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Less than a week after the third anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the geopolitical situation surrounding the war was thrown into complete disarray. Events are moving so rapidly that it is difficult to keep up. It seems like every day brings with it new dramas on the diplomatic front, which have taken on a life of their own away from the battlefield. At the moment, all eyes are on the fallout from the disastrous meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky on 28 February in the Oval Office, which descended into raised voices and the Ukrainian President being ejected from the White House.[i] We now appear to be at an inflection point. In this piece, I will discuss some macro-level observations about the current state of play. 

A maximalist victory for either side seems impossible for the foreseeable future.[ii] To say otherwise seems out of touch with reality. Russia’s spring 2022 gambit to quickly seize Ukraine and make it a puppet state had definitively failed by the end of that year. The publicly stated goal of liberating all of Ukraine’s 1991 territory from Russian control, or at the very least driving Russia back to the pre-2022 lines of contact, ran aground with the failed 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive. Since then, the war has remained largely static, with only incremental gains made sporadically by each side.[iii] There is no concrete evidence that the present battlefield conditions will qualitatively change in the upcoming year or two.

Over a long enough timeline, a definitive victory might be in the cards for one side or the other. However, this would likely come at an unacceptable cost to whoever emerges as the winner and be pyrrhic at best. This means that there will be a negotiated settlement of some kind, just like most wars throughout modern history.[iv] Whether this will be merely a ceasefire or something more permanent is unclear. Still, it seems that both sides are in a situation in which they are primarily fighting to determine where the line of control will be – one which will vary by miles, not hundreds or even tens of miles. Delay in a ceasefire/peace will likely only cost more lives for minimal territorial gains. So, both sides (and their supporters) must ask themselves the following: How many more lives are they willing to expend to get a little bit more land or to give themselves a slightly better position at the bargaining table?

If Ukraine were winning the war, there might be an incentive for Kyiv to keep fighting and for its backers to keep supporting it. However, it has been apparent for some time that Ukraine is losing.[v] The Ukrainians are being pushed back steadily in the east, and their strategic position continues to worsen. Moreover, Moscow did not take the bait following Kyiv’s Kursk gambit, ostensibly designed to draw Russian forces away from the east and to give Ukraine something to bargain away in a final peace agreement. Instead, Kursk has been described as a “strategic error” because Ukraine has lost elite troops for a piece of territory that is shrinking by the day.[vi]  Time does not appear to be on Ukraine’s side, no matter how many new weapons systems the West provides.

While all this has come at a disproportionate cost[vii] of men and material for Russia – in terms of relative Ukrainian losses and how much territory this actually yields for Moscow – it appears that Russia is willing to bear it and that Russia’s willingness and ability to carry on over the next year or so will persist. Granted, the costs to Russia may eventually undermine its war effort: the economic sanctions might finally bite,[viii] and the Kremlin’s meatgrinder style of warfare will lead to another round of general mobilization,[ix] which, in turn, will cause a revolt against the Kremlin. However, we have heard this story for the past three years. How many more years do we need for these claims to be proved right – if at all?

Ukraine fought heroically and valiantly to secure its independence in 2022. No one can deny this, and its total social mobilization in defiance of Russia will be celebrated as one of the great feats of modern warfare. However, it appears that Ukraine is no longer treating the war like the “existential threat” that their leaders and their supporters continue to claim.[x] Ukraine is facing an “acute” manpower shortage, which, according to reports, has seen the Ukrainian general staff “order[ing] already-depleted air defense units to free up more men to send to the front as infantry.”[xi] This type of war needs people sent into the battlefield and Ukraine has been on the losing end of this equation.[xii] Public support for continuing the war is declining,[xiii] desertions[xiv] and draft dodging[xv] are up, and Kyiv still refuses to draft 18-24-year-olds.[xvi] (Just getting the draft age reduced from 27 to 25 was highly “divisive.”[xvii]) The Biden White House saw this as a problem[xviii] and President Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, echoed[xix] this sentiment the week before Trump took office. Given these dynamics, it would seemingly behoove Kyiv to end the war sooner rather than later to save both Ukrainian lives and land, as well as to maintain the support of its most powerful backer, the United States. But Zelensky seems unwilling to do this.

The return of Trump to the American presidency has precipitated a sea change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Europe. This may be the most obvious statement one could make, but it seems that this is Trump’s world, and we are just living in it.[xx] The consistent message by Trump and his entire team since returning to office is that the war must end and end now. As U.S. Secretary of State Rubio said, prolonging the war just to see if Ukraine will be in a better bargaining position later “is not a plan [President Trump] is on board with.”[xxi]

There has always been a danger to Ukraine if the Trump White House came to see Kyiv as unduly obstinate and a roadblock to the peace deal, regardless of whether that view was justified or not.  If this were to occur, then Ukraine might run the risk of Trump washing its hands of the entire situation. We appear to be at that stage now.

Zelensky claims to want peace, but his vision of what would be an acceptable peace seems to be stuck closer to the maximalist side of the line. His refusal to accept an immediate ceasefire and then enter into more long-term peace talks was perhaps the central contention of the 28 February blowup in the Oval Office, with an exacerbated Trump eventually turning Zelensky and saying, “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out.”[xxii] In his impromptu press conference following the meeting, Trump reiterated his threat: “Either we’re going to end it or let them fight it out.”[xxiii] Zelensky’s post-meeting comment that the end of the war is still likely “very, very far away” seemingly made things worse and was met with a harsh rebuke by Trump who called it “the worst statement that could have been made…and America will not put up with it much longer!”[xxiv]

Almost immediately, we got the answer to how much longer the U.S. would “put up with it”.  At the time of writing, Washington has paused U.S. military aid to Ukraine.[xxv] The logic behind this move was articulated by Trump several times beforehand: U.S. support for Ukraine is chiefly responsible for Zelensky’s refusal to make peace; therefore, the only way to achieve a peace deal is to cut off Ukraine.[xxvi] At the current moment, therefore, the Trump-Zelensky relationship – and thus, by implication, the current U.S.-Ukrainian relationship – seems broken. Possibly only a dramatic change in Zelensky’s policy and attitude, or his resignation, can repair it.

The consequences of this go far beyond Ukraine. The bigger and more fundamental issue is that the continuing war in Ukraine has intensified rifts between the U.S. and Europe, with an increasing number of U.S. Republicans giving up on NATO and hinting about a withdrawal.[xxvii] Following the Oval Office confrontation, numerous commentators were taking the possibility of NATO falling apart seriously,[xxviii] with one calling the current situation “Europe’s nightmare.”[xxix].  Even if a full rupture were to be avoided, the Atlantic Alliance is certainly “under grave threat.”[xxx]

There is no question that Trump sees the world through a transactional lens.[xxxi] At his core, he is a businessman, after all. America has long criticized Europe as free-riding off of American security,[xxxii] and there is little that Europe has done over the past three years that has changed this perception. For what is claimed to be the greatest geopolitical security threat that Europe has faced since the end of the Cold War -- “existential,”[xxxiii] even -- with some rare exceptions (Poland, Scandinavia, and the Baltics), there is little substantive evidence that the Europeans are truly taking the Russian threat as seriously as they should, given that Russia is committing aggression on their doorstep. Europe is still only willing to make minimal incremental changes in defense spending[xxxiv] and industrial capacity expansion,[xxxv] lest the Russia-Ukraine War interfere with their domestic welfare spending or net-zero environmental goals. While Europe has given over $130 billion in aid to Ukraine,[xxxvi] American support is relatively close to that, despite the fact Ukraine is an ocean removed from Washington.

Europe has not articulated a clear, unified plan toward countering the Russian threat other than various versions of supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes”[xxxvii] and ensuring “Ukrainian sovereignty.”[xxxviii] Additionally, it is unclear what they mean by a Ukrainian victory. Despite hosting a series of emergency summits[xxxix] on Ukraine prior to and in the wake of the disastrous Trump-Zelensky meeting – which were seemingly designed to show the region and the world that Europe was finally serious about providing for its own security -- the ultimate takeaways from each are that they are light on specifics and that Europe would somehow ‘do more’. 

Europe has an economy well over ten times that of Russia and a population that is more than three times bigger. Still, both the “reassurance force” proposed by France and the UK,[xl] and the proposed European “boots on the ground”[xli] require U.S. support by their own admission. A world in which “500 million Europeans begging 300 million Americans to defend them from 140 million Russians”[xlii] is not only unsustainable, but also absurd – at least from Trump’s perspective.[xliii]Europe may return to freeriding in four or eight years under a Democratic president, but Europe-American relations may not have that long. It is in crisis now.

While many commentators, such as Walt[xliv] and Sullivan,[xlv] may point to this situation and say that the Trump administration is to blame, this has been building for some time, and Europe must accept its full share of the responsibility for the breakdown in the American bipartisan consensus on Europe.[xlvi] As British Prime Minister Starmer said, “Europe must do the heavy lifting.”[xlvii] This is definitely true. However, it remains to be seen if Europe will actually emerge as a true security partner of the United States or whether these will be just more empty words. Even if the former came to pass, would it be too little too late? If the latter, then the future of the post-World War II order, which has largely rested upon the Atlantic Alliance, is in grave danger. 

With those somber thoughts, the beginning of the fourth year of the Russia-Ukraine War has brought us to an inflection point in U.S.-Ukrainian and U.S.-European relations. Unfortunately, there are few reasons for optimism.

Dr. Thomas Ambrosio is a professor of political science at North Dakota State University where he researches authoritarianism, Russian foreign policy, critical geopolitics, and ludic studies, as well as teaches courses on international politics and international law.