By Maria Popova

February 24, 2026

On February 24, 2022, as Russian tanks rolled over Ukraine’s border with Belarus aiming to take Kyiv, many international relations experts blamed NATO expansion for provoking Russia.

Military experts, reflecting assessments by U.S. intelligence, among others, predicted that Putin’s “special military operation” would be a quick and triumphant.

Against the grain, my colleague Oxana Shevel and I wrote that Putin’s objective was “to re-establish Russian political and cultural dominance over a nation that Putin sees as one with Russia, and then follow up by undoing the European rules-based order and security architecture established in the aftermath of World War II.”

Today, Putin has failed to even begin to achieve either of these goals. The Ukrainian army managed to partially push back the Russian invaders in 2022 and has been holding off their advances in the Donbas.

The Ukrainian government led by President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have reasserted political and cultural independence from Russia many times over. Ukraine provides indispensable protection to Europe, which while subject to Russia’s hybrid attacks, hides behind Ukraine’s resistance.

The moribund rules-based order hangs by the tiny thread of Ukraine’s steely resolve as Zelensky continues to resist Putin and Trump’s joint pressure to withdraw from Donbas and turn it over to Russian occupation—a militarily unwarranted surrender that the Kremlin and White House euphemistically bill, in a classic of misdirectional propaganda, as a “diplomatic solution”.

The Ukrainian people have paid a high price in blood, trauma, and displacement over the past 12 years of Russian aggression and especially in the four years of intense, full-scale war. Yet, two thirds of them are ready to endure war as long as necessary to see it end in an acceptable peace rather than surrender.

Because Ukrainians have been successful in their resistance, we often forget that Russia’s goals are way bigger than Ukraine. Putin dreams of nothing less than a return to the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was a superpower peer of the US.

He wants Russia to dominate as much of Europe as possible and turn the dominated into voiceless vassals. In his address for the Orwellian-named “Defender of the Fatherland” Day, Putin reminded his people and the world that Russia’s aggression in Ukraine aims to “maintain strategic parity” which is military jargon for being equal to the US.

In pursuit of this goal, Russia seeks a reset with the Trump administration and asked for the Alaska meeting to negotiate Ukraine’s fate with the U.S. over the heads of the Ukrainians.

The Kremlin refuses to meet and negotiate directly with Zelensky, precisely because Putin doesn’t want to recognize Ukraine as a peer opponent, despite the fact that it is the Ukrainian army fighting alone that has served Russia a series of humiliating setbacks on the battlefield, has made the misnomer “special military operation” last longer than Russia’s venerable Patriotic War, and has inflicted more casualties on Russia than all post-1945 conflicts combined, to the tune of 30K per month in 2025-2026.

The main reason Russia hasn’t been able to reestablish its dominance in Europe is Ukraine’s resistance and sacrifice — the comparison to the indomitable resilience of the British under Churchill in World War II is not overstated.

Russia also refuses to negotiate with Europe, instead heaping hapless scorn on the EU’s foreign and security affairs chief, Kaja Kallas for her direct language about the need to defeat Russian aggression.

Recognizing Russia’s revanchist imperialism as the root cause of its war in Ukraine provides clues about how the war can and cannot end. Giving Russia a sliver of Ukrainian land won’t simply be an “unjust peace” for Ukrainians, it would feed Russia’s ambition to pursue its broader objectives in Europe and thus accelerate rather than end the war.

At a time of geopolitical flux, it also sets a New World Order precedent that Trump may appreciate of larger, autocratic powers invading neighbouring democracies without legitimate casus belli and with impunity.

The Trump administration peddles the idea that meeting Russia halfway requires drawing a border somewhere in Eastern Ukraine, but the reality is that from Russia’s standpoint, meeting them halfway means putting up a new Iron Curtain somewhere in the European Union.

This mismatch implies that the war will not end in a negotiated settlement based on the resolution to an illegal invasion that has clearly failed, but when one side is militarily spent and unable to continue its war effort.

The last four years have revealed Russia as a much weaker military power than anyone imagined. It lacks the ability to compel any of these maximalist goals on the battlefield.

While Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev regularly threatens that Russian soldiers could march through Europe as in 1945 or 1812 (when they didn’t march through Europe but rather repelled Napoleon from Russian soil), the reality is that Ukraine has prevented them from taking small towns in Donbas for 12 years.

But the lesson from the war shouldn’t be that Russia is a paper tiger that we should not fear.

In a clash of world orders represented in part by a battle between democracy and autocracy, victories for either side take on asymmetrical, systemic significance, which is one reason why the side that has clearly lost this war is still being propped up by China, North Korea, and a United States led by a wannabe autocrat.

But the main reason Russia hasn’t been able to reestablish its dominance in Europe is Ukraine’s resistance and sacrifice — the comparison to the indomitable resilience of the British under Churchill in World War II is not overstated. In gratitude for this sacrifice and in an act of self-preservation, Europe needs to work out a feasible strategy for supporting Ukraine’s military victory and invest its economic power in implementing it.

Instead of devising plans for a peacekeeping Coalition of the Willing after the war is over, Ukraine’s allies in the existing Coalition of the Willing should be helping Ukraine right now to end the war by taking over the security of Ukraine’s Western regions to free up the Ukrainian armed forces and let them focus on the front.

President Trump reportedly aims to broker the signing of a Russo-Ukrainian peace treaty before July 4^th but there are no signs that this is at all feasible.

Putin has not agreed to a single concession and is likely to continue stalling and rejecting any concrete ceasefire proposal. So, the war is unlikely to end before the 250^th anniversary of America’s founding in the wake of a revolution against an imperial power.

Meanwhile, for the sake of not just Ukrainians’ lives and freedom but democracy and freedom everywhere, the free world should put economic, military, and diplomatic pressure on Russia so its war machine breaks down before we find ourselves marking the 5^th anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s ill-considered, illegal invasion.

Policy Columnist Maria Popova is the Hiram Mills Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and Co-Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal. With Oxana Shevel, she recently published a book titled Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States.