Forget Ukraine progress reports. There’s no end in sight for the war

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No senior official or analyst has made predictions on how long the conflict will last, perhaps keeping in mind the mockery generated by Trump’s assertion during the campaign for the 2024 elections he won that he would solve the war in a day.

Despite a flurry of diplomatic efforts and an unusually optimistic statement from US President Donald Trump, military experts see scant chance of an early end to the war of aggression Russia began almost four years ago.

The losses in the biggest conflict in Europe since World War 2 have been staggering. Precise, verified numbers on either side are secret, but estimates suggest well over a million Russian casualties killed or wounded, with Ukraine suffering at least 400,000.

The war is being waged on two distinct fronts: on the battlefield and what the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War calls “cognitive warfare.” That is a battle for how key leaders, above all, Trump, assess the strengths of the warring parties.

The Kremlin has gone all out in a campaign to convince the world that a Russian victory is inevitable. That has had some success. In a December interview with the news site Politico, Trump repeated a Kremlin talking point: “Russia has the upper hand, and they always had. They are much bigger. They are much stronger. You know, at some point, they will win.”

Facts on the ground do not support this assessment. During this year’s summer offensive, Russia seized just under one per cent of Ukrainian territory at the cost of more than 200,000 dead or wounded.

The “Russian victory is inevitable” message is designed to pressure the United States and Ukraine’s European allies into reducing their support and pushing Kyiv towards concessions.

In late November, the Trump administration came up with a 28-point peace proposal, which prompted immediate criticism both from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s European allies and several US lawmakers for being favourable to Russia. It included territorial concessions and a cap on the size of the Ukrainian army.

The hostile reaction prompted more rounds of diplomatic talks and resulted in a 20-point plan leaning less towards the Kremlin’s demands.

That plan was discussed by Trump and Zelensky at Trump’s winter home in Florida on December 28. Both leaders expressed optimism after the talks, and Trump said that Russia and Ukraine were “getting a lot closer, maybe very close” to a peace deal.

A day later, the Kremlin accused Ukraine of having launched a massive drone strike on one of Putin’s official residences, in the Novgorod region north of Moscow. The Russian Defence Ministry asserted the attack had involved 91 long-range drones – all of which were shot down.

According to the Russians, there was no damage in what they termed “an act of state terrorism” which would be answered with toughened negotiating positions in forthcoming Trump-mediated talks. In other words, the Americans’ “maybe very close” might not be as close as he thought.

There is no physical evidence of the alleged attack on a Putin residence, unusual in a world where almost nothing ever happens without video images.

The first time he made that claim was on January 26, 2023 on his social network, Truth Social. “If I were president,” he said, “the Russia/Ukraine war would never have happened, but even now, if president, I would be able to negotiate an end to this horrible and rapidly escalating war within 24 hours.”

That was 1,074 days ago, and the “solution in one day” assertion became a standard phrase in his campaign speeches.

While Putin has made clear that he thinks time is on Russia’s side because of its greater size and larger numbers, some US analysts think he is making a strategic mistake in drawing out the conflict.

In a thoughtful analysis in Foreign Affairs, the must-read publication of the American foreign policy establishment, Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, headlined his analysis America’s Magical Thinking about Ukraine.

He said that “it should be evident to anyone who has closely followed this conflict that, nearly four years on, Russia is much worse off than it was in February 2022. . Its economy… is now in dire straits. With runaway inflation and an interest rate of 16.5 per cent, Russia is on a steady track to recession. It has a shortage of labour, especially highly qualified labour.

“Russia finds itself increasingly dependent on China as a source of key technologies and as a market for Russian hydrocarbons; such dependence makes Russia deeply vulnerable to the whims of Beijing.”

Radchenko summed up with a sobering assessment of the conflict: “In reality, both countries are losing the war. The question is which one will lose first.”