Why the Ukraine War Will Not End Soon, Part 2: Europe’s Narrow Window Of Opportunity
Part 1 covered the two belligerents and why each, for opposite reasons, prefers continued fighting (in the near-term) to the deal currently on offer.
Zelensky holds his strongest hand in years and wants to press it.
The NATO Summit of this week was a further confirmation of this.
Trump was warm, praised Ukraine, and agreed to grant a license that would allow Ukraine to co-produce Patriots with Boeing.
In addition, leaders from the 32 NATO member countries formally pledged €70 billion (equivalent to $80 billion) in military equipment, assistance, and training to support Ukraine.
(side note: Crucially, the U.S. is not going to play a part in this new funding. Instead, European NATO states and Canada are going to carry the weight of new loans and funding.)
On the other side, Putin cannot be seen to fold under a declared coercion campaign.
This part II turns to Europe, whose position is the most paradoxical of all, because Europe genuinely fears Russia, genuinely supports Ukraine, and yet has structural reasons to prefer that the war continue rather than end on the terms now available.
The European interest in continued war rests on the arguments the previous cables have already touched, that a fighting Russia is a degrading Russia, that the rearmament boom within Europe itself needs the threat to justify it, and that Europe wants a seat at the table before any settlement.
But there is a deeper argument beneath all of these, and it is the one that makes the current moment so consequential: the window is open now to get ready for ever more aggressive Russia.
And yet, this very window may not be open in two or three years.
Why Now: The Attrition And Degradation That Cannot Be Repeated Later
The core logic is about timing.
For as long as the war continues, the Russian army is being destroyed inside Ukraine at a rate no peacetime strategy could achieve, and by Ukrainians rather than by NATO soldiers.
Russia has now suffered roughly 1.4 million casualties, including as many as 450,000 dead.
It has lost more than 14,000 armored combat vehicles and over 2,100 artillery pieces, and it is now losing air defense systems, (one of the most expensive and hard-to-replace categories), faster than earlier in the war.
Russia’s casualties have exceeded recruitment every month since December 2025, and its monthly territorial gains have collapsed from 405 square kilometers in 2025 to around 15 in 2026.
For Europe, and as it stands, the alternative to continuing this war is not a good durable peace.
If the war ended now, Russia would give up no territory; that much is a given.
At best there would be a ceasefire, and as the previous cable argued, Russia will not accept the deployment of Western peacekeepers to Ukraine under any near-term terms, so that is off the table.
Russia would keep its claim to the annexed territories.
What Europe would be left with, after four years of war, is a Russia that did not win but that nonetheless holds more Ukrainian land than it did in 2022, at enormous cost.
That is a major headwind for the Putin regime, but neither is it a definitive strategic defeat.
Such an outcome would allow the narrative to take hold that Russia fought the united West, gained ground anyway, and can now learn from the battlefield, reconstitute, and rebuild.
This is the danger a premature ceasefire creates, and it is the mainstream European expert view, not just the view of these cables.
The EU’s own Institute for Security Studies rates a ceasefire on Russia’s terms as a top-tier risk for 2026 in both likelihood and impact.
Indeed, Russia could actually end the war with more troops than it started with, with an expanded drone and missile production, because Russia now makes millions of tactical drones a year and has contracted for at least 100,000 large attack drones in 2026 alone.
A pause lets Russia repair its rear, adapt against drones, run another recruitment drive, replenish its stocks, and return stronger, without ever having accepted that it lost.
