This text is a transcript of a presentation given at the conference ‘Four Years of War in Ukraine: What Prospects for Peace and Transatlantic Security?’, held on 23 February 2026 at UQAM.
Despite almost constant diplomatic negotiations, 2025 has not brought us any closer to peace – far from it.
On the other hand, it has allowed us to clarify a number of key points. Let us begin with the war itself. Last summer, we heard the argument that the Russian advance on the Eastern Front was unstoppable. Putin subsequently reiterated this: either you hand over the rest of Donbas to us, or we will take it by force. And yet, although the army has managed to seize a further 10% of the territory of Donetsk Oblast over the past year (bringing the total to 78%), the town of Pokrovsk – with a population of 60,000 prior to 2022 – still holds out. It was, however, expected to fall by the summer of 2024. The fortified towns of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk – ironically, the cradle of the 2014 separatist uprising, but recaptured after a three-month siege – still seem far from immediate danger.
Of course, war is not linear and no one can predict its outcome, but the prospect of a collapse of the Ukrainian front similar to the German rout on the Western Front in 1918 seems highly unlikely. The technology of warfare is constantly changing. Two years ago, the most serious problem appeared to be the asymmetry in artillery capabilities, with Russia at times holding a 10-to-1 advantage. But Europe, by sourcing supplies partly from stocks around the world, has managed to largely make up for this Ukrainian disadvantage. Last year, the shortcomings of Ukrainian recruitment were at the forefront. The situation remains just as critical—the new and very young defence minister revealed staggering figures last month (2 million Ukrainians who would rather hide than go to the front), but the fact remains that the supremacy of surveillance drones has outweighed the numerical inferiority of Ukrainian soldiers. Put bluntly, the fewer Ukrainian soldiers there are on the front line, the more Russian soldiers perish. The first lesson of 2025 is therefore that the Russian advance on the Eastern Front is not inevitable.
Since the front line is holding, the Russian strategy has been to step up attacks on civilians. There are two ways to target civilians. The first is to attack them directly through aerial bombardment, as Russia did in Grozny in the 1990s, in Aleppo in 2015, or in Mariupol at the very start of the 2022 war. In each case, civilian casualties were considerable. But with the exception of Mariupol, Russian aircraft very quickly ceased flying over Ukrainian airspace in 2022, for fear of being shot down. Russia has resorted to artillery to pound towns near the front line, turning all the towns in the Donbas that it has captured or besieged – Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Pokrovsk, among many others – into fields of ruins. The second method is to target civilian infrastructure. As we know, in Kyiv and major cities across Ukraine, it is seeking to destroy the hydroelectric network so as to capitalise on the freezing winter. The idea is to break the resistance of the population, forcing them to put pressure on their elites to end the war at any cost and accept Russia’s terms.
This is, however, an illusion. Historians will tell you that it never works. An army may decide to stop fighting – as we saw in Afghanistan in 2021 and in Syria in 2024 – but attacking civilians tends to have the opposite effect. I don’t personally know how Ukrainians manage to endure repeated, prolonged power cuts when it’s minus 20 degrees outside, but I do know that overall, based on credible polls, when asked “How long can you hold out?”, three out of four Ukrainians reply “As long as possible”. Despite the almost daily drone and missile attacks on their cities. The proportion was barely higher four years ago. Probably because the alternative is worse: Ukrainians know what is happening in the occupied territories and Russian prisons – or what happened in Bucha in 2022. Second clarification: Ukrainian resolve is not cracking.
And this is despite the heavy military losses visible in every town and city across Ukraine, with the constant stream of funerals and seriously wounded soldiers returning from the front. Zelenskyy recently put the figure at 55,000 dead, but it now seems likely that the death toll is at least three times higher. A Ukrainian NGO has identified, with supporting biographical records, nearly 100,000 soldiers who have perished since 2022, and nearly another 100,000 who are missing, a large proportion of whom are likely to have died. The comparison with the first Donbas war, that of 2014–2021, is striking. The number of Ukrainian soldiers killed at that time stood at just over 4,000. The figure has therefore risen 35 to 40-fold over the past four years. The death toll on the Russian side is much higher, though not necessarily in proportion to the population.
In geopolitical terms, the year 2025 will have brought about three major changes. The first was the complete cessation of US military and economic aid to Ukraine – although Europe, in partnership with Canada and other non-European countries, can purchase American weapons and send them to Ukraine. The second is the shocking realisation by NATO countries, including Canada, that they can no longer rely on the United States to defend them. The result is a massive increase in defence budgets, a shift that will have a major impact on the war in Ukraine, though not in the short term.
The third change is a US break with the values underpinning the Western alliance. The most fundamental is the idea that the individual or citizen has rights vis-à-vis the sovereign, vis-à-vis the state. That they cannot be arbitrarily arrested and that they have a right to life. This is the English Bill of Rights, which has evolved into human rights. What is known as international law is based on this cardinal idea. As well as on the principle, established since the Second World War, that one state cannot unilaterally alter the borders of another state. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine flouts both these principles by seeking to destroy a state, which is also a democracy. Third clarification of 2025: the Trump 2.0 administration is indifferent to these two basic principles. In his speech at the Munich Conference, Secretary of State Rubio did not mention them once.
On the subject of negotiations, the fourth clarification is that, in fact, there have been no real negotiations. The Russians and the Americans talk to each other, the Ukrainians and the Americans talk to each other, but the Russians and the Ukrainians do not talk to each other. By this I mean that the Russian delegations at bilateral meetings with the Ukrainian side never have a mandate to discuss political issues. When the delegation is led by the propagandist Vladimir Medinsky, the mandate is to impose conditions and deliver lessons in pseudo-history. When military personnel are sent, it is to discuss the terms of a unilateral withdrawal of the Ukrainian army from the Donbas. Putin does not want to negotiate, certainly not with the Ukrainians, and even less so with the Europeans. It must be understood that the so-called “root causes of the conflict”, which Russia has been hammering home since December 2021, stem from the Western coalition’s refusal to restore Russia’s status as a power equal to the United States. This is why any summit between Zelensky and Moscow appears illusory. Russia wants to negotiate only with the United States, bypassing Europe and certainly the Ukrainians, and even claims to have reached an agreement this summer in what it calls “the spirit of Anchorage”, referring to the Alaska summit between Putin and Trump in August 2025.
Could a withdrawal from the Donbas not lead to a cessation of hostilities? There is the military argument: Ukraine would lose its fortifications, its front line would be exposed, leaving Kharkiv and the centre of the country vulnerable. There is the historical precedent: Putin seized Crimea without any real consequences, and in 2022 he turned his attention to the whole country. But there is also, and perhaps above all, the principle. If Ukraine were to agree to withdraw, the fundamental principle that one state cannot change the borders of another state by force would be legally flouted. Moreover, Ukraine would be agreeing, following political negotiations, to condemn hundreds of thousands of its citizens to the arbitrary rule of the Russian authorities. What is at stake is not merely a question of territory – the remaining 25% of the Donbas – but the dual principle that in fact drives the entire Ukrainian resistance: their national right to live within their own state, and their rights as citizens vis-à-vis the state. These principles are those of Europe and the free world, and their violation would have very dangerous consequences for global security. They have been abandoned by the US administration since Trump’s return, but they remain fundamental.
Does this mean the prospects for peace are completely blocked? It is difficult to envisage a diplomatic breakthrough in the short term. The great fear of 2025 was that the United States would abandon Ukraine. In a sense, this has already happened, with military aid reduced to nothing, and the decision to prioritise air defence systems and munitions on the Middle Eastern front. But Trump, although still fascinated by Putin, nonetheless sees Russia as an adversary in the energy sphere. Hence the sanctions against major Russian oil exporters and also the role of CIA intelligence in helping the Ukrainians to better target oil refineries and military factories deep within Russian territory. Trump regularly puts pressure on Zelensky to accept the unacceptable, but it must be acknowledged that he has increased the pressure on Russia where it hurts most: the export of oil used to finance the war effort.[1]
Russia does not want to negotiate, but over the past four years it has adapted its strategy to the realities on the ground. It withdrew from the Kyiv front, then from the Kharkiv region and the city of Kherson in 2022. It withdrew its warships from the port of Sevastopol in 2023. Each time, this was because the military situation demanded it. This has not yet happened on the south-eastern front. The chances of such an outcome occurring in 2026 are not zero. Russia has shown us that it has lost much of its ability to project power onto other continents, as in Syria, Iran and Venezuela. It remains to be seen whether this can be applied to the Ukrainian front. A ceasefire would become possible if and when Russia came to realise that its military option has been neutralised. But just as Putin was living in a bubble in 2022, believing that the Ukrainians would not resist, everything suggests, within Russia’s ultra-opaque system, that he is still living in a bubble cut off from reality. Dictatorships, however, have this peculiarity: everything that appears immutable can begin to change very quickly.
The current deadlock may well not last.
About the author
Dominique Arel, a political scientist, holds the Chair in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa (Canada) and is President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN).
[1] These sanctions have been suspended since the start of the war in Iran.
Image credit: Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.
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