By Ian Proud, Substack, 10/19/26

I have wanted to write an article for sometime about the differing fates of Russia and Ukraine since the onset of the conflict in 2014. The headline is that Ukraine has never made up the difference in increased trade with Europe having cut its trade with Russia to the bone since 2014. This has inadvertently meant that Europe has had to inject significant sums of capital into Ukraine just to prevent its currency from collapsing as the war has gone on. Russia has diversified its trade away from Europe such that its export model is as strong today as it was in 2014, giving it the liquidity it needs to underwrite the war effort.

Key finding:

• Ukraine exported 24% less and imported 46% more in 2025 than in 2014. The war has driven up imports while exports never recovered from the signing of the DCFTA and have been hampered by the war effort.
• The yawning trade deficit Ukraine has built since the war started has placed greater strain on European sponsors to provide the capital Ukraine needs to prevent its currency collapsing, in addition to providing funding to meet its fiscal requirements.
• This funding challenge for Europe will persist after the war ends until Ukraine can become self-sufficient in boosting exports and/or attracting sufficient foreign investment to offset its trade deficits.
• Russia’s export strength and consistent surpluses have been unaffected by war. After the Ukraine crisis started, Russia started to diversify its major energy exports away from Europe, allowing it to weather the progressive reduction of exports to Europe. Indeed, Russia gained a huge windfall in 2022 from surging energy prices. There is no evidence that sanctions have impacted Russia’s export model in a significant way.
• Russia has already started to reaccumulate FX reserves after the oil price collapse of late 2014, until before the war started. Following the immobilisation of $300bn in Russian FX reserves, Russia started to accumulate reserves in monetary gold, to sanction-proof future earnings. Russia now has liquid reserves of over $420bn meaning the immobilisation of its foreign currency reserves is no longer an economically limiting factor.

Detailed analysis

Russia’s export model in which it runs consistently large trade surpluses has ensured it can generate the reserves of foreign currency and gold which have undoubtedly helped to bankroll the war in Ukraine. Ukraine’s trade deficit has yawned since the war started, requiring continual injections of European capital to prevent its currency from collapsing.

This helps to explain by Russia can sustain the war for longer; it doesn’t need to take on significant new debt, its debt remaining low at 20%. Ukraine can only fund the war and keep its national accounts in balance with European money that cannot be guaranteed long-term and which, in any case, has increased Ukrainian debt by an average of 20% of GDP each year since the war started. This is not sustainable.

The Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement of 2014 has disadvantaged Ukraine because it forced a choice away from trading with Russia.

The starting point for this is the signature by Ukraine of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with Europe on 27 June 2014.

Herman van Rompuy, then President of the European Council said that “stronger political and economic ties will bring greater stability and prosperity to the entire European continent.”

President Poroshenko said “over the last months, Ukraine paid the highest possible price to make her European dreams come true.”

Yet, the true price of this agreement has borne by Ukraine which saw its exports collapse and its imports increase, as it make a “sovereign choice” not to maintain trade links with Russia.

That was a catastrophically bad choice. Russia had accounted for around 25% of Ukrainian exports prior to 2014 and that figure fell to less than 5% in 2021 before the war started. Ukraine did not make up that gap by increasing the volume of exports to Europe, which have remained largely unchanged.

Indeed, this same pattern can be seen in Georgia which has also seen no real increase in exports to the EU after it signed the DCFTA. The EU uses a number of trade dispute mechanism and other non-tariff barriers to put blockages in the way of import growth from DCFTA partner countries.

So, by encouraging Ukraine to trade with Europe and not with Russia, Europe has imposed a deadweight economic loss on Ukraine which took a sovereign decision to forgo a previously profitable trade relationship, to pursue a political goal of EU integration.

Moreover, since the war started, imports into Ukraine have surged leading to a progressive ballooning of its trade deficit. This surge in imports has been caused by Ukraine purchasing weapons from the US using borrowed European and domestic funds. So, Ukraine is borrowing money to create a trade deficit that needs to be filled with further inflows of capital.

Dragged into a persistent and growth trade deficit by war, Ukraine needs continued injections of foreign funds to prevent its currency collapsing.

The graph below maps the growth in Ukraine’s trade deficit with the corresponding growth in receipts classified as Secondary Income within its quarterly balance of payments. These inflows of capital as Secondary Income are injections from Europe (principally) that are vital to shore up Ukraine’s FX reserves and so prevent a run on the currency. The key point is that foreign funding to Ukraine is more than just a fiscal event and top it. It is a vital support mechanism in circumstances where Ukraine is unable to attract sufficient inflows of foreign investment during a time of war.

Russia simply hasn’t faced the same challenge, choosing instead to diversify its exports to other countries as Europe progressively shut down trade. Sanctions haven’t dented trade.

The graph below illustrates in an elegant way how Russia’s trade has changed and evolved since. Russia’s exports have gone through peaks and troughs since 2014, although the troughs have often been caused by global events such as the 2014 and 2016 oil price collapses and COVID,

The onset of the war in Ukraine caused a huge windfall in income from exports as oil prices surged. Despite the imposition of thousands of sanctions by western nations after the war commenced, Russia’s exports have remained highly resilient. This is down to Russia’s diversification of its exports towards countries in Asia.

In short, despite many headlines in western mainstream media of sanctions ‘denting Russia’s war economy’ there is no substantive evidence that this has been the case.

Russia’s export model continues to be an engine room that provides the liquidity it needs to fund the war without taking on significant new debt. This gives it a significant advantage over Ukraine and its European backers in the ‘war of attrition’.

Russia has accumulated reserves since the war started to make up for the immobilisation of $300bn in FX by western nations. Russia now invests in monetary gold to sanction-proof its assets.

Finally, I have been commenting for some time that Russia started the process of accumulating Foreign Exchange Reserves in 2017 as it shifted its monetary policy to embrace a weak rouble to maximise rouble income from exports and as it undertook a number of dollar purchases via the Finance Ministry. You can see this reserve accumulation in the graph below.

After the war started, following the large windfall in earning from exports in 2022 and still solid trade figures after that, Russia continued to accumulate reserves. However, following the freezing of its foreign currency assets, it has chosen instead to store its reserves in monetary gold, to sanction proof them.

While Russia would undoubtedly like to see the return of its immobilised assets after the war ends (big question mark) it has nevertheless built up a significant financial buffer to the tune of over $420bn in reserve assets in addition to those assets that remain frozen.

This deep well of reserves undoubtedly helps to underwrite Russia’s war effort without the need for significant borrowing. Russia’s debt today sits at around 20% of GDP.

In 2021 Ukraine’s debt sat at around 49% of GDP. Today it sits at around 110% of GDP.

By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 10/16/26

Black Sea shipping is in crisis, adding pressure to a global economy already absorbing Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz disruptions. Commercial vessels face rising risks, insurance costs have climbed, and tanker freight rates have surged.

Ukraine has stepped up attacks on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, ports, oil facilities, and vessels associated with Russian trade, expanding the conflict’s geographical scope. Grain, oil, fertilizers, and other commodities move through these waters, including shipments for non-belligerent countries.

S&P Global reported on October 9 that tanker freight rates rose sharply amid attacks, sanctions, and security concerns disrupting Russian energy exports. According to maritime security consultancy Ambrey, Kyiv expanded its campaign beyond naval assets and oil infrastructure to merchant ships trading with Russian ports.

In November 2025, attacks had already expanded to commercial vessels, particularly oil tankers, in the open sea. In May 2026, Ambrey attributed strikes on three Russia-linked tankers inside Turkey’s exclusive economic zone to Ukrainian naval drones.

By July, targeting expanded to dry-bulk carriers, general cargo, container ships, and roll-on/roll-off vessels. In September, insurers widened the high-risk zone. Ambrey data shows 45 merchant vessels struck outside the previous war-risk area in 12 months, 31 after July 1, 2026.

Ambrey’s finding is that Ukraine-attributed strikes (on Russia-linked shipping far offshore) helped drive insurers’ growing risk perception across the Black Sea.

Russia has responded by also conducting strikes in the Black Sea. As Modern Diplomacy puts it, Moscow has made any Black Sea truce conditional on Kyiv ceasing attacks on Russian energy infrastructure.

This is, after all, a proxy war of attrition, marked as it is by considerable military asymmetry. Russia possesses a larger population, defense-industrial base, strategic arsenal, air force, and navy, as well as greater resources for prolonged warfare.

Ukraine, despite developing formidable drone capabilities and long-range strike capacity, remains heavily dependent on Western assistance.

Global Firepower’s 2026 ranking places Russia second and Ukraine twentieth. The military asymmetry is therefore considerable.

The hard truth is that, notwithstanding any legitimate criticism one may have of Moscow’s campaign, Russia has refrained from employing its full destructive capabilities.

Such restraint, particularly in the war’s early stages, may have reflected not only humanitarian and military calculations but also (on Moscow’s end) awareness of historical and cultural ties between the two countries – which may have a psychological effect on decision-makers.

Kyiv, in contrast, since the 2014 ultra-nationalist revolution, has launched an anti-Russian campaign to distance the nation from Moscow. Even so, 42.6% of Ukrainians still regularly spoke Russian in December 2022, despite the war and media censorship restrictions.

Former US diplomat Chas Freeman and retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor have both argued that Moscow exercised restraint.

Poland’s Centre for Eastern Studies likewise noted in June 2022 that Russia had refrained from systematically destroying key infrastructure – while the US Congressional Research Service observed that the initial bombardment was more limited than expected.

For comparison, Bono Vox performed in Kyiv on May 8, 2022, less than three months after Moscow launched its campaign. One could hardly imagine Bono performing in Baghdad shortly after the US invasion! Or in 2011 Libya, for that matter.

The broader point here is that the Russian Federation retains substantial military advantages, despite Ukrainian advances, but Western support has enabled Kyiv to sustain a prolonged war of attrition – increasingly targeting Russian energy.

In August, Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian and Iranian-linked vessels in the Caspian Sea risked expanding the conflict into a vital Russia-Iran logistics corridor.

The attacks risked further “proxifying” the conflict by aligning Kyiv with US and Israeli interests against Tehran, potentially merging the European and Middle Eastern theaters – a scenario that never materialized.

In any case, Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure continue amid mounting political pressure, with Trump even saying it is “time for Ukraine to get new President.” I’ve commented before on Zelensky’s resilience, despite several reported plots against him.

The Ukrainian leader has shown a habit of acting unpredictably, sometimes behind his Western patrons’ backs. In 2023, leaked documents revealed wild Ukrainian plans that risked widening the conflict. More recently, attacks on Russian refineries drew attention amid rising diesel prices and reports of moves angering Washington.

This “wild-card” tendency risks triggering a dangerous spiral, with potentially disastrous consequences for Ukraine – and the global economy. Repercussions for food, energy, and fertilizer trade are already visible, while the danger of crossing red lines has arguably never been greater.

By Leon Vermeulen, Substack, 10/16/26

The Estonian prime minster, Kirsten Michal, ahead of the EU Council meeting: “The faster Russian refineries are blown to smithereens the better.”

Earlier this week, it appeared possible that Europe might awaken to the first building blocks of an end to the war in Ukraine.

The outline was incomplete, fragile and deeply contested: a reciprocal halt to attacks on Russian and Ukrainian energy infrastructure, the restoration of safe Black Sea trade, limited sanctions relief tied to Russian concessions and a negotiating process intended to prevent another catastrophic winter.

It was not yet peace. But it was an off-ramp.

That possibility has not merely been delayed. Europe’s hard-line security establishment is attempting to torpedo it before it acquires political momentum. The annual Warsaw Security Forum made that unmistakably clear.

While Donald Trump searches—however inconsistently and self-interestedly—for a transaction capable of reducing the conflict, Warsaw presented a competing vision. In that vision, peace does not mean rebuilding relations, establishing reciprocal security or ending the confrontation. It means freezing the battlefield while continuing sanctions, military pressure, political isolation and preparations for a future conflict.

Europe is being offered permanent confrontation and being told to call it peace.

Trump’s imperfect opening

Trump’s initiative deserves no romantic interpretation. His decision to ease sanctions on Russian diesel was driven partly by American fuel prices and domestic electoral pressure. His demand that Ukraine stop attacking Russian refineries was not initially matched by an enforceable demand that Russia stop destroying Ukrainian energy infrastructure. His public attack on Volodymyr Zelensky and suggestion that Ukraine should find a new president were coercive and diplomatically crude.

But the motives of a negotiator do not determine whether an opening is useful.

Trump had identified several practical areas in which Russian, Ukrainian, European and American interests might temporarily overlap: energy security, Black Sea navigation, grain exports, sanctions relief and the prevention of further infrastructure destruction during winter.

Zelensky himself offered the essential reciprocal formula: Ukraine would stop striking Russian refineries if Russia stopped attacking Ukrainian energy facilities.

That was the opening to test.

Instead, the planned two-day Miami meeting ended after one angry day. Ukraine promised to continue attacking Russian refineries. European governments condemned the easing of sanctions and repeated that they would stand behind Kyiv. The possibility of a limited de-escalatory agreement was submerged beneath accusations of betrayal.

Then came Warsaw.

A peace designed to prevent peace

The Warsaw Security Forum’s 2026 report argues that Poland and the Nordic-Baltic countries should become principal architects of Europe’s future security order.

This is not yet official NATO or European Union policy. It is an advocacy report produced by the Casimir Pulaski Foundation with contributions from serving and former ministers, parliamentarians, diplomats, military figures and policy specialists. But it was launched in the Polish parliament, is being promoted across the region and is explicitly intended to shape government policy.

It must therefore be taken seriously.

Its proposed postwar order appears remarkably similar to Kyiv’s maximalist objectives. Sanctions against Russia should become effectively permanent. Dialogue must not be allowed to evolve into political normalisation. Russia must pay reparations. Frozen Russian assets should finance Ukraine’s reconstruction and integration into the European Union. Ukraine should be brought into both the EU and NATO.

These are not negotiating positions designed to meet an adversary somewhere between competing security interests. They are terms intended to formalise the permanent defeat, isolation and punishment of one party.

Whatever one thinks Russia deserves, Moscow will not voluntarily sign a settlement whose purpose is to preserve every mechanism of economic warfare, place Ukraine inside NATO and extend the strategic confrontation into Russian territory itself.

A peace proposal that no Russian government could accept is not a path towards peace. It is a justification for continuing the war.

The Kaliningrad gambit

The most dangerous proposal concerns Kaliningrad.

The report reportedly argues that an eventual settlement should include the demilitarisation of this Russian exclave, describing it as a strategic vulnerability within range of European missiles.

Kaliningrad is not occupied Ukrainian territory. It is internationally recognised Russian territory containing major military installations and serving as Russia’s principal strategic position on the Baltic Sea. Introducing its demilitarisation into negotiations over Ukraine transforms the prospective settlement from an attempt to end one war into an effort to restructure Russia’s defences under Western pressure.

Moscow has already warned that an attempt to isolate Kaliningrad could trigger the use of its entire arsenal, including nuclear weapons.

Such warnings are dangerous and coercive. But they cannot responsibly be ignored while European strategists discuss closing the Baltic Sea, neutralising Kaliningrad and striking the systems that support Russian military operations.

Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna recently stated that NATO could close Russia’s Baltic “lifeline” within hours if Moscow attacked the alliance. His statement was conditional upon Russian aggression, not a proposal for an immediate peacetime blockade. Yet describing the ability to create an “existential” crisis for a nuclear-armed state is hardly the language of cautious deterrence.

When each side openly discusses imposing existential danger upon the other, the distance between deterrence and catastrophe becomes dangerously short.

Manufacturing an Article 5 pathway

The report also recommends that sustained hybrid attacks should potentially be treated as an Article 5 contingency even when no single incident would justify activating NATO’s collective-defence clause.

This proposal could transform ambiguity into a pathway to war.

Cyberattacks, disinformation, sabotage, electoral interference, damaged undersea cables and unidentified drones are serious matters. Some have been credibly attributed to Russia. Others remain disputed, incompletely investigated or supported principally by intelligence assessments that cannot be independently examined.

Combining multiple uncertain incidents does not automatically produce certainty.

Yet the proposed doctrine would allow governments to aggregate a series of individually insufficient events until a political threshold for collective military action had been reached. Attribution could become cumulative. Suspicion could become evidence. Events that do not individually constitute an armed attack could collectively be treated as one.

This is especially dangerous when diplomatic relations have been reduced, military communication is weak and political leaders face incentives to attribute every unexplained incident to the same adversary.

Article 5 was designed to deter unmistakable armed aggression. Transforming it into a response to an accumulating cloud of “hybrid” activity risks creating a mechanism through which governments can slide into war without any single decision or event appearing to have caused it.

From online claims to physical attacks

Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius went further, publicly suggesting that Zelensky should strike more Russian data centres to protect European elections from interference.

That statement should have caused outrage.

Data centres can support government operations, military activity and propaganda. They also provide ordinary civilian and commercial services. The claim that recent attacks significantly reduced Russian influence operations has itself been challenged by specialists who say the internet-traffic evidence has been misinterpreted.

Nevertheless, a European head of government casually advocated additional physical attacks inside Russia as a response to alleged information operations.

This illustrates the elasticity of hybrid warfare. Suspected online interference becomes grounds for kinetic strikes. Those strikes provoke Russian retaliation. The retaliation is then presented as another hybrid attack, supporting stronger NATO responses.

Escalation becomes self-justifying.

Deterrence without diplomacy

NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Alexus Grynkewich, used the Warsaw meeting to outline his “Theory of Victory.”

He promised that NATO would block, blunt and break any attack against an ally, striking not merely the attacking force but everything that supports, sustains and controls it. In formal military terms, this is a defensive doctrine. It does not amount to an explicit endorsement of attacks on Russian civilians. But its possible target set is extraordinarily broad.

Russian command centres, logistics networks, communications infrastructure and dual-use systems may also support nuclear forces. Striking them during a rapidly escalating conflict could be interpreted in Moscow as preparation to disable Russia’s capacity to retaliate.

The danger does not lie simply in NATO preparing to defend its members. Every alliance must plan for defence. It lies in combining expansive military doctrines with disappearing diplomatic channels, ambiguous thresholds and political demands that leave the adversary no acceptable path towards normalization.

Deterrence without diplomacy does not create stability. It creates two armed systems waiting for the other to make the mistake that confirms their worst assumptions.

The frontier becomes Europe’s centre

Poland and the Nordic-Baltic states have legitimate security concerns. Their geography, history and proximity to Russia understandably shape their threat perceptions. But proximity does not grant them the right to determine the acceptable level of risk for an entire continent.

The countries closest to a perceived threat may offer essential warnings. They may also possess the deepest historical fears, the strongest domestic incentives for confrontation and the least political room for compromise.

Making this group the principal architect of Europe’s relationship with Russia would place the states most sceptical of coexistence in charge of deciding whether coexistence may ever be attempted. That is not strategic balance. It is the regionalisation of fear into continental policy.

The larger European states would still retain formal influence. NATO decisions require political agreement, and neither Poland nor the Nordic-Baltic countries can independently activate Article 5 or impose their preferred settlement. But influence does not require formal control. It operates by defining the vocabulary through which every policy is judged.

Negotiation becomes appeasement. Normalisation becomes capitulation. Restraint becomes weakness. Escalation becomes deterrence. Permanent confrontation becomes peace. Once those definitions dominate the debate, governments may technically remain free to choose diplomacy while becoming politically unable to do so.

Sabotaging the American off-ramp

This is why Warsaw must be understood in the context of Trump’s initiative. The report positions Europe’s eastern and northern flank to resist any American-Russian arrangement that does not preserve maximal pressure on Moscow and guarantee Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership. It attempts to establish in advance the boundaries of an acceptable settlement—and those boundaries exclude the concessions that any negotiation would require.

Trump may respond by reducing American intelligence support, restricting weapons deliveries or negotiating directly with Moscow over European objections. If he does, European leaders will face an impossible contradiction.

They will promise to sustain Ukraine without the United States while lacking the intelligence, air-defence stocks, logistical systems and industrial capacity necessary to replace America quickly. They will demand greater military expenditure while social services, infrastructure and household security deteriorate. And they will ask increasingly sceptical citizens to pay more because Europe rejected the most visible attempt to explore an end to the conflict.

Europe may possess sufficient theoretical wealth to prolong the war. It does not possess unlimited political consent.

Every additional billion will compete with healthcare, pensions, housing, industrial renewal and public services. Every further mobilisation measure will deepen public anxiety. Every refusal to negotiate will strengthen parties that argue Brussels has placed its geopolitical ambitions above the welfare of its own citizens.

The home front will become the decisive front.

The road returns to catastrophe

The Warsaw meeting does not prove that all Europe is calling for war. It demonstrates something almost as dangerous: the European security debate is increasingly dominated by people who call permanent confrontation “peace,” escalation “deterrence” and the exclusion of diplomatic normalisation a prerequisite for security.

The carefully guarded dream of an off-ramp has therefore not merely encountered another delay. It has been struck deliberately.

Europe has returned to the dead-end street: more sanctions, more weapons, more attacks, more military exercises, more nuclear signalling and less diplomacy. The remaining distance between that dead end and catastrophe is becoming alarmingly short.

War is not yet inevitable. But Europe is systematically dismantling the mechanisms through which war might be prevented.

A sustainable peace cannot be built by demanding Russia’s permanent isolation, inserting Kaliningrad into the settlement, expanding the meaning of Article 5 and treating diplomatic normalisation as a security threat. Nor can it be built by demanding unilateral restraint from Ukraine while Russia continues attacking its infrastructure.

Peace requires reciprocity, verification, compromise and an acknowledgement that security cannot be achieved by making the other side permanently insecure.

Trump’s initiative may be imperfect, transactional and motivated by American self-interest. It may ultimately fail. But the responsible European response should have been to test it, improve it and insist upon reciprocal obligations. Instead, Europe’s hard-line security establishment is attempting to ensure that the opening closes.

If it succeeds, Europe will not have defended peace against appeasement. It will have rejected an uncertain road away from war in favour of a familiar road towards catastrophe—and then insisted that there was never another route.

***

Poland eases engagement rules for pilots guarding against Russia

Politico, 9/28/26

Poland plans to make it easier to shoot down objects violating its airspace, Deputy Minister of Defense Cezary Tomczyk announced on Monday [9/28].

The change would add to tensions between Warsaw and Moscow, which are already running high after Russia has tested Poland’s defenses with a number of aerial incursions in recent weeks.

Speaking to journalists in Dęblin, Poland, Tomczyk said that pilots now have to not only “read the radar,“ but also “visually identify” an aerial threat before engaging it. “This means that the pilot must fly up to the target and see what exactly the object is,” Tomczyk explained.

The Ministry of Defense now plans to cancel the “identification“ requirement. “After the changes, the pilot or operational commander will only need to read the radar to make a decision about the shot,” the Polish minister noted. The change will save time, which means that “Polish fighter jets will shoot down drones and missiles flying into us from the direction of Russia faster.“

On Sept. 23, a Russian Mi-8 helicopter briefly entered Polish airspace from Russia’s Kaliningrad region. It penetrated about 300 meters into Polish territory and remained there for 42 seconds. Poland scrambled fighter jets in response.

“The nature of the incident indicates that Russia is once again testing the readiness of our air defense,” The Operational Command of Poland commented on the occasion.

Poland has previously shot down Russian drones over its territory.

This time last year, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław said Poland would shoot down Russian jets if they breached Polish airspace, saying: “You have been warned.”

RT, 10/13/26

Russia’s campaign of large-scale strikes against Ukraine’s economic infrastructure, underway since August, appears to be producing political consequences as, in Kiev, the possibility of peace is once again being discussed, and not simply in terms of negotiations from a position of strength.

For perhaps the first time since the conflict began in 2022, some Ukrainian politicians are openly considering serious compromises with Moscow, including concessions previously regarded as politically unthinkable.

Remarkably, one of the most prominent voices in this emerging debate belongs to Alexei Goncharenko, a Ukrainian MP long associated with the most uncompromising wing of the country’s political establishment.

Until recently, Goncharenko treated virtually any compromise with Moscow as treason and his position was effectively that Ukraine should continue fighting regardless of the human cost.

On October 2, however, he published what amounted to a political manifesto acknowledging that Ukraine was losing and insisting that negotiations with Russia should begin wherever possible.

Nothing, he suggested, should be excluded from discussion, including neutrality, the removal of sanctions against Russia, the status of the Russian language, and other contentious issues because sacrificing an entire nation for the increasingly remote prospect of NATO membership was, in his view, unacceptable.

The reaction was immediate. Goncharenko was branded a Kremlin sympathizer, expelled from Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party and added to the ‘kill list’ database maintained by the controversial Ukrainian website Myrotvorets.

Yet he wasn’t entirely isolated because other political figures, including parliamentary committee chairman Daniil Getmantsev and Kharkov Mayor Igor Terekhov, have expressed positions suggesting a growing willingness to reconsider Ukraine’s approach and MP Anna Skorokhod also introduced legislation proposing neutrality.

For now, these politicians represent only a small minority of the Ukrainian establishment, therefore they possess neither the influence nor the institutional resources necessary to alter government policy.

Nevertheless, their emergence is significant as for the first time in years, an identifiable group within Ukrainian politics is openly challenging the prevailing assumption that the conflict must continue until Kiev achieves its stated objectives.

Previously, there was little meaningful political alternative, given how Zelensky’s principal rivals, including Poroshenko and former military commander Valery Zaluzhny, have offered different personalities and political styles, but little fundamental disagreement over the conflict itself.

The notable exception was Alexey Arestovich, the former presidential adviser who resigned in early 2023 and subsequently left Ukraine after he became an outspoken critic of Zelensky and advocated a different future for Ukraine, including some form of peaceful coexistence with Russia.

His proposals initially attracted limited support, while speculation about his presidential ambitions gradually faded.

Three years later, however, the political environment has changed considerably as successive Ukrainian counteroffensives, peace initiatives, and victory plans have failed to produce the results promised by Kiev. Meanwhile, forced mobilization, corruption scandals, and declining foreign military assistance have increased public frustration.

Dissatisfaction was accumulating, but largely remained private because for many Ukrainians living far from the eastern front, the war’s consequences, although serious, were still less immediate than those experienced in frontline regions.

Russia’s intensified air campaign against Ukraine’s energy and economic infrastructure since August has changed that calculation as disruptions to electricity, transport, and economic activity have brought the consequences of the conflict more directly into everyday life. It would be surprising if this had no effect on public attitudes.

In this respect, Goncharenko may simply have articulated concerns that were already becoming more widespread and the nervous reaction of Ukraine’s political hawks is particularly revealing. Rather than acknowledge that their own policies may have contributed to growing dissatisfaction, they have sought explanations involving Russian influence and political betrayal.

The fact that Goncharenko himself was previously among the most uncompromising supporters of the war makes his change of position especially uncomfortable for them and this presents a potential danger for Zelensky.

His continued hold on power rests partly on the argument that political leadership shouldn’t change during wartime, even as the prolonged suspension of normal electoral politics raises increasingly difficult constitutional questions.

But if discussion of peace becomes more widespread, it may eventually lead Ukrainians to question whether the present leadership is capable of delivering it.

The familiar argument against changing horses in midstream loses some of its force when people begin to suspect that the horse can’t reach the opposite bank, but for the moment, however, any suggestion of an imminent political transformation would be premature.

Ukraine’s emerging peace camp remains politically weak and far from achieving the influence necessary to challenge the government, also is there no guarantee that public frustration will translate into an organized political movement.

As long as the existing leadership retains control of the principal state institutions, the security apparatus, and much of the political agenda, fundamental changes in Kiev’s approach remain unlikely.

Nevertheless, something important has happened because arguments that were once confined largely to private conversations are beginning to appear in public political debate.

Whether this develops into a genuine challenge to Zelensky remains uncertain, but the political monopoly enjoyed by advocates of continuing the conflict is, at least, beginning to face open dissent.

This article was first published by the online newspaper Gazeta.ru and was translated and edited by the RT team:

https://www.gazeta.ru/comments/column/articles/23670835.shtml

By Tom Stevenson, London Review of Books, 10/8/26

If Russia Wins: A Scenario 
by Carlo Masala, translated by Olena Ebel and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp.
Atlantic, 120 pp., £9.99, August 2025, 978 1 80546 574 4

Atlantic Resolve: The War for Estonia 
by Thomas Newman and John Pierson.
Amazon, 224 pp., £7.55, March 2025, 9798313464589

At Narva​ in north-east Estonia, Hermann Castle, a reconstructed Teutonic fort, sits directly opposite Ivangorod Fortress on the Narva river. The two castles are only about 150 metres apart, but between them lies the border between Nato territory and Russia. In the 18th century the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia began at Narva. The German empire and the Bolsheviks fought there in 1918. Next to the affronting fortifications there is a modern road bridge built by the Soviet Union in the late 1950s to replace an older bridge blown up first by the retreating Red Army in 1941 and again by the retreating German army in 1944. It is still called Most Druzhby, the friendship bridge, though recently druzhba has been in short supply. Russia closed the bridge to cars in 2024 and last year metal gates were erected on the Estonian side.

Narva, a mostly Russian-speaking border town inside the European Union on the main road from Tallinn to St Petersburg, might have been dreamed up as the perfect location for a conflict between Russia and the West. Since the failure of Ukraine’s counter-offensive in 2023, there has been plenty of conjecture about future wars with Russia, and Narva has been one of the places earmarked as a potential Sudetenland. Earlier this year, a group on the Telegram app called ‘Narva People’s Republic’ began posting fantasy descriptions of a pro-Russia militia taking over the city and declaring a breakaway people’s republic along the lines of the Luhansk People’s Republic, formally annexed in 2022. The Telegram group attracted dozens of articles about Russian hybrid threats to Estonia and was briefly a cause of concern in European security circles. But the Narva People’s Republic was an obvious hoax. There was no embryonic separatist movement organising online.

Another imagined Narva is at the centre of Carlo Masala’s book, or ‘scenario’, about a future Russian invasion of Nato territory. Masala, a professor at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich and an occasional commentator on security matters for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, opens his story in 2028. Ukraine has been forced to sign an unequal peace with Russia that includes handing over slabs of land in eastern Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky has resigned and Ukraine has been ‘plunged into chaos’. Vladimir Putin has resigned too – though in his case in the wake of victory – and been replaced by President Obmanshchikov (a name with an echo of the Russian obmanshchik, ‘deceiver’). In Europe, far-right political parties celebrate. Worst of all, the US pulls large numbers of troops out of Europe and packs them off to East Asia. The time is ripe for the Kremlin to plot its next move, which turns out to be an occupation of Narva.

The opening scene is not set in Narva, however, but in Mali. A group of civilians is captured and driven somewhere in North Africa to be put on boats heading to Europe. The intention is to draw Germany into moving its frigates from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean in anticipation of another migrant crisis. Xi Jinping has agreed to create a diversion by landing men on the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea, which causes the government of the Philippines to ask the US to send in an aircraft carrier. Russian forces move on Narva under the pretext of protecting the rights of Russian speakers. When news arrives that the Russian army has crossed into Estonia, Nato is in disarray. Unlike in 2022, US intelligence doesn’t know what’s going on even after it has started, let alone before.

Nato faces a big decision: should it assemble forces to repel the attack? And if so, who will die for Narva? A Russian diplomat visits the White House to argue that Washington surely can’t care all that much about a small Estonian town. Meanwhile, a Russian nuclear-armed submarine surfaces in the strait between Greenland and Canada. The US president – unnamed, but presumably Trump in his final year in office – is happy to let the Russians have their way. Poland, the UK and the Baltic states are gung-ho about pushing Russia out of Estonia but Southern European countries are reluctant to fight. Without the US, some Nato states argue, they can’t defend themselves from Russia’s ballistic missiles. Public opinion is against another war with Russia. To make matters worse, ‘high-ranking Western politicians’ keep pointing out the complexity of Eastern European history. So the transatlantic alliance that ‘guaranteed peace, freedom and economic prosperity’ is revealed to be a sham. Putin and Lukashenko appear at a ceremonial public event where Obmanshchikov declares the ‘return’ of Narva to the Russian Federation. Xi thinks that ‘Chinese domination of the world is within reach.’

Though it is presented as the kind of scenario planning that goes on in military staff offices – imagining plausible futures and drawing up strategies – Masala’s approach is closer to that of a television scriptwriter imagining Nato meetings. Mr Secretary General, might the military commanders be allowed to give their assessments? ‘Gentlemen, please.’ Wise army officers are ignored by foolish political leaders. Russia is crafty and pitiless. The EU is impotent and the US brash and unlettered. Russian rearmament is an obvious sign of impending aggression, whereas European rearmament is prudent deterrence. The book’s reception was predictably positive – it was Alastair Campbell’s book of the year for 2025 – thanks to its irresistible offer of conventional wisdom dressed up as provocation. ‘What makes Masala’s scenario so compelling – and unnerving’, the New Statesman said, is that ‘it is so plausible.’

Masala wrote the book as a protest against the idea of a ceasefire in the Ukraine war. For him, the underlying problem is the weakness of European societies, which he believes are unwilling to ‘consistently face down Russia’. Apart from Poland and the Baltic states – classed as ‘resilient’ societies – Masala’s Europe refuses to notice that it is being attacked by Russian ‘hybrid warfare’. Western Europeans are even opposed to reintroducing universal conscription. This is why, despite the relatively negative picture of Washington he presents, Masala wants US forces to remain in Europe. The true enemies are at home, on both sides of European politics, whether victims of Russian disinformation or simply traitors (in Germany, as in Britain, critical perspectives on national security matters are often suspected to be foreign influence operations). The great fear of a Russian victory in Ukraine is not the price paid by Ukraine but the potential fracturing of the holy transatlantic alliance.

In an afterword to the book, Masala takes aim at ‘fearmongers’ in the West who insist on taking into account Russia’s thousands of thermonuclear weapons. It goes unmentioned that in 2022 US intelligence assessed that there was a 50 per cent chance Russia would use nuclear weapons if it started losing in Ukraine. Masala’s prescription is to ignore that possibility and subject European societies to the usual conservative medicine of increased military budgets and lower social spending. As usual there is no consideration of whether this reallocation of resources might destroy what it claims to preserve.

Masala’s book isn’t the only recent example of war fiction designed to raise the alarm about Russia. In their self-published Atlantic Resolve, John Pierson and Thomas Newman, two US army veterans, imagine a similar invasion of Estonia. In their narrative, the Ukraine war ended in an unstable ceasefire forced on Zelensky by the US. As in Masala’s scenario, Putin is removed from the picture (he succumbs to a stroke offstage) and is replaced by Igor Belov, the owner of a Russian arms company that profited handsomely from the war. The West has made an ‘overall pivot to isolationism’: the US has reduced troop levels in Europe and Germany is again buying Russian gas. Seizing the opportunity, Belov lights on a plan to use Estonia to break ‘Nato’s hold over our rightful sphere’.

The operation is launched in February 2033, when the handful of US soldiers stationed in Estonia have their plans to visit the saunas of Tallinn thwarted by the arrival of 300,000 Russian troops. Russia calculates that the US won’t care enough about Estonia to fight, but it has underestimated American mettle. The Europeans come off worse. Baltic leaders are brave and clear-sighted but subject to forces beyond their control (‘It is fortunate,’ a cackling FSB chief remarks, ‘that the Nato governments with the most foresight are often the weakest’). The UK, ‘always competent and reliable’, agrees to send four thousand paratroopers to Tallinn but they will take too long to arrive. Germany and France decline to commit troops and the Hungarian prime minister thinks Estonia deserves to be invaded.

As in the Masala scenario, Russia envisions a bloodless coup de main. Instead, US ground forces make quick work of the first wave of Russian soldiers and then dig in to stall the invasion until help can arrive. The US president orders a huge airlift of troops and equipment to Europe in ‘the greatest display of logistical prowess the modern world had ever seen’. The war is won through the grit of individual American heroes, who hold the line until the cavalry arrives in the form of the US air force, which beats back Russia’s air support and wipes out its missile defence network. The rest of Nato (except Hungary, Turkey and Slovakia) is heartened by an unambiguous display of American power and joins the fight to hand Russia a humiliating defeat.

Pierson and Newman have lifted their title from the name of a US-led military operation launched in 2014 and still ongoing: Operation Atlantic Resolve was designed to bolster Nato’s eastern flank following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The title gives the game away when it comes to the book’s tone and style, as does the back cover, imprinted with le drapeau de l’OTAN. ‘The Russians’ emerge from the snow as manifestations of the malicious world-soul, an ‘alien race’ of starvers and plunderers. You can detect the influence of social media discourse about the Ukraine war: in English, Ukrainians often use the term ‘orc’ to refer to Russians (in Ukrainian, a homophobic slur is more common). ‘Can’t they just be normal?’ a US private asks. A fellow soldier explains: ‘This kind of shit is pretty much the story of Russian history.’

At its core the book is a fantasy of American salvation of Europe. Whatever strife might exist in Congress about riding to the old world’s rescue, in the end the US president chooses to scramble the F-35s. Russia’s army of professional orcs is ruthless, but no match for the Americans. The Russian president stages an ICBM test with a nuclear warhead, but after that the threat of nuclear weapons recedes. Better to have a straightforward story of American soldiers driving Russia from the field than a bloody stalemate in the devastated bocage of eastern Ukraine.

Successive​ Estonian governments have worked to present the country as one of the success stories of the post-Soviet world – a pioneer of ‘e-residency’, flat taxes and cybersecurity conferences. Yet the country now finds itself the backdrop for the imaginings of sympathetic war-fi writers. Estonian politicians aren’t delighted about this. The former president Kersti Kaljulaid politely dismissed Masala’s Narva scenario as unhelpful. Estonia has tried to be the most pliable of US allies. It supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, is reflexively pro-Israel and was quick to endorse the US-Israeli attack on Iran. Apparently that’s no protection against lurid portrayals of national disaster.

The war-fi phenomenon may seem puerile, but these books are only embellishments of the dire warnings about Russia regularly relayed in national newspapers. In February, the minister of defence for the Netherlands, Ruben Brekelmans, predicted that Russia would be in a position to move large numbers of troops towards Nato’s borders within a year. British generals, both retired and in uniform, continue to make similar statements. The idea that Russia, despite being bogged down in Ukraine, is already considering another adventure further north isn’t wholly unsupported: its military has repeatedly violated the airspace of the Baltic states and Poland (sometimes with drones, occasionally with MiGs and Tupolevs). But these incursions are invariably met with an air policing response from Nato.

Newspapers also like to report on more elaborate hypotheticals. Die Welt recently published the results of a war game conducted by the Helmut-Schmidt University of the German Armed Forces, in which ‘Russia’, under the pretext of a humanitarian crisis in Kaliningrad, successfully seized Marijampole in Lithuania with 15,000 troops. These results attracted a lot of attention, though no one mentioned that the point of publicising war games in the media is to lend credibility to political arguments. War games are useful for staff training, and for testing plans under the harsh light of hostile review. Military staffs around the world are fond of them and participants seem to find them very diverting. But their outcomes are heavily influenced by their starting assumptions and by the prejudices of participants about the way putative adversaries think. Some are straightforwardly designed to be lost, with Western forces defeated: an effective basis on which to campaign for increased military spending.

The current trend for war games springs from the same source as the taste for ‘plausible’ war-fi. Over the past year, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington has conducted more than seventy war games simulating Chinese blockades and invasions of Taiwan, yielding the remarkable discovery that there would be large numbers of casualties and that a ‘Ukraine strategy’ – in which the US supplies Taiwan but doesn’t join the fight – would not work on water. Last year, Sky News and Tortoise produced a radio series, The Wargame, which simulated a Russian attack on Britain, conducted for mysterious reasons, that was principally a vehicle for bemoaning Britain’s missing military capabilities. The series has now been remade as a TV documentary starring Michael Gove, Nicola Sturgeon and Christopher Steele.

In light of admonitions that it is once again 1938 in Europe, it’s worth noting that the official assessment of Nato intelligence agencies is that Russia is not in a position to attack any Nato country. American intelligence has briefed about the possibility of a cyber attack, or even a ‘limited incursion’ into Nato territory in the next few years. But in June the supreme allied commander Europe, General Alexus Grynkewich, was asked about the risk of war in the Baltics. ‘I’ve watched the intelligence very closely,’ he said. ‘Russia is not looking for a conflict.’ Yet as long as the war in Ukraine continues, the risk of a larger war in Europe remains. From Russia’s perspective, Nato is financing and supplying the destruction of Russian army units in Ukraine and is providing intelligence and communications networks that allow for Ukrainian strikes inside Russia. Despite the risk of a general war it would entail, Russia could decide to attack Nato on a different front. But Nato security types often want to have it both ways: should Russia win in Ukraine, we’re told, it will be more likely to attack the Baltic states; yet when Russia gets bogged down in eastern Ukraine and struggles even to seize small towns in the Donbas, we’re told that this too increases the chances of further adventures.

The strength of these fictional accounts is that they accurately depict the frontier between Europe and Russia as being in an unstable equilibrium. In the long term, Russia is clearly a military threat to the Baltic states, though no longer to Poland. But the war-fi accounts all conveniently ascribe this to dynamics endogenous to Russia, which figures as a metastasising cancer for which one is either prepared or not. The risk of war derives from the existence, or non-existence, of Obmanshchikov or Belov or Putin. Put aside the fact that Baltic governments haven’t always been models of defensive restraint themselves (in May, Lithuania’s foreign minister, Kestutis Budrys, threatened to ‘show the Russians that we are capable of breaking into their little fortress that they have built in Kaliningrad’). Is it credible that no responsibility for the tensions lies with Nato’s own actions, or for that matter with the original decision to extend the American empire in Europe to an unsustainable point? And is there no better solution than a very long militarised border secured by elaborate demonstrations of commitment to small Eastern European towns?

Since April 2025, Germany has stationed its 45th Panzer brigade in Lithuania. By 2035 Germany plans to nearly double the size of its military forces and become ‘the strongest conventional army in Europe’. Polish rearmament continues. But the paradigm is still defined by the American military presence in Europe. In early May, the US caused a brief panic when it said it would withdraw five thousand troops from Germany. But days later Trump announced that an additional five thousand soldiers would be sent to Poland. The Pentagon is currently conducting a review of the US military posture in Europe, which has security officials in Brussels on edge. But the current National Defence Authorisation Act, signed by Trump in December, mandates that the US must keep at least 76,000 troops deployed across the continent, at least for now. Last July, the Pentagon significantly increased the number of B61-12 tactical nuclear bombs stationed in European bases.

In 2024, the defence ministers of the Baltic states announced a joint plan to set up a 1600-kilometre line of ‘anti-mobility installations’ along the borders with Russia and Kaliningrad. Dragons’ teeth, anti-tank ditches and bunkers wouldn’t be enough to prevent a ground invasion but they might buy a little time. In June, Poland lodged a request with Washington that a permanent US military base be established in the country (in addition to the existing US army garrison at Poznan). Last spring, Poland, Finland and the Baltic states all announced they would withdraw from the Ottawa Treaty, which bans anti-personnel landmines. Estonia has adopted an approximation of the Finnish conscription model with mandatory military service for young men, though in practice there are plenty of indefinite deferments on offer. Latvia reintroduced conscription in 2023 against the preferences of its defence ministry and most of its Russian-speaking minority. Poland, having wasted some money on a frigate in the Baltic Sea, is now talking of developing ‘nuclear potential’. In February the Estonian foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, said the prospect of deploying Nato nuclear weapons on its territory should not be ruled out.

An obvious objection to the war-fi genre is that there are quite enough wars to be getting on with without inventing fictional ones. Most of them are started by a country that the genre doesn’t consider dangerous. There is no market for a book titled ‘If America Wins’, or for a fictional account of how the most aggressive state in the world, if finally successful in Iran, will feel emboldened to take on Cuba and Greenland (should the latest deal to site two US bases there fall through, or fail to satisfy Trump’s appetite). Rather than writing about real aggression conducted or facilitated by the state of which you’re a citizen, you can always tell stories about imaginary aggression by designated enemies. What would we think of Russian authors writing fictional scenarios of American aggression that are really veiled political arguments for diverting more resources to Russian security forces? We might hope that instead they would oppose their own government’s criminal aggression and, to whatever extent possible, advocate for efforts to reduce the risk of catastrophe.