By Ian Proud, Substack, 10/22/25

President Trump’s latest about face on dialogue with Russia doesn’t change the fundamental predicament Europe finds itself in: unable to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia but unwilling to face the political consequences of ending the war in Ukraine.

The Budapest Summit between Trump and Putin is now off, it seems. European leaders and Zelensky have clearly sold the US President on the idea of entering a ceasefire along the current line of contact. Yet, caught between a rock and a hard place, European leaders continue to deny the obvious realities of the dire situation in Ukraine, which will only worsen over time. I see no evidence of any willingness to change course, despite the obvious political hazard they face and the increasingly grim forecast for Europe and for Ukraine should they continue to push an unwinnable war.

The war in Ukraine is now entirely dependent on the ability of European states to pay for it at a cost of at least $50bn per year, on the basis of Ukraine’s latest budget estimate for the 2026 fiscal year. Ukraine itself is bankrupt and has no access to other sources of external capital, beyond that provided by the governments sponsoring the ongoing war.

That then brings the conversation back to the creation of a so-called ‘reconstruction loan’ underwritten by $140bn of the Russian foreign exchange assets currently frozen in Belgium. The term ‘reconstruction loan’ is itself disingenuous, on the basis that any expropriated Russian assets would not be used for reconstruction, but rather to fund the Ukrainian war effort. Indeed. Chancellor Merz of Germany recently suggested that the fund could allow Ukraine to keep fighting for another three years.

The most likely scenario, in the terrible eventuality that war in Ukraine did continue for another three years is that the Russian armed forces would almost certainly swallow up the whole of the Donbass region – comprising Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. This – Ukraine’s departure from the Donbas – appears to be the basis of President Putin’s conditions for ending the war now, together with a Ukrainian declaration of neutrality and giving up any NATO aspirations. More likely, the Russian Armed forces might also capture additional swathes of land in Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts, and also in Dnipropetrovsk, where they have made recent incursions.

So, there is a strong likelihood, at the currently slow pace of the war effort in which Russia claims small pieces of land on a weekly basis, that three years from now Ukraine would have to settle for a peace that was even more disadvantageous to it than that which is available now, having lost more land, together with potentially hundreds of thousands of troops killed or injured.

Logically, European policymakers would be able to look into the future to see this grim predicament with clear eyes and encourage Zelensky to settle for peace now.

But European policy is driven by two key considerations. Firstly, an emotional belief that an extended war might so weaken Russia that President Putin was forced to settle on unfavourable terms. The idea of a strategic defeat of Russia – which is often spoken by European politicians – however, doesn’t bear serious scrutiny.

Russia doesn’t face the same considerable social and financial challenges that Ukraine faces. Its population is much larger and a wider conscription of men into the Armed forces has not been needed – Russia can recruit sufficient new soldiers to fight and, indeed, has increased the size of its army since 2022. Ukraine continues to resort to forced mobilisation of men over the age of 25, often using extreme tactics that involve busifying young men against their will from the streets.

Critically, Russia could likely continue to prosecute the war on the current slow tempo for an extended period of time without the need for a wider mobilisation of young men, which may prove politically unpopular for President Putin domestically. Yet, the longer the war continues, Ukraine will come under increasing pressure, including from western allies, to deepen its mobilisation to capture young men below the age of 25 to shore up its heavily depleted armed forces on the front line.

There has been considerable resistance to this so far within Ukraine. Mobilising young men above the age of 22 would prove unpopular for President Zelensky but it would also worsen Ukraine’s already catastrophic demographic challenge: 40% of the working age population has already been lost, either through migration or through death on the front line and that number will continue to go south, the longer the war carries on.

Russia’s financial position is considerably stronger than Ukraine’s. It has very low levels of debt at around 15% of GDP and maintains a healthy current account surplus, despite a narrowing of the balance in the second quarter of 2025. Even if Europe expropriates its frozen assets, Russia still has a generous and growing stock of foreign exchange reserves to draw upon, which recently topped $700bn for the first time.

Russia’s military industrial complex continues to outperform western suppliers in the production of military equipment and munitions. In the currently unlikely event that Russia started to fall into the red in terms of its trade – what commentators in the west refer to as destroying Russia’s war economy – it would still have considerable scope to borrow from non-western lenders, given the strength of its links with the developing world, aided by the emergence of BRICS.

Ukraine is functionally bankrupt because it is unable to borrow from western capital markets, on account of its decision to pause all debt payments. With debt expected to reach 110% in 2025, even before consideration of any loan backed by frozen Russian assets, it depends entirely on handouts from the west. Ukraine’s trade balance has continued to worsen throughout the war, reinforcing its dependence on capital injections from the west to keep its foreign exchange reserves in the black.

So while the determination of Ukraine to fight is unquestionable, the emotional belief in the west that this will overcome the enormous social and economic challenges the country faces in an extended attritional war with Russia is wildly misplaced.

So, let’s look at the rational explanation for Europe’s continued willingness to prolong the fight in Ukraine. The uncomfortable truth is that Europe’s political leaders have boxed themselves into this position because of a hard boiled determination not to concede to Russia’s demands in any peace negotiations. Indeed, there is a steadfast and immovable objection to talking to Russia at all, which has been growing since 2014.

However, across much of Europe, the political arithmetic is turning against the pro-war establishment with nationalist, anti-war parties gaining ground in Central Europe, Germany, France, Britain and even in Poland. And despite so far fruitless overtures made by President Trump towards negotiation with President Putin, Trumpophobia provides another brake on the European political establishment shifting its position.

So, changing course now and entering into direct negotiations with Russia would have potentially catastrophic consequences, politically, for European leaders, which they must surely be aware of. A full 180 degree change in diplomatic course by Europe would require an acceptance that the war against Russia was unwinnable, and that Russia’s underlying concerns – namely Ukrainian neutrality – would finally have to be accepted as a political reality.

On this basis, European politicians would face the prospect of explaining to their increasingly sceptical voters that their strategy of defeating Russia had failed, having spent four years of war saying at all times that it would eventually succeed. And that would lead potentially to internationalist governments falling across Europe starting in two years when Poland and France will again go to the polls, and in 2029 when the British and German governments will face the voters.

There are deeper issues too. An end of war would accelerate the process of admitting Ukraine into the European Union with potentially disastrous consequences for the whole financial basis of Europe. The European Commission will face the prospect of accepting that a two-tier Europe is inevitable, admitting Ukraine as a member without the financial benefits received by existing member states; for probably understandable reasons, this would cause widespread resentment within Ukraine itself, having sacrificed so much blood to become European, precipitating widespread internal dissent and possibly conflict in a disgruntled country with an army of almost one million. Alternatively, the European Commission would need to redraw its budget and face huge resistance from existing Member States, who would lose billions of Euros each year in subsidies to Ukraine. And the truth is that it will in all likelihood be unable to do so.

Caught between hoping for a strategic defeat of Russia which any rational observer can see is unlikely, and accepting the failure of their policy, causing a widespread loss of power and huge economic and political turmoil, Europe’s leaders are choosing to keep calm and carry on. If they had any sense, the likes of Von der Leyen, Merz, Starmer or Macron would change tack and pin their hopes on explaining away their failure before the political tide in Europe evicts them all from power. But I see no signs of them having the political acumen to do that. So we will continue to sit and wait, while storm clouds grow ever darker over Europe.

Euronews, 10/29/25

Three days after announcing a test of the nuclear-powered Burevestnik missile, Moscow said on Wednesday it also tested Poseidon, a nuclear-capable underwater drone. The second nuclear weapon test in just a week comes as the talks with the US stalled over Moscow’s reluctance to ceasefire in Ukraine.

Russia has conducted a successful test of a new nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable underwater drone, known as Poseidon, President Vladimir Putin announced on Wednesday.

Describing it as a new weapon “which cannot be intercepted,” Putin said the drone has already been dubbed a “doomsday machine”.

Speaking at a Moscow hospital where he met the soldiers wounded in Russia’s war against Ukraine, Putin said the Poseidon drone was tried while running on nuclear power for the first time on Tuesday. He also described it as having “unmatched in speed and depth”.

The Russian president said the nuclear reactor that powers the Poseidon is “100 times smaller” than those on submarines, and the power of its nuclear warhead is “significantly higher than that of our most advanced Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile.”

“For the first time, we managed not only to launch it with a launch engine from a carrier submarine, but also to launch the nuclear power unit on which this device passed a certain amount of time,” Putin said.

There was no independent confirmation that such a test took place.

What is Poseidon?

The Kremlin-affiliated media outlets claim that the Poseidon is designed to travel at up to 200 kilometres per hour.

Known in NATO as “Kanyon”, and formerly labelled “Status-6” by Moscow, the drone is 20 metres long, 1.8 metres in diameter and weighs 100 tonnes, according to Russian media outlets.

Moscow claims that with the nuclear power giving it an unlimited range, the drone’s speed and depth make it hard to locate.

Putin said the Poseidon’s power exceeded that of “even the most promising Sarmat intercontinental-range missile,” the so-called SS-X-29, or Satan II.

The Poseidon is one of six new arms — dubbed “super weapons” — the Russian president mentioned in his 2018 state-of-the-nation address.

Russian media reported that the Poseidon was designed to explode near coastlines and unleash a powerful radioactive tsunami.

Nuclear arms race instead of diplomatic talks

Since announcing the six, including the Poseidon and Burevestnik in 2018, Putin has described the super arsenal as a response to the US strategy to build a missile defence shield.

Last Sunday, Putin announced that Russia tested its “unique” Burevestnik nuclear-ready cruise missile, which the Kremlin described as part of efforts to “ensure the country’s national security”.

Together with Russia’s nuclear drills last week, the Burevestnik test over the past weekend and now the Poseidon test just a few days later, is widely seen as a further message to Washington, following Putin’s words last week, when he stated Moscow will not cave under US sanctions and pressure.

US President Donald Trump has called the Burevestnik test announcement “not appropriate”, noting also that Moscow is aware that the US has a nuclear submarine deployed “right off their shore”.

“(Putin) should get the war ended. A war that should have taken a week is now soon in its fourth year. That’s what he should do instead of testing missiles”, Trump said on Monday.

***

Russia Matters, 10/27/25

Vladimir Putin’s announcement of the successful tests of Russia’s nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable Burevestnik missile “constitutes his first serious nuclear saber rattling since Mr. Trump returned to office in January,” said Hanna Notte of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, according to The New York Times. Putin’s announcement Oct. 26 has not surprised analysts, but is still a cause for concern, NYT reports. According to Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at Middlebury College, Burevestnik is “a tiny flying Chernobyl… It is one more science fiction weapon that is going to be destabilizing and hard to address in arms control,” NYT reports. However, analysts do question the game-changing capability of the Burevestnik. “It’s not a terribly useful system,” said Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based analyst of Russian nuclear forces, according to NYT. Readers may recall that in 1957, the USSR launched a rudimentary satellite—the first manmade object in space—called Sputnik. Like Sputnik, Burevestnik’s real impact may be in stimulating a U.S. and allied arms race rather than actually shifting the balance of power between nuclear-capable rivals.*

RT, 10/14/25

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky would be defeated in a presidential vote by military intelligence chief Kirill Budanov as well as former armed forces commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny, a new poll has suggested.

Zelensky has repeatedly ruled out holding elections in the country, citing martial law imposed due to the conflict with Russia.

According to a survey released on Monday, conducted by the Kiev-based pollster RATE1 among 1,200 respondents in early October, Zelensky’s political viability continues to wane.

In a scenario pitting Zelensky directly against Budanov, 33% of respondents favored the military intelligence chief as opposed to 32.5% for Zelensky.

In a head-to-head between Zelensky and Zaluzhny, 42.6% of voters said they would back the retired general, who is now serving as Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, while only 26.3% would support the incumbent leader. A direct race between Zaluzhny and Budanov would give the former a decisive lead, with 44.5% to 22%.

In a broader first-round scenario featuring multiple candidates, Zelensky would still lead among decided voters but with less than one-third of total support, the survey indicated.

Zelensky’s presidential term expired last year, but he remains in power under martial law. The Ukrainian Constitution mandates that presidential authority should transfer to the parliamentary speaker under such circumstances. Russia has said Zelensky is illegitimate.

Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump called the Ukrainian leader a “dictator without elections.” Speculation in the media suggests that Zelensky’s team is quietly preparing for a potential return to the polls, even though he has suggested he would not seek reelection once the conflict with Russia is over.

Neither Zaluzhny nor Budanov has officially declared political ambitions, maintaining that the conflict with Russia must first be resolved.

By Seymour Hersh, Substack, 10/23/25

The battered Russian troops call it the “Horseshoe,” a brutally reinforced area in the hilly northern corner of the Donbas region that blocks the army’s entry from the east to the vast central plains of Ukraine—a path that could lead the Russian army, if it were able to overcome an expected counterattack, deep into central Ukraine and even theoretically to the outskirts of Kiev.

The Horseshoe is bloodied high ground and fortified by trenches, bunkers, and concrete barriers that have kept the Russian army at bay, at great cost in lives and materials. A well-informed American official told me that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, continues to urge his generals to do an all-out assault and take the area and give Putin what he wants to end the war: total control of the Donbas, which consists of two provinces—Donetsk and Luhansk—that are rich in coal, iron ore, lithium, titanium, and rare earth metals. And Russian history. Russian speakers make up 70 per cent of the region. Russia’s generals, I was told by the official, have so far refused to make another attack on the Horseshoe, citing prior failures, heavy casualties to combat soldiers, and destruction of their tanks and other heavy weapons.

With winter approaching, Putin will not be able to mount a ground offensive until spring and again seek to take all of Donbas, whose Ukrainian-controlled areas have been under heavy Russian drone and missile assault since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. Press reports of the most recent non-summit have emphasized that Putin agreed to freeze all combat along the rest of the front if he is granted control of all of Donbas. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, despite pressure from the United States, insisted, as he has throughout the history of peace talks with Russia, that he would not alter, as the US official put it to me, “his long-standing position to keep up the empty hope and objective of ‘taking back all of the Ukraine.’”

The irony, or “reality,” as the official put it, is that “Russia has been trying unsuccessfully to capture this sliver of territory for a year and failed with great loss of life by his troops without success.” Zelensky’s gambit, he added wryly, “Might work. Might not.”

The full article (behind a paywall) is available here.

By Alexander Hill & Ted Snider, Antiwar.com, 10/14/25

Alexander Hill is Professor in Military History at the University of Calgary, and editor of the outledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies published in February 2025, as well as other books and articles on Soviet and Russian military affairs including The Red Army and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and  The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.

“Ukraine,” U.S. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social on September 23, “is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back.”

He came to this completely revised conclusion apparently having been briefed on battlefield and economic conditions by U.S. officials, including Special Envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellog and Mike Waltz, who served very briefly as Trump’s National Security Advisor and is now the U.S. Ambassador to the UN. Coming out of those briefings, Trump was now convinced that Russia is “in BIG Economic trouble” and that “Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win.” His advisors stressed that Russia had not made significant territorial gains despite large-scale summer offensives.

After the revision in Trump’s assessment, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Trump now “clearly understands the situation and is well-informed about all aspects of this war.” But does he?

Trump now apparently thinks that Putin is vulnerable because Russia is in economic trouble, although it isn’t exactly clear what trouble Russia is in. The Russian government and central bank are certainly having to walk something of an economic tightrope, trying to lower inflation while not pushing the economy towards some sort of recession. Interest rates remain high, with the Russian Central Bank’s key rate at 17%, impacting consumer spending and investment. Inflation has, however, dropped to much more manageable levels than earlier in the war, and indeed than earlier this year.  Where inflation is now around 8%, it has been as high as just under 18% back in early 2022, still topping 10% earlier this year.

While Russian government plans to increase VAT to help fund the war may contribute to modest increases in inflation, the Russian Central Bank still expects inflation to be down to 6-7% by the end of the year. Lower inflation should allow for the cutting of interest rates. If all of this data was from a Western country it would be seen as positive, but there seems to be a determination on the part of some Western governments and observers to try to put a negative spin on any economic news out of Russia – regardless of what the news is.

Russia has weathered the harshest sanctions regime the West could muster. Russia has the fourth largest economy in the world when measured by purchasing-power parity, which is an assessment of the size of an economy adjusted for the cost of goods and services within it, and is a key measure used by the World Bank. Russia’s GDP growth continues to be more than respectable – currently still expected to be above 1% for 2025 even according to conservative figures. For the first time since the war began, the 2026 budget actually cuts military spending. Russia will officially spend 5.8% of GDP on defense spending. In comparison, Ukraine spends 34.48% of GDP on the military, the largest military burden in the world.

Russia may be facing some economic challenges, but Ukraine is undoubtedly in big trouble and is living hand to mouth. Ukraine has been, for some time, on the verge of economic collapse – and the IMF recently revealed that the situation is far worse than projected. Ukraine has received $145 billion in international aid since the war began, and they have a massive budget deficit they cannot pay. At this point the Ukrainian economy is essentially dependent on foreign assistance. While for the time being the EU currently seems content to carry on bailing Ukraine out, for how long that will last and whether it will be sufficient to keep Ukraine afloat remains to be seen.

The same negative trend for Ukraine is apparent not just for the money to fund the war, but for the troops to fight it. Even if Ukraine had all the money and weapons it needs to equip the war, it is running out of soldiers to fight it. By far the most serious shortage Ukraine is facing is manpower. Millions have left the country, hundreds of thousands have avoided the draft, and, worst of all, hundreds of thousands have been killed or seriously injured. Already by the end of 2023, a close aid to Zelensky had complained that, even if Ukraine had all the weapons they needed, they “don’t have the men to use them.” Two years later, the situation is very much worse.

By contrast, although Russian losses have also remained high, they have continued to be proportionally far lower than those of Ukraine given Russia’s much larger population. Last year, half a million Russians joined the military.  Although presented in a negative light in much of the Western press given that it represents a drop in recruitment, the Russian military continues to recruit significant numbers of new personnel: nearly 40,000 during the second quarter of 2025. Russian recruitment has certainly dropped, but there is limited evidence that Russia has been losing fewer troops during 2025 than 2024 while still maintaining pressure on Ukrainian forces.

And that raises another problem for Trump’s belief that Ukraine will “be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that!” Ukraine cannot win back all of its territory while it is on the defensive. Without going over to the offensive it will continue, bit by bit, to slowly lose more territory as it is now, while suffering losses that it can afford even less than Russia can. But with its manpower shortage, Ukraine is simply not likely to be capable of shifting to the offensive in any meaningful way. This war has taught both sides that to go on the offensive and push the other side back requires a significant local manpower advantage – something that shouldn’t have come as a surprise in a peer-peer war – and something that Ukraine is increasingly incapable of achieving.

Despite having caught Russian forces off guard in 2022 and having achieved local numerical superiority late that year, since then, when Ukraine has amassed resources to go over to the offensive, those offensive operations have ended badly.  The much-vaunted counteroffensive of the summer of 2023 squandered much equipment and many lives for little gain. The so-called ‘Kursk’ offensive of 2024 looked impressive for a while on a map, but the territory occupied by Ukrainian forces was of little military or economic value and soaked up better quality military units just to hold it. When it was finally recaptured by Russian forces, Ukraine lost many men and much equipment in an offensive operation that ultimately gained it little or nothing other than fleeting Western headlines. Zelensky’s potential rival and former head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, may have been point scoring when he recently suggested that the costs for Ukraine of the ‘Kursk’ offensive had been ‘too high’, but they were certainly losses in both men and materiel that Ukraine could ill afford.

Though Russian forces have not made decisive advances on the battlefield, recently they have been making gains more quickly than at any point in the war since early 2022. The increasingly thinly stretched Ukrainian frontline is becoming more porous and vulnerable with the danger of collapse still looming in the background. For the first time in years, the Russian armed forces recently broke through key defensive positions, and logistical hubs critical for the Ukrainian armed forces to supply their troops in the east have been partially infiltrated and all but surrounded, challenging the Ukrainian armed force’s ability to supply their troops on key sectors of the front. The briefings being given to Trump seem to omit the existential attrition of Ukrainian troops and weapons and the increasing pressure it is putting on their front lines.

There remains a naïve belief in much of the Western press and some government circles that the West can make up for Ukrainian weaknesses in terms of manpower with more weapons. However, currently cut off from the flow of American weapons, Ukraine is dependent on what it can produce for itself and what an economically troubled Europe can provide. That has left it depleted of weapons to prosecute the war and even more depleted of air defenses to defend it.

Russia, on the other hand, is, for the first time, producing more weapons than it needs to fight the war in Ukraine. It has doubled its production of artillery, drones, armored vehicles and tanks. No longer producing just what it needs, Russia is poised to restart arms exports in a meaningful way, with there being reports that Algeria may become the first foreign operator of the SU-57 aircraft by 2026, receiving 14 such aircraft during 2026-7.

And Russia is not just producing more weapons, it is producing improved weapons. Russia is passing Ukraine in the race for more sophisticated drones and more sophisticated ways of defending against drones. It is also using them in increasingly sophisticated ways that better co-ordinate with other arms. It has also upgraded its ballistic missiles to evade the best air defenses Ukraine has, including American made Patriot systems. Russian ballistic missiles now seem capable of performing last minute changes of course and dives that confuse Patriot interceptors. Ukraine air force data suggests that the Ukrainian armed forces now have a missile interception rate of only 6%. Russian missiles are eluding Ukraine’s air defenses and are hitting their targets. A report produced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency concludes that the Ukrainian armed forces are now “struggle[ing] to consistently use Patriot air defence systems to protect against Moscow’s ballistic missiles because of recent Russian tactical improvements.”

And there does not seem to be any magic bullet to reverse the trend. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked Trump for Tomahawk missiles. Trump is reportedly considering it. Tomahawk missiles have a range of 1,500 miles, putting targets deep within Russia, including the Kremlin, within range according to Zelensky.

There are a number of problems with Zelensky’s plan. The first is that the U.S. doesn’t have all that many such missiles itself – and recent use of its own missiles against Iran and Yemen highlights that they are a resource that the U.S. also needs. Pentagon budget data suggests that the US plans to buy only 57 such missiles in 2026.

The second problem is that Ukraine currently lacks any of the platforms capable of launching Tomahawk missiles. While some sort of jerry-rigged solution is not beyond the realms of possibility in the mid-longer term, the U.S. also has the Typhon missile system capable of firing Tomahawks, but the first U.S. systems are only just being deployed.

The third, and very dangerous, problem is that Ukraine is incapable of using Tomahawk missiles without U.S. assistance. The US has clearly been providing Ukraine with targeting information in the war to date, so providing such information wouldn’t be anything new. However, the amount of U.S. assistance that would be required to get Ukraine firing Tomahawk missiles into the depths of Russia would be considerable – and there couldn’t be any hiding it. Vladimir Putin has reportedly said recently that a decision to supply Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine “will ruin our relations [with the United States] or at least the emerging positive trend in these relations”.

Russia has faced increased Ukrainian capabilities in this regard before and has adapted. What makes the Tomahawk missile somewhat different than previous U.S. and European missile-related escalations in assistance to Ukraine is the fact that, although the U.S. doesn’t currently deploy nuclear Tomahawk missiles, the reintroduction of such a missile remains a possibility.

Rhetoric about Ukraine being in a position to take all of its land back and win the war will not change the reality on the battlefield: nor would a few Tomahawk missiles. They would, however, constitute yet another escalation in a war that sooner or later may run out of escalations. So far, as one of the authors of this piece predicted back in late 2022, those escalations have not led to an overwhelming advantage for either side in circumstances in which morale on both sides remains sustainable for the foreseeable future. If time is on either side, however, it is leaning more and more towards Russia for reasons that were to some extent foreseeable earlier in the war.

Western ‘hawks’ are now trying to hype up the need for another wave of escalation of Western assistance to Ukraine, ignoring the fact that, at some point, an escalation may be an escalation too far. They also often conveniently ignore the fact that not only Russians but also Ukrainians are still dying in their droves, but are still apparently willing to fight to the ‘last Ukrainian’ rather than accept realities and move towards the sort of peace that is viable.