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Four years after Vladimir Putin launched the biggest conflict on European soil since the second world war, the human cost of his revanchist ambition mounts ever higher. Across a 750-mile frontline in the east of Ukraine, Russian forces make minimal progress despite relentless attrition, advancing more slowly than troops during the battle of the Somme. In 2025, the estimated number of Russian casualties in “the meat grinder” was 415,000.
For Ukraine, the suffering will scar generations to come. Battlefield casualties are estimated to be about 600,000. Since the invasion, as many as 6 million people have been displaced inside the country and 4 million, mainly women and children, have left. Civilian deaths soared last year as Russia stepped up its bombing campaign of cities and infrastructure in an effort to break Ukrainians’ will.
But though exhausted and longing for peace, Ukraine is not broken. In February 2022, Mr Putin believed that his “special military operation” would be over in weeks. Since that historic miscalculation, Moscow’s attempt to outlast Kyiv’s ability and willingness to resist has only produced a virtual military stalemate and continuing defiance. Latterly, European solidarity with Volodymyr Zelenskyy empowered him to reject Donald Trump’s bullying proposals for a carve-up of territory, in which unconquered land in the Donbas region would be surrendered to Russia.
The outlook, nevertheless, remains desperately grim. Mr Putin has strung Mr Trump along since he re-entered the White House. But the Russian president has no serious interest in peace talks, which ground to a halt in Geneva last week on the second day after only two hours. Although 30,000 to 35,000 Russian enlistees are now required each month simply to replace those lost in combat, Mr Putin’s intention is to continue the besiegement and bombardment of Ukraine in order to obtain decisive leverage in the negotiating room. Nor has the Kremlin retreated from its maximalist demands, which, if implemented, would amount to the erasure of Ukraine as a sovereign state.
Mr Trump, having told the world that he would end the war within 24 hours, is likely to try again to browbeat Mr Zelenskyy over the Donbas before November’s midterm elections. But Mr Putin’s blood-soaked aspirations go beyond the handover of land. His goal is to reassert Russia’s great power status at the expense of Ukraine’s independence. Against that ominous backdrop – and in its own strategic self-interest – Europe must do all it can to strengthen Kyiv’s ability to achieve a peace on its own terms, with credible security guarantees.
As well as renewing Ukraine’s military capabilities, that means maximising economic pressure on Russia through further sanctions, and tougher enforcement of existing ones. Mr Putin’s war economy is not yet collapsing, but it is now struggling. Further decline may change his calculus of risk, in a way that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians has not.
A week after Mr Putin’s invasion, a mother fleeing Kyiv told our reporter Shaun Walker: “Look at these faces around us, they are exactly the same as in the photographs from the second world war, and it’s just five days. Can you imagine what will happen in a month?” Ukraine’s struggle has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s battle to resist Nazi Germany. History will judge Mr Putin for his crimes. The west must continue to stand by Kyiv.
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