Why Europe Still Can’t Decide What Winning in Ukraine Means

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): International Policy Digest

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/18

Taras Kuzio is a UK-based political scientist and one of the foremost international authorities on Ukraine and post-Soviet politics. His academic path spans a BA in Economics from the University of Sussex, an MA in Soviet and Eastern European Studies from the University of London, a PhD in Political Science from the University of Birmingham, and a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University. Over the years, he has held posts at major institutions, including the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Transatlantic Relations, and the NATO Information and Documentation Centre in Kyiv.

Kuzio has written and edited a wide body of work on Ukrainian nationalism, corruption, and the evolution of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. His most recent books—Putin’s War Against Ukraine: Revolution, Nationalism, and Crime, and Russia and Modern Fascism: New Perspectives on the Kremlin’s War Against Ukraine—build on decades of study into Kremlin ideology and Ukraine’s political trajectory.

Mark Temnycky is a Ukrainian-American analyst and journalist whose work centers on American, European, and Eurasian security affairs. He is a Nonresident Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a regular geopolitics contributor at Forbes. Before entering journalism full-time, he spent nearly seven years as a U.S. defense contractor supporting the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. His commentary and reporting appear across leading outlets and policy forums, and his portfolio of articles and media reflects a steady focus on Ukraine, European security, and transatlantic defense debates.

In this conversation, Kuzio and Temnycky examine whether Europe’s evolving long-war posture amounts to a coherent strategy. Their answer is ambivalent. They describe a continent fractured in its response: the Baltic states and Poland are rearming with urgency, while Germany and France move slowly and are encumbered by political and legal constraints. They argue that Western policy since 2014—rooted in misread signals from Moscow, misplaced fears about Ukrainian politics, and the aftershocks of Afghanistan—helped create conditions that encouraged Russian escalation.

Putin’s worldview, they contend, blends nineteenth-century imperial nostalgia with a modern authoritarian system built on corruption, mobilization, and public acquiescence. Meanwhile, the West still hesitates to articulate a clear goal of Ukrainian victory. Ukraine continues to innovate technologically, from drones to long-range strike systems, to raise the costs for Russia and compress the war’s timeline as 2026 nears. Yet both analysts note that time, political will, and a unified strategy remain the defining variables of the conflict’s next phase.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is Europe’s de facto long-war posture strategically coherent?

Taras Kuzio: It depends on how you define Europe. Is Europe the EU, or is it NATO?

Jacobsen: Yes, it’s the EU broadly, but NATO more specifically.

Mark Temnycky: Currently, as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia continues into what will soon reach its four-year anniversary in February, the Europeans have reacted slowly. Countries such as the Baltic States and Poland understand that, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they are next if the Ukrainians are unable to defeat the Russians. Those countries have bolstered their defenses and capabilities while maintaining stronger relations with Ukraine.

Countries such as the United States, Germany, and France have been slow to react and have imposed self-restrictions on Ukraine’s ability to strike back against Russia’s invasion. As President Trump completes his first year in office, and as President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and other senior officials in the Trump administration continue to push the Europeans to do more for Ukraine, the Europeans are increasingly realizing that they simply do not have the capability to supply Ukraine in a way that would also allow them to defend the European continent. That’s telling.

Everyone knows what has been happening over the last four years. Everyone knows what’s at stake and what’s necessary, but for some reason, the Europeans are not able to move at the pace they should be right now.

Kuzio: There’s a problem in talking about the term “Europeans,” because there isn’t really such a unified category. I say this as someone from Britain, because many countries in Europe do not care about the war in Ukraine—for example, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. And I say this as someone with an Italian mother: Italy has one of the biggest economies in Europe and spends hardly anything on defense. It’s somewhere near where Canada is.

Europe is a mixture of countries, and we have to take our hats off to Donald Trump. This is coming from someone who does not like Donald Trump, but because of his haranguing and threats, Europe has finally had to increase its defense spending. Europe was essentially free-riding on the United States, as Canada was for many years. Canada is among the bottom five NATO members in defense spending. That pressure has finally produced some results, with new targets of 3.5% defense spending and 1.5% related expenditures, for a total of 5%.

When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, only five NATO members were spending the required 2%. That did not include two of the Baltic states; only Estonia did. It has been a peculiar period. I would take it back to 2014, because between 2014 and 2021, European policy was a complete disaster—an utter disaster—which helped Russia prepare and launch its full-scale invasion. The Ukrainians are paying the price today for those terrible past policies.

In the U.S., this is not just about Republicans or Trump; it’s also about the Democrats. The last U.S. president to support Ukraine’s membership in NATO was George W. Bush. Obama, Biden, and Trump—so both Democrats and Republicans—have opposed Ukraine joining NATO. This has left Ukraine in a gray zone, which is a temptation for imperialist powers like Russia.

There’s also the current Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte. I say this as someone who lived in the Netherlands for 6 years—he was the Dutch Prime Minister before his current job, and during that time, he supported the construction of Nord Stream after 2014. Now he’s on a different wavelength, as it were, but where the hell—what the hell were they thinking before 2022?

Every Western country before 2022 opposed and vetoed sending weapons to Ukraine because they pretended it was in their interest to classify it as a civil war rather than Russian military aggression. That was their way of avoiding responsibility.

Regarding Europe, there are undoubtedly many positive developments since 2022. But why did it have to take a full-scale invasion? Why did it take Russia’s invasion for the EU to recognize Ukraine as a European country finally? This is the first time that the membership door has been opened to Ukraine—it happened in 2022.

In 2014, what was on offer was integration, not membership. So yes, there are positive aspects to this. The EU—or Europe, if we include the EU, the United Kingdom, and Norway—has provided more military, economic, and financial aid to Ukraine than the U.S., even under Biden.

In that sense, this has been very positive. The EU has also changed dramatically, with greater influence from Eastern Europe—the Baltic States, Finland, and Poland. The current foreign minister of the EU is Estonian, which is good because the Western Europeans were terrible. The French and Germans, in particular, were terrible.

To give you an example, I know Poroshenko well in Ukraine, and during the period from 2014 to 2021, the Western Europeans—and probably the U.S. as well—were telling Poroshenko to forget about Crimea. They said it was lost forever. Crimea was not included in the Minsk Agreements.

What changed fundamentally in 2022 was Russia’s miscalculation, with consequences for both European and U.S. policy. Russia expected those so-called “Little Russians,” as they called Ukrainians, to welcome the Russian army as liberators. That didn’t happen.

They also expected the West to be timid in its response, as it was in 2014. The Western response in 2014 was a joke, let’s be frank. That was not the case this time. Russia miscalculated, and that’s why it had to expand its war to bring in China, Iran, and North Korea—because it became far larger than expected. Russia thought it would be in Kyiv within a few days.

What’s surprising to me as an analyst, and I’m sure to Mark as well, is the degree to which practically everyone in the West—including all the think tanks in Washington, the so-called “beltway bandits”—got it wrong. The RAND Corporation and others, all funded by the U.S. government in various ways, expected Ukraine to be easily defeated.

This was evident in the spring of 2022, when we were all biting our nails, wondering how it would end. Eventually, Ukraine pushed the Russians out of the Kyiv region, and only then did the West—including the U.S.—begin sending normal weapons. Before that, it was only Javelins, Stingers, and NLAWs.

Temnycky: It’s a real mix—a massive question, by the way. What’s also essential is the prior year, 2021, when the Afghan central government rapidly collapsed.

Many analysts in the West, and the United States specifically, believed that the Afghan military forces, given the amount of assistance provided by the U.S., would be able to fend off the Taliban. What happened instead, in the summer of 2021, was that the Taliban more or less took over the entire country within hours.

As Taras mentioned, analysts got it wrong with Ukraine just as they did with Afghanistan. There was a great deal of hesitancy from the United States, NATO, the European Union, and other collectives around the world when Russia invaded Ukraine. Because of what had happened in Afghanistan, they assumed Russia—being so much stronger in landmass, military capabilities, weapons, and economy—would cause Ukraine to fall quickly as well. That is why they were hesitant to provide Western aid; they did not want the Russians to gain access to advanced Western weaponry.

Kuzio: You’re right—Afghanistan. I keep forgetting about Afghanistan. It reminded me, and I’m old enough to remember, of the disastrous withdrawal from Vietnam, when helicopters were being pushed off boats and people were running to the American embassy. It was nearly as chaotic.

This viewpoint of Ukraine was fed by decades of Western academics and think-tank analysts over-focusing on regional and linguistic divisions in Ukraine. This totally exaggerated and, in many ways, reflected a Russian or Moscow-centric view of Ukraine as a fragile, artificial entity.

They also exaggerated the corruption issue. I do not mean to belittle corruption in Ukraine. Still, the West has always been hypocritical about it—focusing only on where the money is stolen (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, or elsewhere) and never on where the money ends up, which is the United States and Western Europe. There’s a reason why London is nicknamed Londongrad or Moscow on the Thames, and why Delaware, Biden’s home state, produces the most offshore companies that allow tax evasion.

All of this fed into a false image of Ukraine. And let’s remember, most of the so-called experts on that part of the world—whether in think tanks or academia—are Russianists. They still hold the arrogant belief that they are experts not only on Russia but on the entire former USSR, which is nonsense. They are not, but they think they are.

By the way, this viewpoint continued into the Trump administration. Mr. Witcoff, for example, recently claimed to President Zelensky in Washington that Russian speakers are simply Russians, so what’s wrong with letting Russia have that region? This thinking fails to grasp that, if you apply that logic broadly, then the United States should join Canada, or Canada should join the United States; Austria should join Germany; Ireland should join Britain; and all of America should go back to Britain. Since when has language been the determinant of identity? It isn’t always the case.

I have always been frustrated by how so many Western experts exaggerated these divisions within Ukraine, which, of course, exist in every country. I lived in Canada for many years, and everyone hated Toronto. It’s the same as everyone hating London in Britain or New York and California in America. That kind of internal rivalry is not unusual, but in Ukraine it was exaggerated to an entirely different level. Ukrainians had to pay the price for that perception and had to prove they were different.

One of the strangest aspects of all this, regarding Russia, is that we have people—so-called experts at the RAND Corporation—who receive huge sums from the U.S. military, saying that Western military aid would have no impact because the Russian army has been reformed and is superb. I want to stare them in the face and say, “You do realize that Russia is a mafia state. It’s not simply corrupt; it’s a mafia state.” This is what U.S. diplomats have said—you can find it on WikiLeaks, in one of the leaked U.S. diplomatic cables dating back to 2010. If Russia is a mafia state, that means everything is corrupt. Everything. That includes the military.

And thank God the Russian military is totally corrupted, because that’s one of the reasons Ukraine is doing well on the battlefield. But this reality was completely ignored. To me, it’s a no-brainer. I’ve always been frustrated by this Western ignorance, laziness, and incompetence. I often call it academic orientalism—writing about Ukraine using Russian sources.

Jacobsen: I wanted to touch on something that came up in the pre-talk—the idea of a “black swan,” and the extent to which many analysts, as mentioned earlier, fail to understand Putin’s obsession with Ukraine.

You brought up the point, Taras, about how long Russia can continue to lose soldiers and sustain a declining economy as the cost of this obsession. So, to start with, to what degree is Putin obsessed with Ukraine and Ukrainians, and how much longer can this obsession, in terms of cost, last? Mark, do you want to take this first?

Temnycky: Certainly. Scott, there are two important things to understand, which many people still don’t realize. The first is a statement Putin made publicly: that the greatest tragedy of the past century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The second is his desire and obsession to be remembered in Russian history as someone like Peter the Great or Catherine the Great.

He has said this publicly, written about it on the Russian Federation’s government website, and had it published in various news outlets around the world.

If you’re the international community dealing with someone who has this level of ego and narcissism, it’s dangerous. I still can’t understand the idea of negotiating with Putin to end the war when he’s made it very clear that he believes Russia and Ukraine are the same. He thinks Ukrainians are not an ethnic community, that their language is fabricated, merely a dialect of Russian. You can’t reason with someone like that.

With that in mind, the only way the war will end is through something similar to what has happened before in Russian history, such as the First Chechen War in the early 1990s, when Russia suffered enormous losses, with casualties exceeding a million, and the economy was severely impacted. Or look at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which also caused major financial hardship and the destruction of much of their equipment. The Russians suffered casualties there as well.

Over the last four years of the invasion, we’ve also seen a few protests inside Russia against the war. The roughly one million men who fled the country during Putin’s conscription calls have not spoken out against the regime or the invasion. That tells us something about how things have unfolded over the last several years—about Putin’s mindset and the Russian public’s passive support for the war.

Kuzio: There’s simply no debate that Putin is obsessed—with big capital letters. To give you two examples: first, watch Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson. Carlson was flabbergasted and completely confused when Putin started talking about. Putin went on about Kyivan Rus—bringing out maps and documents, having them translated for Carlson. I’m sure Carlson never read them. Putin talked about Kyivan Rus and Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, while Tucker clearly wanted to discuss the contemporary period.

A second example involves Putin and Trump in Alaska. There’s a great Financial Times report on that meeting. No one initially understood why Trump canceled the lunch and ended the summit early. Apparently, it was because, once again, Putin went on a rant about Kyivan Rus, about Ukrainians and Russians being one people, and so on. You can imagine Trump listening, clueless about what Putin was talking about. Trump, after all, has bragged about never reading books. So he basically said, “I’m out of here. I’ve had enough of this.”

That’s two examples. Putin is absolutely obsessed. As Mark mentioned, there are book series, billboards, and education policies portraying him as the new “gatherer of Russian lands.” By “Russian,” he means Eastern Slavic lands. He sees himself as the modern version of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Stalin, and then Putin. That’s how he envisions his place in Russian history, at least since 2012.

The downside of all this is that very few people—beyond a small group in Europe, especially Western Europe, and in the United States—seem to grasp it. They just don’t get it. The only way to understand Putin’s mindset is to realize that we live in the 21st century, but Putin lives in the 19th. It’s completely lost in translation, as those Alaska and Tucker Carlson examples show.

The Poles understand this—Sikorski, for example, gets it completely. The Balts and the Finns get it too. But beyond that, I don’t think many others do.

On the question of Russians and the war, there’s been an ongoing debate. People like Mark, I, and others have said that this is a war by the Russians against Ukraine. It’s not Putin’s war—it’s Russia’s war. But many Russophile academics, think tankers, and journalists in the West argue otherwise. They say, “You have to differentiate between the Russian people, who don’t support the war, and the Russian leadership.” That’s not true.

It might have been true in 2014—indeed, Ukrainians hoped so then—but not today. There are countless examples proving otherwise. You can find them online. I saw one recently: a young, intelligent woman in Germany who’s lived there for 18 years was interviewed on the street, and she was spouting pro-war views.

One reason Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel remains pro-Putin—and refuses to help Ukraine—is because many of his voters are Russian Jews who watch Russian TV all day. They are pro-Putin and tend to support the far right in Israel. Viktor Medvedchuk is one of those types. You find them in Israel and in Brighton Beach, New York.

To give one clear example of how the Russian diaspora behaves, they’re either burying their heads in the sand like ostriches or openly supporting the war. Look at my country, England.

During the Cold War—Mark probably doesn’t remember this—but I’m sure it was the same in the U.S. and Canada. Ukrainians, Poles, and Balts would protest outside Soviet consulates and embassies nearly every weekend. That was certainly true in London. I took part in many of those, including hunger strikes—though we took a few breaks to go to the pub. I don’t think beer counts as food, especially when you’re a teenager.

During the Cold War, Britain had the largest Ukrainian community in Western Europe, with about 30,000 people. That’s not true today, but it was then. Now, in England, there are around 150,000 Russians. I cannot recall a single time they’ve held a demonstration outside the Russian Embassy.

You can’t blame that on Britain being an authoritarian state. Inside Russia, yes—it’s dangerous to protest; you can get ten years in prison for something minor. Recently, musicians performing on the streets of Moscow were arrested. But in places like Britain, Armenia, or Georgia—where many Russians now live—they’re free to protest. Where are they?

So it’s simply not true to say Russians don’t support the war. They may support it for different reasons, but they do support it. The so-called Russian opposition is no better. Navalny’s wife, for example, is terrible on the war. Khodorkovsky is somewhat better. Kasparov is the best of the Russian émigrés. They’re a mixed group, and I’ve tried to pin them down on key questions—such as whether they support the return of all Ukrainian lands occupied by Russia.

On Crimea and the Donbas, many of them hedge or avoid the question. That’s a major problem.

As for black swans, we could spend an entire podcast on that. Sometimes I feel the West is a bit too optimistic about Ukraine. Politicians will always be politicians—they congratulate themselves and say, “Look how much we’re doing to help Ukraine.” But I’d be interested to hear Mark’s view, because the West doesn’t actually have a coherent policy on this war.

The West has never come out and said, “We want Ukraine to win and Russia to lose.” Individuals, yes—like Sikorski in Poland—but not the collective West. Without that stance, what does it mean? Are we simply helping Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian? Is that the policy?

Russia could probably outlast us. Economically and socially, it isn’t easy to predict. Yes, stagnation matters, but some countries endure stagnation for long periods. Look at Mexico to your south; stagnation doesn’t necessarily mean collapse. Possibly it will—but who knows.

Casualties are another issue. I saw a Russian military blogger recently admit that the enormous casualty numbers will come back to haunt them. I’m continually stunned—and I collect this kind of material—by how poorly Russian soldiers are treated by their officers. They’re treated like dirt, like something scraped off the bottom of a boot. I’m baffled—why do they put up with this? And yet they do. Then they go into battle knowing they’ll probably be killed.

Kuzio: It’s very odd and strange. You can explain it in many ways, but ultimately, there’s no respect for human life in Russia. Nevertheless, it’s baffling. It truly is. They do horrible things to Ukrainians—nearly 200,000 documented war crimes—but they also do similar things to their own soldiers. That’s how Russia operates.

There is no respect for dignity or human rights inside Russia. As we’ve written in our new book, Russia is a fascist dictatorship. But anyway—Mark, any follow-up thoughts?

Temnycky: Strange, right? Two quick comments on policy toward Ukraine. There have been numerous statements by former President Biden and various European leaders that they will “support Ukraine for as long as it takes.” Of course, that’s encouraging and important, especially given the scale of aid Ukraine has received over the past four years.

But very few have come out publicly and said, “We want the Russians to lose, and we want the Ukrainians to win.” That’s a big deal.  On the one hand, you could argue that’s effectively what the international community is doing by providing Ukraine with half a trillion dollars collectively in defense, humanitarian, and medical aid. This support has helped Ukraine push back against the Russian Federation’s invasion.

However, during those four years, there were many restrictions on what the Ukrainians could do with that aid. While men and women needed to defend their country for several months at the beginning of the war, they were not allowed to defend themselves properly. Only after Ukraine proved to Western governments that it could hold the line did the flow of meaningful aid begin.

It’s as if the Ukrainians have been forced to prove themselves repeatedly—unlocking additional capabilities like a video game: the more experience you gain, the better the equipment you receive. That delay has hurt Ukraine’s ability to win.

As the war has progressed, Western leaders have continued to make public statements about the types of aid they plan to provide. By the time those deliveries occur, the Russians have already adapted—moving key assets and capabilities out of Ukraine’s striking range. This makes it much harder for Ukraine to deliver decisive blows.

For example, there’s an ongoing public debate about whether Ukraine will receive long-range Tomahawk missiles. That’s significant. If Ukraine had those capabilities, it could strike deep into Russia—targeting ammunition depots, weapons factories, vehicle plants, and even oil refineries. That’s one reason the Ukrainians have relied so heavily on drones—they can be built domestically and deployed without external restrictions.

On the one hand, Ukraine receives messages of solidarity—“We support you, here’s aid to help you continue fighting”—but on the other hand, there’s no definitive plan for what happens next.

Part of this, as Taras was saying, stems from a false understanding of Russian culture and history. Some academics, think tankers, and government officials may even be afraid of what it would mean if Russia were to lose. I don’t think it would be as dramatic as another Soviet collapse, with new countries breaking away—but it would certainly transform the balance of power.

It doesn’t make sense. I’m a firm believer that if Ukraine had received the weapons it needed at the start of the war—and if the restrictions had been lifted earlier—as long as Western allies had properly trained Ukrainians on how to use that aid, the war would already be over.

There’s no question that historians will look back on this period and say the missed opportunity was in the autumn of 2022, when Ukraine kicked the Russians out of several regions.

Kuzio: Continuing from that point—yes, historians will absolutely write about this. In fact, the entire period from 2014 to 2021 is a complete disaster zone for Western policy. International relations are fundamentally about sending signals, and the West has repeatedly sent signals of weakness—first in Georgia in 2008, then in Crimea in 2014.

After 2022, this slow, drip-drip policy of supplying weapons to Ukraine—by both the Biden administration and Germany, the two major fearmongers about a potential Russian collapse—also sent signals of weakness to China. As a result, by 2023, China began supporting Russia much more directly.

In the autumn of 2022, after Kharkiv was liberated, the Russian army was in panic mode—it was fleeing. Ukraine could have advanced all the way to the Black Sea. At that time, Russia only had about 170,000 troops inside Ukraine. That’s an incredibly small number for such a large-scale invasion, based on their delusional belief that “little Russians” would welcome them as liberators from the so-called Nazis.

For comparison, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 with a quarter of a million troops, and Czechoslovakia had only 10 million people. Ukraine had over 40 million.

But in late 2022, the U.S. administration and Western Europe were slow and unwilling. Many in the Biden administration were terrified of Russia’s perennial nuclear threats. By the summer of 2023, when Ukraine launched its counteroffensive, it was too late. Russia had been given ten months to mobilize, which it did—sending hundreds of thousands of new troops and increasing its occupation force from 170,000 to nearly half a million.

Russia also built fortifications—the so-called “Viking lines”—and laid countless mines. The Ukrainian offensive was doomed from the start. Russia had been granted breathing room by Western weakness.

It’s as if the West is content to let Ukrainians die—as long as the war remains inside Ukraine and doesn’t spill over into NATO or EU territory. It’s a darkly comical and irrational situation.

If you look at NATO today, it would likely be defeated by Russia—not because of military inferiority, but because of a lack of political will. Ironically, the strongest political leaders in Europe today are women, not men—draw your own conclusions from that.

The U.S. is no longer a reliable partner. I wouldn’t depend on it. The primary factor that could change the balance in any future conflict with Russia is Ukraine itself. Ukraine now has the most experienced army in Europe and one of the most innovative and capable defense sectors in the world.

Yet NATO wants Ukrainians to train them in drone warfare—but heaven forbid Ukraine actually join NATO. It makes no rational sense whatsoever. But that’s the absurd reality we’re living in.

To give you an example: Poland is one of the countries most hyped about the Russian threat, yet nineteen drones were fired into Poland, and they only shot down four. Thank God those were not armed drones. The Poles then begged the Ukrainians to come and help train them in countering drones, yet the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, is a Ukrainophobe—he opposes Ukraine joining NATO or the EU. If I were Zelensky, I would tell him to take a hike until he changes his stance.

We live in a bizarre world. EU sanctions against Russia’s energy sector have been largely ineffectual. Last year EU members paid more to Moscow for energy than they provided in financial support to Ukraine. The biggest impact on Russia’s energy sector has come from Ukrainian strikes against refineries—apparently about 160 this year—and from Trump’s latest sanctions. Those, not the EU’s measures, have had the greatest effect.

Jacobsen: Regarding Ukrainians’ desire for the war to end quickly and Europe’s slowness due to a de facto long-war posture, what is a realistic assessment as we move into 2026, say, the first two quarters?

Temnycky: The first thing is understanding the Ukrainian resolve and morale. Ukraine’s neighbor has been trying to erase the Ukrainian language, history, and culture for roughly 400 years. Despite what Ukrainians endured under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s language, history, and culture survive—and the country remains independent. That is the biggest success story of Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and its full-scale in 2022: Ukraine is still an independent state, and that is now permanent. It is committed to joining the West, aspiring to EU and NATO membership.

Despite the hardships Ukrainians have endured, they want the war to end because they do not want to be constantly bombed. Almost everyone knows at least someone killed in the war, whether a soldier or a civilian. Yet many Ukrainians—around 76 percent according to an August poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology—believe the war cannot and should not end on Russian terms. That means continuing to fight and defend themselves. A slogan that has circulated since the full-scale invasion began in 2022 captures this: if Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine will no longer exist; but if Russia stops fighting, the war will end. That mentality persists.

Kuzio: Ukrainian leaders likely think: to hell with Western patience and slowness—we do not want this war to drag on forever. Prolonged war means refugees never return home, ongoing destruction of the country, and more civilian and military casualties. One of the biggest tragedies is the impact on children: many cannot get a proper education and are traumatized. Ukrainians must find ways to make the war costly for Russia—we have already seen targeted campaigns against Russia’s energy sector.

But there are other ways as well. To hell with Tomahawks, to be quite honest—Ukraine’s domestically produced missiles are, according to experts, as good as, if not better than, the Tomahawk, which is an older American system. To hell with the Taurus missiles the Germans promised but have not supplied. Ukraine is building its own long-range missiles; production is increasing.

The Danes led early on, and other countries copied them—the British and some Scandinavian states have provided financial assistance for Ukraine to build weapons inside the country secretly. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of what Ukraine uses on the battlefield is produced domestically. This month, Zelensky authorized some exports of those weapons to raise revenue. Many of these weapons are not only cheaper than Western systems but, in some respects, better.

One of the funniest aspects of this war is how Western drone makers, whose products performed well in Afghanistan and Iraq—where the opponents fought with Kalashnikovs—found those same systems often ineffective in Ukraine. You end up with expensive “white elephants” that the Pentagon buys, and now it’s realizing it must change its mindset. We need to adopt strategies and technologies developed in Ukraine. Many Western companies already use Ukraine as a testing ground for weapons and joint ventures; that trend will increase.

That means Ukraine no longer has to ask Germany or the United States for permission to launch long-range strikes—these will be Ukrainian missiles. They also use British and French systems: the British and French have been willing to supply Storm Shadow missiles for strikes inside Russia, the kinds of systems the Germans and Americans have hesitated to provide.

Ukrainian leaders must be thinking that they need to make the war increasingly costly for the Russians—bring the war home to the Russian public—while continuing to inflict heavy losses on the battlefield. That combined pressure may eventually crack the Putin system or at least moderate his demands and bring him to the negotiating table. That’s something Trump has never understood: how to get Putin to moderate maximalist demands. He does not grasp the necessary steps.

So you have a clash: Western lack of coherent strategy, which by default risks “fighting to the last Ukrainian” (bad for Ukraine), versus Ukraine’s insistence that this must end quickly. They will pursue everything they can. I suspect we will see more audacious actions—like that remarkable strike in the Russian Far East when trucks opened up and launched swarms of drones. Expect more operations of that sort.

Jacobsen: Mark and Taras, thank you very much for your time today.

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