There is a Kissinger line worth keeping in mind before talking about Ukraine: "History is not an à la carte menu." You choose what you can, not what you want. And what the West chose for thirty years was not to choose: to postpone hard decisions, dismantle military capabilities, expand alliances without expanding real commitments, and trust that globalisation would tame Russia as it had tamed, presumably, everyone else. It did not work. And on February 24, 2022, when Russian columns crossed the Ukrainian border from three flanks simultaneously, the bill arrived.
Nobody expected what followed. Not Moscow, which had planned a surgical operation lasting days. Not Washington, which evacuated its embassy anticipating the fall of Kyiv. Not Europe, which discovered in real time that it had outsourced its security to a country on the other side of the Atlantic and that its own armies were, in many cases, little more than a bureaucratic formality in uniform.
This war, the largest on European soil since 1945, ended up being something nobody had planned: an open-air military laboratory, a twenty-first-century industrial war of attrition, and the catalyst for a geopolitical reconfiguration that is still unfolding.
The Provocation Nobody Wants to Discuss
To say that Russia invaded Ukraine is a factual description. To say the invasion occurred in a geopolitical vacuum is a fantasy. And yet, for years, that was the dominant narrative across most of the Western establishment: Russia as an irrational revanchist power, without legitimate motivations, driven purely by Putin's imperial expansionism.
The reality, as is usually the case, is more uncomfortable. The eastward expansion of NATO, which began in 1999 with the incorporation of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and continued in 2004 with the Baltic states and seven other members, was a process that systematically ignored Russian warnings. George Kennan, the architect of containment policy during the Cold War, said it in 1998 with a clarity that today reads as prophetic: NATO expansion would be "the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era." William Burns, who would later become CIA director, wrote a diplomatic cable in 2008 from Moscow with a subject line that left no room for interpretation: "Nyet means nyet." Russia was not going to tolerate the incorporation of Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance.
The Bucharest summit of 2008, where NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia "will become members" without offering a timeline or a concrete mechanism, was probably the worst possible outcome: a provocation without backing. It told Russia that its neighbours were going to join a hostile military alliance, and it told Ukraine and Georgia that they had a security umbrella that in practice did not exist.
Perhaps this does not justify the invasion. But to explain is not to justify, and geopolitics does not operate in the realm of morality but in the realm of power. Russia acted as any great power acts when it perceives its sphere of influence is being eroded. The United States did the same in Cuba in 1962, in Central America for decades, and would do so without blinking if China installed military bases in Mexico. The double standard does not invalidate the rule; it confirms it.
The Failure of the Russian Plan
The first thing that failed was the premise. Moscow designed the invasion as a special operation, not as a war. The idea was that a forceful show of strength, with airborne assaults on Hostomel, armoured columns advancing toward Kyiv from Belarus and simultaneous pressure from the south and east, would cause the collapse of Zelensky's government in a matter of days, perhaps hours.
The implicit comparison was Afghanistan in 1979 or Crimea in 2014: swift operations where local resistance was minimal or nonexistent. But Ukraine in 2022 was neither one thing nor the other. The Ukrainian army had spent eight years reforming with Western assistance, particularly British and American, after the shock of 2014. Special forces and infantry units had adopted NATO doctrine. And the most underestimated factor: morale. It turns out that invading a country with a consolidated national identity is different from occupying a territory whose population is indifferent.
The airborne assault on Hostomel failed on the first day. The sixty-kilometre armoured column north of Kyiv got bogged down, literally, through a combination of poor logistics, soft terrain and Ukrainian ambushes with Javelin and NLAW anti-tank missiles. By the end of March, Russia had withdrawn from northern Ukraine. The blitz had lasted a month and ended in humiliation.
What came next was a forced transition to a war of attrition that, paradoxically, played more to Russian strengths: mass, artillery, willingness to absorb casualties. But even there, execution was uneven. The battle of Bakhmut, which lasted almost a year, consumed an obscene quantity of resources on both sides for a city of questionable operational value. The Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023, for its part, demonstrated the limits of attempting a war of manoeuvre against an entrenched enemy with dense minefields and artillery superiority.
Drones, Artillery, Electronic Warfare
If there is something this war will leave as a legacy for global military doctrine, it is the confirmation of three things many analysts already suspected.
First: drones changed everything. Not the high-end drones like the Predator or Reaper, which cost millions, but cheap commercial drones modified with grenades or improvised munitions that an operator can fly with a video game controller. FPV drones costing a few hundred dollars became the infantryman's precision artillery. Ukraine adopted them massively, creating entire units dedicated to the production and operation of these devices. Russia was slower but eventually did the same. The result is a battlefield where hiding is nearly impossible and where a tank worth several million dollars can be destroyed by a drone that costs as much as a television.
Second: artillery is still the queen of the battle. Despite all the technology, this war looks more like the First World War than the Gulf War. The consumption of artillery ammunition reached levels nobody in the West had anticipated. Ukraine was firing several thousand shells per day at the peaks of intensity, and Western industrial capacity simply was not prepared to sustain that rate. Europe discovered, with some embarrassment, that its combined production of 155mm ammunition was a fraction of what a single front demanded.
Third: electronic warfare became a decisive domain. Russian jamming systems proved capable of significantly degrading the effectiveness of Western guided munitions, including the GPS on Excalibur rounds and HIMARS in certain contexts. The race between electronic measures and countermeasures became one of the least visible but most important aspects of the conflict.
The Role of Western Intelligence
If the war proved anything beyond all doubt, it is that American intelligence operates at a level the rest of the world simply cannot match. Washington's decision to declassify and share intelligence in real time with Ukraine, both before and during the invasion, was probably the single most important factor in Kyiv's survival during the first weeks.
Before the invasion, American intelligence published the Russian plans with a level of detail that caught the Kremlin off guard. During the war, the combination of satellite, signals and human intelligence allowed Ukraine to hit high-value targets with a precision its own capabilities would not have permitted. The sinking of the cruiser Moskva in April 2022, the series of strikes against Russian ammunition depots throughout 2022 and 2023, and the general effectiveness of HIMARS against Russian logistics are incomprehensible without the constant flow of Western intelligence.
Western weapons systems, for their part, had a mixed but revealing performance. The Javelin and NLAW were devastating in the initial phase. HIMARS changed the dynamics of the artillery war by enabling precise strikes at distance. The Leopard 2 and Abrams tanks, delivered with so much fanfare, had a more modest impact: useful, but far from decisive on a battlefield dominated by drones, mines and artillery. The lesson is not that these systems are bad, but that modern war degrades any platform that does not operate within an integrated system of air defence, electronic warfare and constant surveillance.
Ukraine as a Military Laboratory
Every major war produces lessons that reshape the military doctrines of the following decades. The Korean War consolidated limited war as a concept. Vietnam taught the limits of technological counterinsurgency. The Gulf War inaugurated the era of precision warfare. Ukraine is doing something similar, and those taking the closest notes are, predictably, those with the most at stake: the United States and China.
The Pentagon is processing the information coming out of Ukraine with a voracity not seen in decades. The war validated investments like those Anduril is making in autonomous systems and low-cost drones. It confirmed that the industrial production of conventional ammunition remains a first-order strategic factor, something the obsession with cutting-edge technology had made people forget. And it demonstrated that electronic warfare requires an investment and attention that the West had withdrawn after the fall of the Soviet Union.
For the defence industry, Ukraine was both a showcase and a warning. Showcase because the systems that worked, like HIMARS or the Switchblade and similar drones, generated contracts and global demand. Warning because the war exposed systemic shortcomings in the Western military supply chain: insufficient production capacity, dependence on single suppliers, delivery timelines incompatible with the demands of a high-intensity conflict.
China, for its part, is watching all of this with the attention of someone with plans of their own. Taiwan is not Ukraine, neither geographically nor strategically, but the lessons on drone warfare, coastal defence, industrial resilience and electronic warfare are directly applicable. Beijing will not repeat Moscow's mistakes, and that should worry Washington more than anything else.
Europe: The Continent That Outsourced Its Sovereignty
If there is one actor that comes out worst from this war, it is not Russia, which at least knew it was getting into a fight. It is Europe, which discovered it could not fight even if it wanted to.
European demilitarisation over the past three decades was not an accident. It was a deliberate political decision, based on the conviction that economic integration had made war on the continent obsolete and that the United States would always be there to cover the difference. The post-1991 "peace dividends" were spent on expanding welfare states and on the bureaucratic expansion of the European Union, while defence budgets shrank to levels that would have been comical if they were not tragic.
Germany is the most emblematic case. The Bundeswehr, once one of the most capable armies in NATO, arrived at 2022 with tanks that would not start, aircraft that could not fly and soldiers who trained with broomsticks instead of machine guns. This is not a metaphor: the German press documented these cases in detail. When Scholz announced the Zeitenwende, the historic shift in defence policy with 100 billion euros for rearmament, the reaction was enthusiastic. But rebuilding a military capability that was dismantled over three decades cannot be done with a cheque. It requires years, industrial chains, trained personnel and, above all, sustained political will. It is not clear Europe has any of those things in sufficient quantity.
The irony is bitter: by disarming, Europe did not eliminate war. It made it more likely. A continent with credible deterrent capacity would have altered the Russian calculus. But Russia looked at a Europe that depended on Russian gas to heat itself, that had toy armies, and that had spent years demonstrating that its foreign policy was, at best, reactive and declarative, and drew a reasonable conclusion: they were not going to do anything serious.
Inevitable Negotiation or Frozen Conflict?
Every war ends. The question is how and when. And in the case of Ukraine, the answer inevitably runs through Washington.
It is an uncomfortable but inescapable truth: the United States is the only power with the capacity to sustain or end this conflict. Military and financial support for Ukraine depends fundamentally on American political will, and that will is neither infinite nor unconditional. Europe can contribute, and does, but it has neither the industrial capacity nor the political cohesion to sustain Ukraine on its own.
American domestic politics is, therefore, the decisive factor. And that dynamic has swung considerably between the initial bipartisan enthusiasm of 2022 and the growing scepticism that took hold in sectors of the electorate and the political class.
The range of possible outcomes is limited. A total military victory by either side seems improbable at this point. Ukraine does not have the capacity to expel Russia from all the territory it occupies, including Crimea. Russia does not have the capacity to conquer all of Ukraine without a mobilisation on a scale the Kremlin has avoided so far for reasons of internal stability. What remains are variants of negotiation or frozen conflict.
A frozen conflict, in the style of Korea or of Donbas itself between 2014 and 2022, is possible but unstable. A real negotiation would require concessions that today neither side can publicly accept: for Ukraine, some form of recognition of territorial reality; for Russia, some kind of security guarantee that does not involve NATO on its border.
Kissinger, before he died, suggested something along those lines: a Ukraine that retains its sovereignty but accepts a form of military neutrality, with international security guarantees. It is not an elegant solution. It is a realistic one. And in geopolitics, realistic solutions are the only ones that last.
The War Nobody Planned
Four years since its start, Ukraine is many things at once. It is a human tragedy of enormous proportions, with hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, millions displaced, cities destroyed. It is a collective diplomatic failure, the result of decades of decisions that prioritised comfort over foresight. It is a military laboratory redefining how the wars of the twenty-first century will be fought. And it is, above all, a demonstration of something the Western political class prefers not to acknowledge: that military power remains the ultimate foundation of the international order, that peace is not a natural state but a product of deterrence, and that when deterrence fails, the consequences are always paid by the same people.
The United States, as in every crisis since 1945, is the final arbiter. Not because it wants to be, but because nobody else can be. That is the reality of the international system, and no amount of UN resolutions, EU summits or declarations of principle is going to change it. The world order is sustained, in the final analysis, by the capacity and the willingness of the hegemonic power to maintain it. Everything else is commentary.