conversation into Russia being an imperialist power intent on conquest and takes the conversation away from the root cause of the war in Ukraine, which is NATO itself. Russia has fought Ukraine to a standstill precisely so it can avoid having NATO on its doorstep. Why then attack the largest military bloc in the world that it has determined to keep its distance from?

The Claim That Russian People Are Turning Against Putin

Finally, there is the claim that Russian people are turning against Putin and will soon evict him from power, so we need to keep the pressure up. For a long time, Western policy hitched itself to an approach of “boiling the frog,” in which ever-increasing pressure on Putin will eventually precipitate some sort of collapse of his rule and usher in a change in power more favourable to good relations with the West.

Even though there is no evidence that a direct military victory can be secured against Russia by Ukraine fighting on its own, claiming that Putin’s legitimacy is collapsing blocks off any suggestion of direct dialogue, because if Putin will soon be out of the picture, then let’s wait until he is gone.

The most troubling aspect of this line is its assumption that any future replacement for Putin would be more favourable towards the West. Firstly, there is little evidence that Putin wants to live in a state of permanent hostility with Europe. He has been remarkably cautious in his prosecution of the war. Militarily he could have escalated several steps up the ladder, including through strikes into Europe or the use of tactical nuclear weapons, which he has actively avoided.

It is my assessment that despite many hardliners in Russia calling for sharper escalation, Putin is driven by a desire one day to normalise relations with Europe and is keen to avoid anything that would deepen an already gaping gulf between Russia and the West.

But the point is that it is deeply mistaken to believe that any future change in leadership in Russia will precipitate a change of heart about the threat of NATO towards Russia. A collapse in Putin’s rule, it is assumed, would usher in Ukraine’s membership of NATO and create a sense of the West finally having prevailed.

Yet it is incredibly foolish to believe that, given the treasure and hundreds of thousands of Russian lives lost in Ukraine, a future Russian leader would resist NATO expansion as fiercely, if not more so. There is a presumption of liberalism in this Western view — that a future Russian leader might be more moderate. The reality is that they could take a much tougher line.

Summary of the Narrative Strategy

To summarise, the constant bombardment of Western press lines about the prosecution of the war in Ukraine is designed to prevent any possibility of direct dialogue with Russia in the interests of peace. In circumstances where the war is functionally at a stalemate, with Russia holding the strategic assets to wait, that leaves us in a position of having no way out of war.

The Western policy position has meant that European countries have subordinated their sovereignty to supranational bodies in the form of NATO and the EU and they are unable on a bilateral basis to break the deadlock of the consensus that governs those organisations, which are led by unelected officials with outsize power to decide policy.

The irony is that the underlying basis of the war is and remains Russia’s claim that NATO expansion threatened its sovereignty.

So, to bring it back to the top of the discussion, NATO has not only supplanted the UN in deciding the rules that Russia should accept without condition. It has taken upon itself the sovereignty of its member states to prevent the types of bilateral dialogue between states that the UN Charter provides for.

The obvious way to end the war would be to disband NATO and return to the norms of diplomatic engagement that are set out by the UN. But that simply will not happen because NATO itself has the convening power to corral the sovereignty of its members around a raison d’être that the bureaucracy, rather than elected officials, decides.

Even though I believe that removing NATO would remove the problem, I judge that it will be practically and politically impossible in modern Europe with the globalist leaders that we have in charge, at a national and at a supranational level.

How Will the War End?

As of today, there is no functional route out of the war in Ukraine. Western leaders have locked themselves into supporting Zelensky come what may, and Putin is unwilling to back down. There is an absolute resistance to a diplomatic settlement and an outright military victory appears unlikely.

Russia will probably seek to paint out the rest of Donetsk, though that may take some time yet. There is a chance, should there be no change from the European side, that Russia would then seek to occupy Odessa, possibly. But that would take much longer. It is far from clear that the West would change its narrative approach, even if Russia made further slow advances. The response would almost certainly be that Russia’s slow progress is a sign of their weakness and the strength of Ukrainian and European resolve.

And even greater gains by Russia might not provide for a negotiated way out if Zelensky and European leaders continued to refuse to engage.

So we risk literally being in a never-ending war in which little military advancement is made at huge cost to Russia, Ukraine and Europe in men and materiel but without the diplomatic means to escape.

That’s why I consider the war will end through popular resistance to it, not through any political moves by Western leaders or through a decisive military victory. The biggest weak point will be in Ukraine itself, with war weariness now heavy and with increasing rebellion against the brutal forced recruitment tactics being employed to shore up the country’s shaky military manpower situation. I therefore predict a forcing event inside Ukraine, either an assassination of Zelensky — who now deliberately spends much of his time outside the country — or, more likely, an internal coup d’état.

A coup could take place on the back of a popular uprising against the continuance of the war and his extended period in office. Or it could be a palace coup. There are risks of an ultranationalist takeover of the Ukrainian state. But given the allegations that Ukrainian ethnonationalists have an outsize role in war policy, I assess that pragmatists within Ukraine’s political elite will seek to oust him, most likely through an impeachment on the back of corruption scandals.

On the European side, I see popular unrest about the war policy of EU and NATO institutions leading to seismic political change in the main powers — France, Germany and the UK. There will be a concerted media campaign to prevent victories by the AfD, National Rally and Reform, though I consider these will ultimately prove fruitless.

A major by-product of the war in Ukraine has been to remove the rights of ordinary citizens to choose their future. This may ultimately lead to the slow erosion of NATO and the EU.

But assuming that Zelensky has not been removed from office by 2027, I predict that the collapse in Western support for the forever war in Ukraine will start to crumble after the French Presidential election, which Marine Le Pen is considered in hot contention to win. France under Le Pen will not want Ukraine to join the EU because of the loss of financial benefits to France that would result. I predict she would not want to prolong the war in Ukraine further given the significant indirect economic cost to France from the decline of Europe that it has precipitated.

There will be an enormous legal and media campaign to prevent Le Pen from winning, much as there will be a similar campaign in Germany in 2029.

Even in Britain, political elites are already looking to unpick the Brexit vote and suck us back into the warmongering supranational structure of Europe.

But the simple truth is this, the only way to end the war in Ukraine is the get rid of Zelensky and the globalist elites in London, Berlin, Brussel and Paris.

There is simply no other functional way to make it end, on the basis that NATO and the EU have stolen the sovereignty of their members, refuse to talk to Russia and see no interest for their citizens in peacemaking.

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By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 7/13/26

An Obsession

The state of Russia’s economy has become almost an obsession for direct participants in the propaganda war that in Western mainstream media suffuses reports and representations of NATO’s war on Russia over proxy Ukraine. Pro-Russian sources seem not to exercise anything like comparable interest in the state of Western economies or even, very much, of Ukraine’s

Competing Economies

This is a limitation, of course, as few Western economies can be said to be thrilling, many are stagnant, and some are in recession, and their economically inadvisable involvement in the Ukraine war is a good part of the reason for this state of affairs. Where economies look more exciting, as in the extremely different cases of Ireland and the US, a single sector (computing and AI) tend to account for a hefty percentage of gains, provided, of course, that one ignores environmental and other consequences unaccounted for.

The Much Exaggerated “Collapse”

Apart from consideration of what is happening to competing economies (and disregard for the cyclical nature of capitalism that thrusts all economies into periods of significant challenge from time to time), other common problems in the assessment of the Russian economy include clear editorial hostility to Russia that affects how data are interpreted, and high selectivity in the economic indices that are selected for discussion.

Economies rarely “collapse,” which is a favorite simile employed by each side when expressing its hope and expectations for the fate of their opponent.

Far more generally, economies pull through, adapt, develop, survive. Nuance rules.

A Dual or Multiple Reality: Explaining Resilience

Like many, Russia’s economy shows a dual if not multiple reality. Massive state spending after 2022 initially prevented collapse against the threat to the economy of the pulling out of Western enterprises and Western sanctions (which Trump is promising to further enhance at the urging, among others, of the late Lyndsy Graham), even though all that these seem to have achieved to date is rapid and effective product substitution and growth.

Other factors that staved off the worst of negative consequences were the forced domestic containment of Russian capital, the return of Russian capital invested overseas back to Russia, the acquisition of Western enterprises by local, and the fact that many Western enterprises remained in Russia despite pressure from their own governments but were required to reinvest local profits locally. Overall, initial Western sanctions and other hostile measures following the SMO of February 2022 proved to be a major boost for investment in the Russian economy.

Sources of Strain

Russia’s critics like to argue that the initial model of aggressive economic adaptation is transitioning into stagnation. They say that the economy is under severe strain from intense labor shortages (but which are often an indicator of a very active, though perhaps overheating, successful economy), heavy military spending (something that creates strong demand for industrial productive assets, a bonus for the economy), and strict monetary controls (which have had demonstrably favorable results in curbing inflation and interest rates), while simultaneously remaining resilient due to high employment and stronger trade ties with non-Western partners (hardly unimportant – see below).

The Military Factor

Critics are keen to convince themselves that the massive state-led stimulus for weapons factories has peaked, resulting in a “dual economy” of overheated military production and stagnant civilian growth. I would say that demand for weapons will continue to increase so long as the West, especially Europe, indulges in anti-Russian warmongering rhetoric – including bravura predictions of going to war against Russia by specific dates – and that while a militarily-skewed economy is not ideal, it does have positive consequences for the circulation of money in the economy and demand for civilian goods and services.

Conscription and war casualties have reduced the available workforce (although we should not overlook the fact that Russian compensation to bereaved families is relatively generous, and that Russia has shown that it can attract significant immigrant labor from North Korea and from China) creating severe labor shortages and a mild wage-price spiral.

Inflation and Interest Rates

Critics also argue that borrowing costs – with the Central Bank benchmark interest rate near a 20-year high of 21% – along with higher taxes and fears of nationalization, have led to a sharp drop in fixed capital investment. State finances face growing strains. Liquid assets in the National Wealth Fund have plummeted (down to 1.8% of GDP), while oil and gas revenues have experienced significant year-on-year drops, widening regional budget deficits. Consumers and entrepreneurs continue to save, but high inflation limits both purchasing power and business expansion.

Yet (!) Russia is investing 26% of its GDP, compared with investment of 15% of its GDP before the war, far higher than most anywhere in Europe. Consumers and entrepreneurs continue to save, even if relatively high inflation limits both purchasing power and business expansion.

Yet (!) the annual inflation rate in Russia is officially projected by the Bank of Russia to decline to a range of 4.5% to 5.5% by the end of 2026 (while the annual inflation rate in the USA is 4.2%, as of the latest May 2026 reading). This is a targeted cooldown from the 6.02% annual headline rate recorded a year earlier.

Borrowing costs remain high as the central bank balances economic cooling against rising inflation risks. Monetary policy easing has been complicated by expanding fiscal spending, wage growth, and energy infrastructure disruptions, causing annual inflation, as we have seen, to hover around 5%, above the central bank’s 4% target. As a result, analysts anticipate that the central bank’s rate-cutting cycle will slow or stall, meaning local mortgage and commercial loan rates will likely stay restrictive.

Banking System

Russia maintains an impressively low national debt, hovering around 17% of GDP.

The domestic banking system remains stable, and employment rates are very high, with wages creeping up to buffer households against rising prices. Continuous state interventions, including extensive social benefits, cash payments to soldiers, and high public spending, have propped up domestic demand and prevented a collapse in living standards for many. Latent vulnerabilities are growing due to a war-burdened economy, rising household insolvencies, and the compounding effects of international sanctions.

While the Bank of Russia maintains that the sector has adequate capital buffers to absorb losses, some independent and intelligence analysts warn of a looming systemic crisis. Signs of underlying strain include a rise in non-performing loans. The share of non-performing assets in the banking system has reportedly surpassed 10% (nonperforming loans make up about 1% of total loans held by US banks).

Debt

Corporate and household debt has risen. Over 500,000 Russians declared bankruptcy last year (but compared with the 574,000 bankruptcies declared in the US in 2025 – admittedly a country with twice the population – this is maybe not so bad) and an estimated 25% of the bond market is at risk of default as businesses struggle with refinancing. Deteriorating asset quality, critics say, is temporarily being masked by loan restructuring and strict financial controls.

New Trading Partners and Opportunities

In response to Western sanctions, Russia successfully redirected its trade and energy exports toward major markets in China and India, insulating itself from a major crisis in export revenue. This is a crushing response to those who argue that sanctions “isolated” Russia into a largely “closed” economy which is about as stupid as the Russophobic complaint that Russian “aggression” in Ukraine has isolated it in international relations (even though Russia is a major player within the BRICS and enjoys largely excellent relations with China and many countries of the global South).

The G7 price cap and European Union import embargoes continue to heavily restrict Russia’s oil and gas revenues – but only from Europe (!). Overall, Russian crude oil exports are close to their historical peak. Purchase by Europe of Russian LNG has risen 18% in the previous year and will likely increase further as gas reserves in Europe plunge in the lead up towards the next winter.

Sanctions and Drones

Extraterritorial U.S. sanctions targeting major firms like Rosneft and Lukoil have driven the Urals crude discount to Brent up significantly. Sanctions targeting Russia’s “shadow fleet” tankers (many of these now being hit by Ukrainian drones in the Azov Sea) have significantly squeezed logistics. Ships are forced to cover longer distances to reach buyers like China and India, artificially creating tanker shortages and depressing domestic crude production.

Drone strikes on oil refineries have severely crippled internal fuel output. Processing volumes fell by nearly one-third by mid-2026, forcing the Kremlin to implement fuel rationing across roughly half of Russia’s regions and boost imports from Belarus and India.

While sanctions compress Russia’s margins, international supply shocks – such as the recent conflict in Iran and subsequent volatility in the Strait of Hormuz – have kept global energy prices high. This allows Russia to stay afloat on higher nominal pricing despite steep buyer discounts.

Monetary Policy

Led by Elvira Nabiullina, the Russia Central Bank has been engaged in an aggressive monetary tightening cycle designed to keep the economy from completely overheating. This involves a gradual easing cycle. As we have seen, after raising the benchmark interest rate to a crushing historical high of 21% to control systemic panic, the Bank of Russia executed a sequence of cuts, ultimately lowering the key policy rate to 14.25%. The latest 25-basis-point cut was smaller than the 50 bps the market expected, revealing growing anxiety over pro-inflationary risks.

The central bank is explicitly battling the Kremlin’s fiscal policy. Government spending on the war has repeatedly run over budget, pushing the primary budget deficit well above targets. Because the Finance Ministry extended its target for balancing the budget all the way out to 2029, the central bank warned that it must keep interest rates highly restrictive. This tight monetary stance heavily frustrates domestic business owners who desperately need cheaper credit to resume civilian corporate investment.

Relations with China and India

Sanctions forced Russia to completely alter its trade map, transforming China into its primary supplier of manufactured goods and India into its most vital energy outlet, while greatly increasing Russian energy exports to both China and India. Bilateral trade between Moscow and Beijing jumped nearly 23% in the first five months of 2026 alone, hitting $109.5 billion. Russia holds a substantial trade surplus with China. Russia’s top exports are entirely resource-driven, led heavily by crude petroleum ($5.96 billion in May alone) and petroleum gas. China has successfully replaced Western tech and automotive suppliers. China exported $11 billion worth of goods to Russia in May 2026, primarily driven by massive car shipments ($1.33 billion), alongside telecommunications equipment.

Bilateral trade between Russia and India hit a historic record high of $68.69 billion for the recent fiscal year. The two nations are proactively tracking a roadmap to reach $100 billion by 2030. The dynamic is vastly lopsided. India imported over $67 billion from Russia, heavily tilted toward discounted crude oil and fertilizers. On the flip side, India’s exports to Russia are a mere fraction at roughly $4.88 billion (mostly pharmaceuticals and machinery). This has stranded billions in non-convertible Indian rupees in Russian bank accounts, creating an ongoing transaction bottleneck.

Gold Sales

Faced with a ballooning federal budget deficit driven by military expenditures, the Kremlin has drastically shifted its gold strategy from long-term accumulation to aggressive, short-term liquidation. Driven by a steep 38% drop in hydrocarbon taxes early in the year, Russia’s budget deficit rose to $78.4 billion in the first four months of 2026 alone. This greatly exceeded the $50.5 billion deficit the Kremlin had originally projected for the entire year. Between January and April 2026, the Bank of Russia shed 27.9 tons of gold to plug these widening fiscal holes.

This represents the single sharpest drop in sovereign bullion reserves in a quarter-century. Russia has converted this gold directly into physical cash by bypassing standard markets. Russia exported 25.3 tons of physical gold to China – valued at $3.29 billion – marking a massive ninefold increase over previous baselines. Prior to 2022, the National Wealth Fund strictly accumulated physical gold as an untouchable strategic cushion. Since then, more than half (232.6 tons) of the fund’s gold has been liquidated to cover state spending. Total remaining NWF liquid assets have plunged from 7.3% of GDP down to roughly 1.5% to 1.9%. While soaring global gold prices (surpassing $5,000 an ounce) temporarily artificially inflate the dollar-value of Russia’s remaining holdings, intelligence reports emphasize that using gold swap operations and emergency sell-offs indicates a severe, ongoing domestic liquidity deficit.

Russia’s state gold reserves fell below $300 billion at the end of last month amid a broader drop in the country’s total reserve assets, according to the latest data from the Central Bank of Russia (CBR). This marks the sixth consecutive month that Russia’s official gold reserves have dropped, and the decline has been dramatic. In April, the CBR revealed that Russia’s gold reserves recorded the sharpest drop in a quarter century.

The main purpose of gold sales is to cover the budget deficit, which reached 4.6 trillion rubles by the end of March, but may also be aimed at building up foreign currency reserves, especially yuan, and domestic demand for gold has risen as a hedge against a weakening ruble. Such sales of gold from reserves by the Central Bank of Russia is said by some expert observers to be consistent with what other central banks are doing, especially in developing countries. Note that because of rising prices in the value of gold, the actual current value of Russian gold reserves may be increasing even as stocks are falling.

Stock Market

There has also been the issue of a fall in the Russian stock market, that marks the longest unbroken slump since 1997. The Russian stock market plummeted in 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine and initial Western sanctions, triggering a market shutdown and massive sell-offs. By mid-2026, the market entered another protracted slump, hitting levels not seen since December 2022 due to fresh US sanctions on major energy firms and high interest rates. While the benchmark MOEX saw temporary, artificial “wartime peaks” driven by domestic retail investors – briefly hitting a high in May 2024 and seeing sporadic rallies in mid-2025 – these gains completely evaporated due to heavy economic headwinds. By late 2025, the market was plumbing deep lows, a trajectory that worsened dramatically into a 17-week consecutive collapse. This is said by Russia’s critics to present a serious loss of investor confidence reflecting stagnant peace talks, frequent infrastructure drone attacks, and the severe financial costs of the military-industrial complex. The Russian Central Bank is maintaining a tough stance on interest rates, signaling that high borrowing costs will persist longer than markets expected. Vital sectors – including oil and gas, mining, and major industrials – are struggling, with giants like Gazprom tumbling to decade lows.

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 7/24/26

EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas has backed measures allowing member states to board, impound, and sell illicit Russian shadow fleet oil cargoes. The initiative targets “smuggling vessels” to choke off Moscow’s “wartime revenues” (in a linguistic bid to pretend that these are different in some way from peacetime revenues and that they are critical to Russian military defense, and that none of this has anything whatsover to do with the global energy crisis that will soon sabotage Europe completely).

Kallas would like to see the EU conduct “flag-verification boardings” of ships suspected of carrying Russian in the western Indian ocean and Red Sea, with a view to selling “illegal” oil and refusing reimbursement to Russia.

EU naval operations (such as Operation Irini) have already boarded “suspicious” tankers like the South Star on July 20, 2026, for sailing under false flags and breaking maritime laws.

Member states have authorized operations like EUNAVFOR ATALANTA to carry out flag-verification boardings on suspected sanctions-busting vessels.

The EU’s 21st sanctions package targets over 40 shadow fleet ships, multiple refineries in Russia and Belarus, and various financial channels.

The specific provision in the package that allows member states to confiscate and sell oil cargoes carried by Russia’s “shadow fleet” (i.e. ships carrying Russian oil that the EU has sanctioned and/or is priced above Europe’s ludicrously low “oil price cap,” and/or are ships that don’t waste their money buying protection with Lloyds of London insurance). This mechanism targets vessels operating outside normal maritime regulations to fund the Kremlin’s war effort.

The new framework gives EU member states the explicit “legal” (i.e. illegal under international law) authority to seize “illicit” (because EU says so) petroleum cargo transported by designated sanctions-busting vessels. Discovered oil can be sold off by the intercepting nation, directly depriving Moscow of its primary energy revenues. For the first time, the provision expands beyond the tankers themselves to target the bunkering (refueling) and service vessels that keep the shadow fleet moving.

An additional 41 “shadow-fleet” (oooh, so deliciously spooky) vessels were added to the sanctions list, subjecting them to immediate port bans and an outright denial of maritime services.

To enforce these economic rules, EU “High Representative” the Estonian-Amazonian Warrioress confirmed that those maritime military missions – such as Operation IRINI in the Mediterranean and Operation ATALANTA in the Indian Ocean – are conducting physical “flag verification” boardings on suspected tankers. These maritime interventions ensure that vessels flying false flags to bypass the EU’s $44.10 per barrel oil price cap can be intercepted and handled under the new package.

The price cap, of course, is ridiculously low at a time of crisis on global oil markets when prices can be said to rest anywhere between $85 and $140 a barrel depending on whether we are talking about paper quotes, futures, or money that people actually have to spend to get oil right now. Prices that may suddenly rocket upwards if and when the US and any other major economy exhausts its oil reserves, and when China re-enters the oil market as its most significant consumer.

International reactions to the EU’s 21st sanctions package and its aggressive “shadow-fleet” maritime enforcement span from outright condemnation by Moscow to internal fractures within Europe and calculated caution from global energy buyers.

The Kremlin denounced the Western sanctions as completely illegal and classified the boarding and impounding of its oil as state-sponsored “economic piracy” that violates international maritime law and freedom of navigation.

Russian state maritime entities immediately began moving to re-register and change the flags of shadow-fleet tankers to non-EU, non-Western jurisdictions to evade the physical “flag verification” boardings conducted by EU naval forces.

Moscow dismissed the effectiveness of the package, pointing to Russia’s ongoing ability to redirect energy trade through alternative non-aligned regional lenders and private cryptocurrency networks. There is absolutely no doubt that China will treat the Kallas wet-dream measures with the full contempt they deserve; and I believe India will respond likewise. These major non-Western buyers of Russian crude have largely remained silent on the EU’s maritime mandates. Instead, their commercial entities are quietly restructuring supply chains. They are adjusting by utilizing non-EU operators and shifting service agreements entirely away from companies vulnerable to EU blacklisting.

The provision passed only after intense infighting. Nations with massive shipping industries – specifically Greece, Malta, and Cyprus – fought the initial proposals. Greece ultimately blocked an outright ban on LNG shipping until it secured a major concession allowing Greek firms to continue transporting Russian gas to non-EU clients.

Hawkish member states like Poland expressed frustration with the final text. The Polish Foreign Ministry publicly stated that the watered-down package was not as tough as desired, highlighting how internal pushback weakened the overall punch of the enforcement.

EU ambassadors rushed to freeze the Russian crude price cap at $44.10 per barrel for 12 months. This was a direct response to anxieties that the escalating hostilities involving Iran would automatically spike global oil prices and penalize Western economies.

In brief, under oppressive and infantile leadership and decades’ of brainwashing by its mainstream media whose purpose is to normalize the West’s piratical scheme to force the break-up of the Russian Federation, the EU has gone full lunatic.

Russia-Ukraine

Russia claims to have shot down a total of 571 Ukrainian drones flying over 18 or so locations in the heartlands of Russia, over the past 24 hours. There were three major Ukrainian attacks: the most significant successful target for Ukraine was another WildBerries “logistics” warehouse in a suburb of Saint Petersburg; then, a warehouse in the city of Kirov was also hit – either a military target of the Aviatek plant or, as Mercouris claims today, a poultry farm – if there is any argument as yet unarticulated that minimizes the impact of Ukrainian attacks on Russia, we can rest assured that Alex will find – and some military warehouse or similar facility in Simferopol in Crimea.

There have been two major Russian attacks on Ukraine in this same period, involving 180 or so drones, of which Ukraine claims to have shot down 160, and 10 ballistic guided missiles aimed at targets in Odessa, Pavlohrad, Petropavlivka, Derhachi (north of Kharkiv) and also, in the north, Kurylivka and Radychiv and, west of Kiev, a military event connected with drone technologies on Kapitanivka that bestrides the important M06 highway that connects Kiev to the west of Ukraine and where Russia’s attack left six dead and a hundred injured.

Russia is reportedly re-deploying military air fleets from both the far east and from Murmansk on the Kola peninsula, to air bases in Engels and Saratov in preparation for an upcoming massive Russian strike on Ukraine.

In the ground war, Russia is making advances that are designed to slice off the northeast of Kharkiv oblast and join them to the Russian mainland in three places (1) westward from Konovclovo in Russia to Rubene and Ustynivka, with a view to eventually connecting these westwards to Vasylivka and Zakherivka; (2) from Rubizhne to Shevchenkove; and (3) southward to Savyantsi and Balakliya, flanking the city of Kharkiv to the northwest.

In the critical zone of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk conurbation near Donetsk, Russian forces have entered Mykolaivka from both southeast and northeast directions, in preparation for closing in on Slavyansk itself. To the south, Russia is making progress in closing the loophole between Kostantynivka and Chasiv Yar, which will give it access to railway lines from that area into Kramatorsk itself.

As I reported in my post yesterday, the Ukraine’s Black Sea ports around Odessa and to the west are now a dead letter, without there being any hope of a revival of the earlier “grain deal.” While re-routing to the Romanian port of Costanza will take care of, perhaps, 20% of this trade, that still leaves a great new logistics headache for Ukraine to resolve.

***

Russia Matters, 7/24/26 (Excerpt)

Putin wants to hold on to parts of Sumy and Kharkiv, while Rubio tells Lavrov new ideas are needed: “Russia is no longer willing to return some occupied territories to Ukraine as part of any deal to end the war and plans to retain them as buffer zones,” “people close to the Kremlin” told Bloomberg. Vladimir Putin now intends to retain occupied border areas of the Sumy and Kharkiv oblasts as permanent “buffer zones” and remains determined to seize all of the Donetsk oblast before returning to talks, according to the news agency. “While the U.S. insists no deal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine was reached at the summit last August, Kremlin officials have repeatedly asserted that a package of undertakings existed under a so-called ‘spirit of Anchorage’ agreement between Putin and [Donald] Trump,” according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week pronounced that spirit dead. Rubio took a question on the proposals made during the August 2025 Anchorage summit when talking to press after meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Manila on July 23. In his response, Rubio said of the so-called Anchorage proposals “we’ll have to find new suggestions and new ideas, because certainly that one, it was not acceptable in Ukraine at the time.” Lavrov, for his part, “reaffirmed Russia’s readiness for a political and diplomatic settlement of the conflict,” telling Rubio that Moscow remained committed to proposals put forward at the August 2025 summit, according to a Russian Foreign Ministry statement cited by Reuters. Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow is not optimistic about a quick peace deal, but hopes U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will visit Moscow when available. 

By Zach Battat, The Montreal Review, July 2026

Zach Battat is a Montreal-based historian and foreign policy analyst whose work focuses on international affairs, Cold War history, and the long roots of contemporary conflict. He holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies. His scholarship has appeared in The International History Review and other peer-reviewed journals, while his public-facing writing has been featured in The National Interest, Policy Options, La Presse, Le Devoir, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Made By History series. His upcoming academic book is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic.

More than a century ago, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and began reshaping the vast Russian Empire into a socialist state, Washington made a fateful decision. After a failed intervention on the side of the Whites during the Russian Civil War, the United States refused to recognize the new Soviet government. During the ensuing years, successive American administrations treated the Soviet Union not as a difficult partner to be managed but as an illegitimate regime to be isolated through sanctions, diplomatic cold shoulders, and rhetorical hostility. Thus, what most commentators call a ‘New Cold War’ between the United States and Russia is, in fact, the third phase of a conflict that began in 1917 and has never truly ended.

If we take seriously what a ‘cold war’ actually is—namely, a protracted freeze in relations between two states characterized by deep mistrust, ideological antagonism, and periodic crises short of a full-scale war—then this American posture toward Soviet Russia already contained the seeds of what we now call the Cold War. The roots of today’s confrontation did not suddenly appear in 2014 or 2022 or even 1947; they reach back to 1917.

The canonical Western definition of the Cold War tends to fix it between 1947 and 1987, framed by the Truman Doctrine on one end and the Reagan–Gorbachev détente on the other. In that forty-year span we find the familiar features: proxy wars on several continents, arms races, nuclear brinkmanship, and the fear that a crisis in Berlin, Cuba, or the Middle East might end life on earth in a matter of hours. But if we strip away the mythology and return to basics, a cold war is simply a situation in which relations between two major powers are frozen by deep structural suspicion. It may lead to proxy wars, as it did between the United States and the Soviet Union, but this is not inevitable. The Sino–Soviet split in the 1960s produced a sharp chill in relations between Moscow and Beijing with border clashes, propaganda battles, and a total breakdown of trust yet without the global narrative we attach to the U.S.–Soviet rivalry.

In that sense, what we usually refer to as the Cold War between Washington and Moscow was really only the middle act of a much longer drama. The first act began in the wake of the Russian Revolution, as the American refusal to recognize the Soviet government solidified into a pattern of treatment that cast Moscow as permanent outsider. For roughly a decade and a half, the United States adopted a policy that combined moral disdain for Bolshevism with economic and diplomatic pressure. The new regime in Moscow might have called itself a great power, but Washington treated it as something closer to a pariah. The depth of this early mistrust was reinforced by the information environment that Americans inhabited after 1917. In 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz published a landmark study, ‘A Test of the News’,1 of the New York Times’ coverage of the Russian Revolution, showing that the paper had repeatedly assured readers that the Bolshevik regime was collapsing and that the White armies were on the verge of victory, when in fact the opposite was true. Lippmann and Merz concluded that the Times had not simply reported events; it had stated what its editors hoped would happen. The effect was to entrench in the American imagination the idea of Soviet power as temporary and illegitimate, helping to solidify the early pattern of treating Moscow as outside the legitimate international order.

It was only in 1933 that this first cold war thawed. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a far more pragmatic and worldly strategist than many of his contemporaries, made the decision to formally recognize the Soviet Union. On November 16, he took the step that Woodrow Wilson and his successors had refused to take, hoping that Soviet–American relations would, as he put it, ‘forever remain normal and friendly’.2 The decision was not born of naïveté about Stalinism; Roosevelt understood perfectly well that he was dealing with a brutal dictatorship. But he was also realistic about geography and power. The Soviet Union could and should, he believed, be drawn, however slowly and imperfectly, into a cooperative framework with the Western democracies. In a 1928 article in Foreign Affairs, written well before his presidency, Roosevelt spelled out what he thought America’s approach to the world ought to be:

[America] can point the way once more to the reducing of armaments; can cooperate officially and whole-heartedly with every agency that studies and works to relieve the common ills of mankind; and can for all time renounce the practice of arbitrary intervention in the home affairs of [its] neighbors.3

Here was the embryo of what would later become his vision of a ‘Grand Alliance’: a permanent concert of powers—‘The Nations’ as he sometimes called them—which would include the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China as guarantors of world peace after the defeat of the Axis. Roosevelt’s strategy toward Stalin was not sentimental. Knowing the Soviet leader’s paranoia and the trauma his country had endured, Roosevelt believed that engagement, reassurance, and careful respect for Soviet security concerns were far more likely to produce stability than open confrontation.

World War II seemed to vindicate that logic. The Soviet Union lost more soldiers than any other Allied power: over 27 million lives, perhaps more if we include those never properly accounted for. Without the Red Army’s brutal, grinding push across Eastern Europe, it is difficult to imagine Nazi Germany’s defeat. The wartime alliance between Washington and Moscow was never harmonious, but it was effective. For a brief moment, it appeared that shared sacrifice might provide a foundation for the cooperative postwar order that Roosevelt envisioned.

However, history turned in another direction. Roosevelt did not live to see the end of the war; he died in April 1945, just weeks before Germany’s final surrender. Roosevelt had insisted on his vice president, Henry Wallace, a progressive internationalist who favoured continued cooperation with the Soviet Union, as his running mate in 1940, but by 1944 conservative Democrats had replaced him with Harry Truman. This quiet political shift proved decisive: Roosevelt’s death handed the presidency to a leader far less committed to engagement with the Soviet Union, and the careful balance he had tried to maintain in dealing with Stalin was abruptly lost. Truman inherited the presidency without sharing Roosevelt’s instinctive preference for engagement over confrontation.

Before Truman met Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, he sought advice on how to handle the Soviet leader. He turned to two men with very different readings of Moscow: Joseph E. Davies, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, and W. Averell Harriman, the sitting ambassador. Davies, recalling a country that was crude, battered, and profoundly scarred by the war, urged Truman to handle Stalin with care, avoid unnecessary provocations, and recognize the depth of Soviet insecurity. If handled carefully, Davies believed, Stalin could be drawn into Roosevelt’s vision of ‘The Nations’, a Soviet Union integrated, however uneasily, into a cooperative postwar system. Harriman, by contrast, painted Stalin as irredeemably paranoid, blunt, and untrustworthy. According to his reading, the only sensible approach was to give nothing, concede nothing, and treat every Soviet move as an aggressive gambit to be countered. Truman, lacking Roosevelt’s intuition for great power politics and confronting an intimidating new strategic landscape, gravitated toward Harriman’s advice.

From that choice grew the second part of the American–Russian cold war. The line of continuity between Roosevelt’s cautious engagement and Truman’s more confrontational posture is often smoothed over in textbooks, but it had important implications. Instead of exploring whether a softer, more patient approach might have brought the Soviet Union into a more stable relationship with the West, Washington hardened its attitude. Within a few years, the rhetoric of partnership had been replaced by talk of containment, ‘iron curtains’, and an existential clash between ‘the free world’ and communism.

This second act, the Cold War proper, stretching from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, contained many chapters: the Berlin airlift, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, multiple rounds of arms control and arms races, the brutal suppression of uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the détente efforts of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and, finally, the remarkable, almost theatrical relationship between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. For all their ideological differences, Reagan and Gorbachev shared one crucial insight: the nuclear arms race had brought both countries to the edge of catastrophe. Their meetings in the mid-1980s, especially the 1986 Reykjavik summit where they briefly contemplated the elimination of their entire nuclear arsenals, were extraordinary. Domestic opposition in both countries forced them to pull back from that radical idea, but they did succeed in abolishing an entire class of nuclear weapons and generated a genuine sense, felt by millions, that the long freeze might finally be ending.

When the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, many in Washington and Moscow proclaimed that the Cold War was over. Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, Stanislav Shushkevich, and several other leaders gathered in a hunting lodge in the Belovezh forest and signed the documents that became known as the Belovezha Accords, effectively terminating the Soviet state. The Russian Supreme Soviet then ratified the accords. Later, one of Yeltsin’s own advisers admitted that the process had been ‘neither legitimate nor democratic’.4 The decision was taken over the heads of a populace that, only nine months earlier, had expressed its wishes in a referendum. Gorbachev himself later complained that the men behind Belovezha ‘wanted to get rid of him’.5 Nationalist deputy Sergei Baburin recalled a communist colleague justifying the ratification by saying that by voting yes, ‘we will get rid of Gorbachev and then come together again’.6 Accordingly, many deputies voted less to break up the Union than to be rid of an increasingly discredited centre.

The referendum they overrode, organized by Gorbachev and often forgotten outside the former Soviet Union, had asked citizens whether they wanted to preserve a reformed union. Roughly 76 percent voted yes. In other words, three-quarters of Soviet citizens did not want the country to be broken apart. That vote is better read as evidence of a third position than as nostalgia for the status quo. Many citizens were critical of late Soviet bureaucracy and political repression, yet they were also wary of a market transition that threatened to dissolve social guarantees and transfer public wealth into private hands. They wanted reform without dispossession: political opening alongside a protected, mixed economy rather than either authoritarian continuity or shock-therapy rupture.

To outsiders, the Soviet Union was an ideological adversary or an abstract geopolitical entity. To the people who lived in it, it was their life. They were born there, went to school there, had their first romantic experiences there, built careers, formed families, and buried their parents there. A person cannot remove themselves from their diary any more than they can remove themselves from their own skin. It is not surprising, then, that decades later many Russians as well as Ukrainians, Belarusians, and citizens of Central Asia continue to feel a complicated nostalgia for certain aspects of the Soviet period. They remember not the queues and the shortages but the sense of certainty: guaranteed employment, subsidized prices for basic goods, free education and healthcare, the widespread use of Russian as a common language, and a social safety net that, however frayed by the 1980s, still existed.

Yeltsin’s abrupt decision to dissolve the Union, without preparation and against the clearly expressed will of the majority, shattered a highly integrated economy. Supply chains that had been woven together across fifteen republics were suddenly severed, resulting in a collapse in production, a plunge in living standards, mass poverty, and a surge in social pathologies, such as alcoholism, crime, and demographic decline. At the same time, a new class of oligarchs emerged, enriched by insider access to the privatization of state assets. Wealth that had formally belonged to ‘the people’ was claimed through presidential decrees, often without even a fig leaf of parliamentary participation. Russians memorably dubbed their new ‘democracy’ under Yeltsin a dermokratiya (дерьмократия), a ‘shitocracy’. This was not merely a domestic tragedy; it was an international turning point. In Washington, the collapse of the Soviet Union was read as proof that America had ‘won’ the Cold War. The old commitment to treat the Soviet Union as an equal, ritualized in arms control agreements and diplomatic summits, was replaced by the conviction that the United States was now the world’s sole superpower, licensed to reshape the international system as it saw fit.

This is where the third part of the American–Russian cold war begins. It did not start with Vladimir Putin, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, or the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Its origins lie in the 1990s, when the United States chose to treat post-Soviet Russia not as a potential partner in building a more stable order but as a defeated adversary that could safely be ignored, instructed, or pushed aside. To understand this third phase, it is important to recognize that post-Soviet Russia is not simply a continuation of the Soviet Union. Its political and economic system is no longer communist but a hybrid form of state capitalism with conservative social tendencies, shaped by the chaotic transition of the 1990s. Although many Western commentators have interpreted Moscow’s decision to send troops into Ukraine in February 2022 as evidence of an effort to rebuild the Soviet empire, Russian officials have repeatedly rejected that characterization. Putin himself has often invoked the well-known line that ‘anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart; anyone who wants it restored has no brains’7 in order to signal that the Kremlin does not seek a wholesale restoration of Soviet borders. From Moscow’s perspective, the war in Ukraine emerged not from expansionist ideology but from a belief that Russia required a buffer against what it viewed as the steady advance of NATO toward its frontiers. Whether or not one accepts this rationale, the Russia of the twenty-first century operates within a very different institutional and geopolitical framework than its Soviet predecessor, while Washington’s strategic outlook has remained strikingly similar to its late Cold War mindset.

The Clinton administration gave the Yeltsin government what amounted to a carte blanche to ‘reform’ Russia so long as those reforms aligned with the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy in Washington and the prescriptions of Western economists. The guiding assumption was that a rapid ‘transition’ to a free-market economy, shock therapy, would create democracy, prosperity, and stability. In practice, it destabilized a nuclear-armed state to an extent that, in retrospect, looks reckless.

Contrary to many Western narratives, Russians were not clamouring for unregulated capitalism. Both before and after the Bolshevik revolution, setting aside the extreme statist model of the Stalin era, Russia had generally operated with what its own economists and officials would recognize as a ‘mixed economy’: significant state involvement in strategic sectors combined with private enterprise. When reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev spoke of perestroika (перестройка), or ‘restructuring’, they were imagining something closer to European social democracy than American libertarianism: a system combining market mechanisms with strong social guarantees, regulated prices for essentials, and public ownership of core infrastructure. Russians often described this aspiration as sotsializm s chelovecheskim litsom (социализм с человеческим лицом), or ‘socialism with a human face’.

But the zealots who dominated American foreign policy and economic establishment in the 1990s had little interest in such nuances. They pushed Yeltsin to move as quickly as possible toward privatization, deregulation, and integration into Western financial structures. The result was not a healthy democracy but a fragile, corrupt system in which a small group of insiders seized wealth on a colossal scale while ordinary people saw their savings wiped out and their life expectancy fall.

Meanwhile, the broader strategic relationship between Washington and Moscow remained trapped in Cold War thinking. Officially, the Cold War was over, but the mentality in Washington and in many think tanks had changed very little. NATO, instead of redefining itself or fading into a different kind of security architecture, expanded steadily eastward, incorporating countries that had once been part of the Warsaw Pact and, later, part of the former Soviet Union itself. Each round of enlargement was justified as defensive, but from the Kremlin’s perspective, it eroded the buffer zone that had historically been seen as essential to Russian security.

Under George W. Bush, there was a brief moment of cooperation when, after the September 11 attacks, Russia supported the American campaign in Afghanistan. That moment soon gave way to familiar patterns. In 2002, the Bush administration withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the bedrock of Moscow’s national security, and launched the invasion of Iraq a year later. In 2006, former Vice President Dick Cheney declared in Lithuania that Russia should no longer be considered ‘a strategic partner and trusted friend’.8 Moscow read these moves as signs that Washington no longer felt bound by great power understandings.

Barack Obama took office in 2009, promising a ‘reset’ with Russia. For a short period, there were indeed gestures in that direction: a new START treaty, some rhetorical softening, and a photo op featuring a symbolic red ‘reset’ button. Yet the underlying structures of distrust remained. NATO increased its rotational deployments, exercises, and infrastructure in Eastern Europe during the Obama years. The intervention in Libya in 2011, justified to Moscow as a limited humanitarian operation but quickly becoming a regime-change war, reinforced the belief that American assurances were not to be trusted. When protests in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014 culminated in the ouster of President Yanukovych and Russia responded by annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in Donbass, the Obama administration led the push for sanctions and for a firmer NATO posture on Russia’s borders. The ‘reset’ was dead, and the third act of the cold war moved into a more confrontational phase.

On top of this came the pattern of American unilateralism more generally: the bombing of Serbia in the late 1990s without a UN mandate, the full-scale invasion of Iraq, and then Libya. To many in Moscow, the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in Georgia and Ukraine, though not American military operations, appeared as Western-backed efforts at regime change. Each episode may have had its own logic in Washington. Seen from Moscow, they were chapters in a single story—a story in which the ‘victorious’ West felt no obligation to honour earlier assurances or to treat Russia as an equal. This perception of betrayal was not merely a propaganda line; it was, and remains, held by much of the Russian elite, from liberal internationalists to hardliners. Both Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev have repeatedly spoken of promises made and broken, particularly around NATO enlargement. Whether every recollection is precise is less important than the cumulative effect: a deep conviction that the United States, having declared itself the winner of the Cold War, is determined to keep Russia permanently constrained.

In this context, sanctions appear less as an episodic instrument than as a standing feature of Washington’s Russia policy, with roots reaching back to 1917. Indeed, after new American sanctions were imposed in response to alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Medvedev, then prime minister, remarked that Russia had been sanctioned for a hundred years in one form or another.9 Even Medvedev, often cast at the time as one of the system’s more pragmatic, West-facing figures, described relations as razrushennye (разрушенные), or ‘destroyed’.10

The climactic crisis of this third cold war act came, of course, in Ukraine. The seeds were planted long before 2014, but that year’s events, Kyiv’s Maidan Revolution, the flight of President Yanukovych, the Russian annexation of Crimea (or, as Russians refer to it, the reunification of Crimea), and the outbreak of war in Donbass accelerated the spiral. From Washington’s standpoint, Russia had violated international law and the sovereignty of a neighbouring state. From Moscow’s standpoint, the West had supported what it saw as a coup in Kyiv and had refused to acknowledge any Russian stake in the outcome. Even then, there remained a narrow diplomatic path. The Minsk Accords were intended to provide a framework for reintegrating Donbass into Ukraine with a special status and constitutional guarantees. Yet successive Ukrainian governments, encouraged by Western rhetoric and arms deliveries, did not implement the political provisions of Minsk, while Russia maintained its military and political backing for the separatists. Likewise, neither the United States nor the European Union exerted serious pressure on Kyiv to take the difficult steps necessary to make the accords work.

From 2007 onward, Russian officials repeatedly signalled that the prospect of Ukraine (and Georgia) joining NATO was a red line. These warnings were often dismissed in the United States, Canada, and the European Union as bluster or bargaining. Then came the 2008 war in Georgia, the Bucharest Summit’s reckless promise that Ukraine and Georgia ‘will become members of NATO’, and years of mutual distrust. In late 2021, Putin’s government sent written proposals to the United States and NATO outlining what it claimed were its security concerns and desired guarantees. Whatever one thinks of the specifics, Washington responded by treating the proposals largely as unacceptable.

In February 2022, as Ukrainian forces increased their deployments to the eastern frontlines and President Volodymyr Zelensky began publicly musing about nuclear weapons and fast-track NATO membership, Putin made the decision to launch a full-scale invasion. If Putin pulled the trigger, it was the United States and its allies who had spent decades loading the gun.

This is not a defence of Russia’s actions. The invasion was a preventive war by choice not necessity. The threat to Russia’s existence, while emerging, was not imminent. Diplomacy, however strained and unlikely to succeed, had not been exhausted. War, once unleashed, proved predictably catastrophic—cities destroyed, half a million killed or maimed, millions displaced—and the risk of escalation to direct NATO–Russia confrontation or even nuclear use was far from negligible. Looking back, it is clear that Putin’s decision rested on a cascade of miscalculations. He overestimated the readiness and effectiveness of his own armed forces, underestimated Ukrainian resilience and nationalism, and, perhaps most dangerously, misjudged the willingness of the American foreign policy establishment to continue its Cold War-style confrontation at high cost and high risk. He was hardly alone in misreading the situation, but as the leader ordering the invasion, he bears ultimate responsibility for the choice.

Had the Istanbul peace talks in the spring of 2022 produced a settlement, those who argue that Putin’s gamble was strategically justified might have had a stronger case. But the war has dragged on. The drawn-out character of the conflict, its mounting death toll, and the cumulative devastation have made it increasingly difficult to portray the invasion as a rational act of statecraft, even from a narrowly Russian perspective. It is quite possible that, over time, Russia will secure enough territory or political leverage to claim some sort of victory, but whether those gains will be worth the economic, military, and human price is a different question entirely.

What is unmistakable, however, is that the war in Ukraine has not become part of a ‘New Cold War’ so much as deepened an old one. The structures of distrust, grievance, and mutual suspicion that have shaped American–Russian relations since 1917 have simply entered a new, more dangerous phase. The language of a ‘New Cold War’ suggests a break with the past, as if something fundamentally different began in 2014 or 2022. In reality, we are watching the third act of a drama whose first lines were spoken when the United States refused to recognize the Soviet state and whose central theme, the inability of Washington and Moscow to move beyond a zero-sum view of each other, has never been resolved.

In Donald Trump’s first term as president, from 2017 to 2021, there were brief, contradictory signals about a possible shift. On the one hand, Trump occasionally spoke in terms that sounded closer to Joseph Davies’s old advice, hinting at the possibility of better relations with Russia, questioning the wisdom of some interventions, and expressing scepticism about endless confrontation. On the other hand, his administration’s actual policies included new sanctions, arms sales to Ukraine, and a hard line on many issues, most notably its decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty. The broader American establishment, Congress, the intelligence agencies, and much of the media treated any talk of a détente as almost treasonous. A kind of ‘Russia frenzy’ took hold in sections of the Western political class, where every domestic controversy seemed to include a Russian angle.

The subsequent Biden administration, from 2021 to early 2025, reverted to a more traditional American posture: rhetorical commitment to democracy and alliances, support for NATO enlargement, culminating in the accession of Finland and Sweden, and a willingness to treat Russia primarily as a malign actor to be contained, sanctioned, and weakened. When the 2022 invasion confirmed every negative expectation about Moscow, it became even harder in Washington to argue for anything resembling Roosevelt’s old vision of a concert of powers.

In January 2025, Donald Trump returned to the White House for a second term with rhetoric which, again, suggested some instinctive openness to reducing tensions with Moscow or at least to questioning the automatic logic of permanent confrontation. Yet he is hemmed in by the same structural forces that constrained his first term: a foreign policy establishment invested in the existing paradigm, a Congress suspicious of any overture to Russia, and allies wary of any unilateral American bargain. The tension between Trump’s occasional gestures toward Davies and the entrenched Harriman school in Washington has only grown more visible. The administration’s November 2025 National Security Strategy makes this tension plain.11 It rails against ‘globalism’ and promises restraint, yet insists that U.S. economic and military pre-eminence must endure and treats the war in Ukraine as a problem to manage rather than a chance to rethink relations with Russia. The document does not end the long Cold War; it quietly updates it.

In late November 2025, Reuters published the text of a draft 28-point U.S.-backed peace framework for the Russia–Ukraine war, which it reported obtaining.12 It pairs a reaffirmation of Ukrainian sovereignty with a constitutional bar on NATO membership, constraints on Ukraine’s armed forces, phased sanctions relief for Russia, and an economic reintegration agenda including energy, critical minerals, and investment vehicles. It treats enforcement and incentives as the core mechanism of stability, with conditional guarantees and compensation doing the heavy lifting. Regardless of its feasibility or justice, the document reads less like an exit from the long cold war and more like its management by contract—a management which is now shaping the next phase of the war in Ukraine.

Now in its fifth year, the war in Ukraine has evolved into a grinding contest of attrition, with periods of escalation and stalemate, recent expanded strikes on Kyiv and Russian warnings of further attacks, diplomatic initiatives raised and abandoned, and a steady tightening of the sanctions and countersanctions that now shape the broader relationship. Inside Russia, too, the long war has narrowed Putin’s room for manoeuvre: high interest rates and the hidden conversion to a war economy have strained the civilian economy,13 and the scale of Russian casualties has become increasingly difficult to conceal.14 Yet public opinion appears to reflect the same constraint: many Russians favour ending the war, but far fewer support doing so if it requires returning the territories Russia already holds.15 This leaves the Kremlin facing pressure for an endgame, but not necessarily for territorial rollback or for a settlement that looks like defeat. That tension has given hardline voices within Russia’s strategic and foreign-policy establishment more room to sharpen a longstanding argument that Moscow should impose an outcome in Ukraine rather than wait for a negotiated settlement with Washington, a view reinforced by the war on Iran and by the belief that Tehran was left bargaining over sovereign choices under military and economic duress before receiving only a fragile interim understanding.16 Trust between Washington and Moscow is effectively non-existent. Arms control frameworks that once put guardrails on the rivalry have eroded or collapsed. The wider international system has grown more multipolar and more brittle, with other powers—China, India, and regional actors in the Middle East and the Global South—seeking to navigate between a sanctioned but assertive Russia and a self-confident but internally divided United States.

In this landscape, American leaders often describe the confrontation as a global struggle between democracy and autocracy. Such language captures some of what is at stake, but it misses a deeper divide. The real fault line in the latest phase of this long cold war runs between a universalist project and various forms of non-universalism. On one side stand those who insist that a single set of political and economic norms can and should apply everywhere and that the United States and its allies remain the natural guardians of those norms. On the other stand states and movements that reject this universalizing claim, whether in the name of sovereignty, civilizational identity, religious tradition, or simple resentment of Western power.

Russia does not offer a coherent alternative model of world order, and neither do many of the governments that resist Western pressure. What they share is a refusal to accept that Washington’s preferences are identical to the interests of humanity as a whole. Russia’s own official rhetoric has increasingly framed this refusal in civilizational terms. Since 2022, and building on older debates, the language of Russia as a distinct civilization or ‘state-civilization’ has moved closer to the centre of official discourse, though in practice this civilization is imagined less as a culture above the state than as a multi-confessional, statist order protected and defined by the state itself.17 For them, the argument with the West is less about the details of parliamentary procedure and more about who has the authority to declare which rules are binding for everyone and which are open to negotiation. In practice, the current confrontation is not simply a contest between democrats and authoritarians. It is a struggle over whether any power can still claim to speak for a universal order and what follows if that claim is no longer widely believed.

Seen in that light, references to a ‘New Cold War’ between America and Russia obscure more than they reveal. What we are living through is not a fresh confrontation born of Putin’s personality or NATO’s latest moves. Rather, it is the third stage of a long-standing cold war that has repeatedly changed its surface form while preserving its core: a deep, reciprocal inability to imagine security with the other side rather than against it coupled with a recurring American temptation to confuse its own universalism with the interests of the world.

There have always been alternative voices. Roosevelt’s vision of a Grand Alliance, including the Soviet Union and China as co-guarantors of peace, was one. Davies’s recommendation to Truman to deal with Stalin carefully and without gratuitous provocation was another. Even in recent years, scattered figures in both countries have argued that the true threats to American and Russian security—international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, pandemics, and cyber vulnerabilities—are not problems that can be solved by treating one another as permanent enemies or by insisting that one side’s institutions are the universal template for all.

Yet the zealots of confrontation in Washington and their counterparts in Moscow have repeatedly prevailed. In the United States, ideological triumphalism combines with entrenched institutional interests to make questioning the logic of endless rivalry exceedingly difficult. The military-industrial complex, far from being a conspiracy theory, is a structural reality of American politics, reinforced rather than restrained by partisan polarization. The U.S. operation that captured Nicolás Maduro and removed him from power in early January 2026 serves as a reminder that the repertoire of intervention remains readily available, even in the Western Hemisphere.18 In Russia, a mixture of genuine security concerns, wounded pride, and regime self-preservation has reinforced a siege mentality that feeds on Western missteps. On both sides, universalist rhetoric is often used to justify policies that deepen, rather than reduce, insecurity.

What we are witnessing is not a ‘New Cold War’, but an old one still unfolding, now in its third phase and more than a century old. The urgent task is not to debate labels but to confront a deeper impasse: the United States’ reluctance to relinquish the claim that its own model represents the sole legitimate destination of history, and Russia’s continued tendency to ground its foreign policy in grievance rather than coexistence. Without some modest retreat from universalist ambition and some corresponding acceptance of pluralism, talk of ending the cold war will remain empty.

For the sake of their own citizens and the wider world, American leaders will eventually have to decide whether they wish to continue staging new variations of the same cold war drama or whether they are prepared to imagine something different. Roosevelt once believed that the United States could ‘renounce the practice of arbitrary intervention’ and ‘cooperate…to relieve the common ills of mankind’. That imagination has flickered at times, but it has never quite gone out. The tragedy of the last century is that whenever such voices have emerged, in the United States as in Russia, they have been marginalized by those who regard confrontation as a permanent necessity or, worse, a profitable habit. The danger today is that we now find ourselves closer to catastrophic miscalculation than at any time since the early 1980s war scares and, arguably, since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Rather than debating whether this ‘New Cold War’ is really new, it is time to ask what the old one can still teach, even if learning those lessons is harder in a world where the claim to speak for universal values is contested as never before. 

By Leonid Ragozin, The American Conservative, 7/17/26

Once upon a time, Donald Trump promised to end what he dubbed “Biden’s war” in Ukraine within 24 hours of his second inauguration. But a year and a half after Trump moved back into the White House, the war continues to rage. Moreover, he has put on his predecessor Joe Biden’s hat, trying to coerce Vladimir Putin into accepting peace on Western terms by raising the stakes to new, insane levels. 

Several such attempts by the U.S.-led West throughout the 12 years of the Russia–Ukraine war invariably ended in fiascos that have come to define the trajectory of this conflict. The crude attempt to reframe the 2014–2015 Minsk agreements in Ukraine’s favor prompted Russia’s all-out invasion in February 2022. Ditching the Istanbul framework agreement in the spring of the same year resulted in an epic catastrophe for Ukrainians. Even if the war ended soon, Ukraine would need decades to recover in demographic and infrastructural terms. But just as on every previous occasion, the pro-war lobby is doing its utmost to promote the narrative that this time things are going to be different.

“It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that can help lead to an end,” Trump said at the NATO summit in Ankara last week. He praised his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky for doing “an amazing job” with drone strikes on oil refineries that have engineered a fuel crisis across Russia and an acute one in the occupied Crimea. 

Trump’s apparent turnaround was preceded by a massive PR surge aiming to prove to its one-man target audience, Trump himself, that “the tide is turning” and Russia is beginning to lose. Judging by Trump’s statements in Ankara, the effort seems to have paid off, with a significant caveat being his propensity for changing his mind shortly after saying things observers interpret as policy.

The “turning tide” campaign rests on a constellation of dubious assumptions about the state of the war, Russia’s society and economy, and the West’s ability to contain the conflict without it sliding into nuclear apocalypse. 

One assumption is that fuel shortages caused by drone strikes could make the war untenable for Putin by raising domestic political pressure. This line of thought derives from imagining modern Russians, or at least the Russian establishment, as snowflakes who will turn against Putin as soon as they have to wait a whopping 20 minutes to get their car fueled. The same kind of magical thinking fueled Western excitement during the Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in 2023 and Ukraine’s Kursk incursion in 2024.

There are multiple issues with this approach. First, Russians have experienced far worse economic and security conditions in living memory. If you need to figure out what kind of hardships a post-Soviet people can potentially endure, look no further than Ukraine, which successfully adapted to the near-total destruction of its own large refineries earlier in the war. 

The problem is that Russian resilience is just beginning to be tested. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s society and economy have worn down to a dangerous level that Russia, if the war of attrition continues, would take decades to reach. There is virtually no way for Ukraine and the West to make Russia so unlivable that Putin would end the invasion before Ukraine itself becomes completely lifeless. This equation has been obvious from the war’s outset, although somehow not to its ardent cheerleaders.

What Russia is doing now in response to Ukrainian strikes is inching towards total war, with Russian drones and missiles methodically knocking out petrol stations in addition to energy infrastructure. Moscow has also begun to target food-processing facilities, agricultural equipment, and trucks on highways. Ukrainians are bracing for another horrific winter in unheated apartments, while Russians are merely at the stage of making an extra effort to fuel their cars. The contrast couldn’t be starker.

Finally, Russians largely do buy into the Kremlin’s narrative about the war. They see it as existential and themselves as underdogs fighting for their sovereignty against the enormous Western military and economic machine. What Trump has been doing to Iran over the last several months has bolstered their impression of malign Western intentions (and confirmed for them the importance of having a huge nuclear arsenal).

Moreover, Russians are being flooded with rabidly xenophobic, even genocidal, anti-Russian propaganda on social networks, thanks to government-linked online mobs like NAFO and, sometimes, high-ranking officials in Kiev and elsewhere. In a recent tweet, Sergiy Kyslytsya—Zelensky’s first deputy chief of staff and formerly a UN ambassador—wrote about the “exceptional degeneracy” of Russian society, comparing the Russian world to “mold” that must be “wiped out” rather than bleached. The tweet was promoted by America’s former Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, one of the architects of NATO expansion into the post-Soviet space, including Ukraine.

Western cynicism regarding Ukraine—as in the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s statement about the U.S. helping Ukraine fight to the last Ukrainian, or in the EU proposal to stop admitting draft-age Ukrainians fleeing mobilization—also doesn’t go unnoticed.

It is hard to predict how long Trump will remain a Russia hawk, but it is safe to say that another historical chance to settle the conflict has been squandered, and the old pattern that has defined the trajectory of this conflict for years is back: Every time peace becomes a realistic prospect, the pro-war lobby derails it by selling the illusion that it will take just few hundred billion more dollars and the next technological magic wand to vanquish Putin’s war machine.

The result has been the same every time—hair-raising escalation, enormous and partially irrecoverable losses for Ukraine in lives, territory, infrastructure, and Russia pressing even harder than before. Every time Ukraine emerges from an escalatory period, it faces far more disastrous terms of peace than it could previously have achieved. There is no indication this time will be different.

Driven by war-industry lobbyists, most Western discourse regarding the Ukraine war evinces a severe misunderstanding of the conflict in every aspect—from the trajectory of the conflict to Russia’s true motives and intentions to human rights and democracy in Ukraine. It hinges on a plethora of taboo subjects, like the brutality of Ukraine’s mobilization and the public resistance to it (see the Lviv riot last week), as well as the infiltration of the Ukrainian state and military by former far-right street thugs, many of whom have become darlings of the Western media and the defense industry.

It also draws a surreal, essentialist portrait of Putin’s Russia as an inherently evil, alien civilization that’s incompatible with Western values by definition, rather than a complex, post-totalitarian society whose phobias and authoritarian instincts are partly driven by the long history of Western aggression (including current footage depicting what the U.S. and its proxies have done to Iran and Gaza).

Strategic planners and think-tankers in Washington concoct schemes to “weaken Russia,” but their efforts have so far produced the exact opposite result—a Russia that’s increasingly adaptive, technologically advanced, ready for modern war, and genuinely hostile to the West. For now, it is the Ukrainians, above all, who are paying the price with their property, blood, and future livelihoods.

Trump might be thinking that he can atone for the Iran debacle by being “tough on Russia” and resolving the Ukraine war on Western terms. But he could soon find himself facing an even greater debacle than the one he’s created in the Middle East.