Carl Bildt
With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine now well into its third year, there are mounting questions about whether any sort of peace or victory is possible.
Much depends, of course, on how one defines those terms. For Putin, the explicitly stated objective is to eliminate Ukraine as an independent nation-state and subject it to Russian control. Yet after two and a half years and a massive mobilisation of military resources and manpower, Russia controls only around 18 percent of Ukraine’s territory, and most of that was grabbed in 2014. Set against Putin’s war aims, the invasion has been a miserable failure.
Could this change? For a Russian victory to be even remotely possible, the West would need to end all forms of support—financial as well as military—to Ukraine, and the Ukrainian people would need to lose their will to resist. Absent either—or probably both—of these outcomes, Putin’s war aim seems unachievable.
There are no signs of a loss of will on the Ukrainians’ part. While a minority of respondents in opinion polls say they could accept some territorial concessions as a price for ending the war, these losses would fall far short of anything that would eliminate Ukraine from the map.
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