By Jeremy Kinsman

February 23, 2026

As the war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, Vladimir Putin’s boast in 2022 that total Russian victory would be swift has been well and truly trashed.

Remarkably, Ukraine’s military forces first repelled the clumsy invaders from Kyiv within days and by the fall of 2022 had retaken about 1/3 of the territory Russia’s initially gained, notably Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, in the East, and Kherson, in the South, which remain under Russian drone attack.

While obtaining accurate casualty counts in this war has been difficult based on their susceptibility to propaganda manipulation, it is agreed by reliable sources that Russia has sustained significantly greater losses. (For a breakdown of the latest, most reliable numbers on military and civilian losses, the Associated Press has just published Four years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a look at the war by the numbers.)

So, in objective terms, Putin has already lost — a defeat to which he will never admit. His life history is one of playing for time, doubling down, conceding nothing, and now counting on a long war to wear Ukraine down.

Russia’s strategy to break Ukrainians’ morale, especially with attacks on energy infrastructure in winter, has further united Ukrainians in patriotism.

In 2025, the Russians ramped up missile and drone attacks with more than 54,000 drone strikes on Ukrainian cities and energy sites, killing 2,248 civilians, a 26% increase over 2024. Russian air attacks on energy targets reached a crescendo this month in the coldest winter for years.

Hurried repairs and back-up generators allowed Kyiv residents only 1 1/2-2 hours of light and heat a day. Some districts do without for weeks. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s vibrant second city, all school classes have been relocated in underground bunkers.

The adrenaline that fuelled Ukrainians’ first response to the attack in February 2022 has subsided, replaced by resilience, pride, and what M. Gessen described in a New York Times anniversary feature as Ukrainian “nezlamnist — invincibility or, literally, unbreakability.”

Humour, irony, and love of life persist. People emerge from shelters in the day, many joining in impromptu raves outside, until the sirens send them underground again.

Ukrainians are exhausted but resilient. A Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) poll published in early February found that 88% of respondents thought Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid were designed to force surrender. And yet, 65% of those interviewed said they were prepared to tough it out as long as necessary.

The fighting on the ground has turned into a stalemated war of attrition along the 750-mile front line, in part because of the omniscience of new technology. As then Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi told The Economist in 2023, “Modern sensors can identify any concentration of forces and modern precision weapons can destroy it. We can each see what the enemy is doing.”

Drones have defined the conduct of this war, and perhaps all future wars. The Ukrainians developed widespread drone use first as a means of addressing the asymmetry in heavy weaponry, developing relatively inexpensive interceptor drones to take down more costly Russian airborne attack systems. But Russia has caught up.

According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, confirmed by Latvian intelligence authorities, drone attacks were responsible for between 70 and 80% of combatants killed on both sides in 2025.

Both sides operate tactical PPV drones (“first-person view”) that enable distant operators with real-time visual access to strike with precision individuals and equipment on the ground.

The high risk to combatants has created on the front lines in Donetsk province a 15-20 kilometre “killing zone” for drone attacks, inhibiting large advances. As Zaluzhni prophesied, “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”

Most civil wars and conflicts between states end in ceasefires, once evidence on the ground shows little prospect of a breakthrough, and when the endurance and enthusiasm of both publics, including their armies, is spent and patriotic support begins to cede to war fatigue.

In objective terms, Putin has already lost — a defeat to which he will never admit. His life history is one of playing for time, doubling down, conceding nothing, and now counting on a long war to wear Ukraine down.

On May 31, 2022, President Joe Biden wrote in The New York Times, “The United States will continue to work to strengthen Ukraine and support its efforts to achieve a negotiated end to the conflict,” quoting Zelensky’s assertion that the conflict “will only definitively end through diplomacy.”

Biden continued, “I will not pressure the Ukrainian government — in private or in public — to make any territorial concessions. It would be wrong and contrary to well-settled principles to do so.”

Donald Trump, inaugurated for a second time a year ago, proceeded to do just that. Putin’s tactical intractability was rewarded by the re-election of an American president far more willing to indulge his agenda.

The two sides have remained irreconcilably far apart on the same issues of territory and security guarantees. Before the latest round of U.S.-led negotiations ended inconclusively on February 18th in Geneva, Zelensky had told Axios that ceding the one-fifth of eastern Donetsk that Russia doesn’t control, as Putin has demanded, would never be accepted by Ukrainians. He has also agreed to drop any demand for NATO membership in exchange for security guarantees.

These remain the basic issues, along with postwar recovery of Ukraine, sanctions on Russia, and Russian responsibility for war crimes.

Having vowed he would settle the war in 24 hours, Trump has made what some observers have referred to as his Groundhog Day diplomacy on the conflict an ongoing media melodrama.

He has used coercion only on Zelensky, evident in his disgraceful attack on the Ukrainian President (“you don’t have the cards”) in their televised shakedown encounter a year ago in the Oval Office. His amateur emissaries seemingly have no grasp of the issues.

Trump, Vance, and MAGA courtiers clearly indicate they don’t care about defending an independent Ukraine. At one point, Trump told Zelensky “you should never have started the war,” which, given that Zelensky’s country was invaded, was ignorance at best and gaslighting at worst.

Though Trump repeatedly says he believes Putin “wants peace,” Putin almost certainly wants the war to continue, believing the wartime economy will keep the country afloat, and national security restrictions keep Russians well suppressed.

But Putin’s apparent belief that time is on his side seems increasingly wrong. Russian finances are stressed. The Russian territorial occupation ended 2025 slightly worse off than in 2024. Monthly Russian losses at the front surpass 30,000, overtaking the capacity of Russia to recruit new soldiers.

And the geopolitical landscape is shifting, as evidenced in debate at the Davos and Munich conferences over the “rupture”, as Prime Minister Mark Carney put it, in the world order.

Just as Russia’s invasion united Ukrainians, the overall effect of Trump’s insults against Europe, imposition of unilateral tariffs, and mad assertions the US should “have” Greenland, have prompted European leaders to look beyond their preoccupations with ultra-right nationalist opponents (supported by Trump) at home to the need to strengthen European unity and commitment and defend Ukrainian independence.

The pro-Ukraine Coalition of the Willing, including Canada, must assert their responsibility to support Ukraine to the hilt, as well, of course, to participate as primary parties in negotiations, from which the US has basically sidelined them.

Above all, Trump’s political capital is depleting, as evidenced in recent domestic rebukes against his tariff war from both Congress and the Supreme Court.

So, as we continue to hope for better days in transatlantic relations and for realism in dealing with Russia, we can, as Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said recently, be grateful to Ukraine for already disproving a notion the world believed buried eight decades ago; that might makes right.

Policy Columnist Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the UK, ambassador to Italy and ambassador to the European Union. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.