Just Another Two Weeks And Ukraine Will Triumph

It has to be said Millenarianism is a strange drug the Boomer class cannot seem to give up. The end of the world is always somehow at hand. First it was equality and the end of history; then the world would stop functioning because of Y2K; then the planet was melting due to climate change; then the puberty epidemic of so-called "trans kids" and the new rise of populist "fascism" destroying the "rules based international order"; then grandma had to be locked in her house to deal with an apocalyptic global disease; and of course, now the existential armageddon of AI. Every one of them has figures projected into artificial religious sainthood.

In between, they managed to fit in Europe's final confrontation with Russia.

One wonders what over-cooked crisis will be next to distract from the 700-year water grid problem? Is it Turkey, or Turkiye? Kiev or Kyiv? Which achingly-correct fashionable cause célèbre must the middle class metrosexual support this week to ensure their precious social vanity? And how will menopausal journalists cope? What we do know is their terrified, nervous, medicated children are now receiving government help in school for "climate anxiety."

Yes, we understand the preferred storyline.

• Putin is a very bad man who secretly conspires to hack our elections with bots to confuse people into voting to leave the socialist EU brotherhood of nations. He is like Hitler, and it's only a matter of days now before he finally collapses. If you say anything else, you are in league with him.
• Zelensky is a very good man. He is the like Churchill. We must clap for carers because it's only a matter of days before the heroic Ukrainians finally change the course of the war and win it majestically. If you say anything else, you are on Putin's side.

This childish bullshit is a morally incoherent playground of stupidity for our worst MPs and press activists. No amount of propaganda makes fiction a reality in the Internet age, and the desperate cope now looks increasingly absurd.

To understand how we got here, it's crucial to go back to Britain's two century rivalry with Russia.

The Last Round Of The Great Game

Britain and Russia have been circling each other for the better part of three centuries. The Great Game, Kipling's phrase though the contest predates him, ran from Central Asia to the Bosphorus, from the Crimea to the Hindu Kush, through two world wars and a Cold War punctuated by defections so theatrical they became literature. Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt. The Mitrokhin Archive. Litvinenko's polonium tea in a Mayfair hotel. The Skripal nerve agent attack in suburban Salisbury. The UK spending years and dollars proving Putin employed synthetic frog poison to kill his opponent. There is nothing new about Anglo-Russian antagonism. It is one of the longest-running strategic rivalries in modern history.

What is new is the quality of British judgment applied to it.

Previous generations of British statesmen understood, instinctively if not always elegantly, a principle so elementary it barely qualifies as strategy: do not pick a fight you have not materially prepared for. Palmerston understood it. Disraeli understood it. Churchill, whose name has been borrowed so liberally it ought to carry a licensing fee, understood it better than anyone. The entire programme of British rearmament in the late 1930s was built on the recognition of a gap between rhetoric and readiness.

The political class which committed Britain to the largest open-ended foreign military entanglement since Afghanistan appears to have forgotten the principle entirely. Or never learned it.

Arithmetic Does Not Care About Moral Certainty

Strip away the rhetoric, the Churchill cosplay, the standing ovations in the Commons, the stupid flags in Twitter bios, and what remains is arithmetic.

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 expecting a rapid decapitation of the Ukrainian state. The campaign failed catastrophically. Kyiv held. The Russian army's logistical, communications, and command failures were spectacular. Ukraine fought with extraordinary tenacity. All of this is true, and none of it is in dispute.

What followed, however, was not a Ukrainian march to victory. It was attrition on a scale most Western analysts had assumed belonged to the previous century.

The numbers as of spring 2026.

Sources: CSIS, IISS, Russia Matters, Estonian intelligence estimates, Reuters reporting.

Territory

Russia controls approximately 20 per cent of Ukraine, roughly 45,700 square miles, an area the size of Pennsylvania. This is down from a peak of around 27 per cent in March 2022, following battles of the Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions. Since then, front-line movement has been glacial. Over the twelve months to May 2026, Russia's net territorial gain was approximately 1,585 square miles, less than one per cent of Ukraine's total area. In recent weeks, Russia has actually been losing ground: a net loss of 46 square miles in the four weeks to 5 May 2026 alone.

This is not a conquering steamroller. But it is not a retreating army either. It is a stalemate purchased at monstrous human cost.

Casualties

Combined military casualties, killed, wounded, and missing, are converging on two million. CSIS estimated in January 2026 approximately 1.2 million Russian casualties, including up to 325,000 dead, and 500,000 to 600,000 Ukrainian casualties, including up to 140,000 dead. The Economist placed the combined figure at 1.1 to 1.4 million. The Wall Street Journal reported 1.2 million Russian casualties and 325,000 Russian dead. Dutch military intelligence estimated 1.2 million permanent Russian losses, including over 500,000 dead. Mediazona and BBC Russia, working from open-source identification, had verified over 352,000 Russian dead by May 2026.

These are Korean War figures. Some estimates approach Iran–Iraq levels. In four years, a war the British press routinely described as one Russia was "losing" has produced casualties comparable to some of the bloodiest conventional conflicts since 1945.

Industrial output

Russia was supposed to run out of missiles. It did not. It was supposed to run out of tanks. It did not. Estonian intelligence estimates, cited by West Point's Modern War Institute, assessed Russian factories produced approximately seven million artillery, mortar, tank, and rocket rounds in 2025 alone, including roughly 3.4 million howitzer shells. Russia has converted significant portions of its economy to wartime production. Its military spending reached approximately 16 trillion roubles, around 7.5 per cent of GDP, in 2025.

This is not the behaviour of a collapsing state. It is the behaviour of a state running a war economy, inefficiently and expensively, but running one.

Sanctions

The sanctions were going to cripple Russia. Early forecasts predicted GDP contractions of seven to ten per cent or more. Russia's GDP did not implode. Russia redirected oil exports to China and India, imposed capital controls, pivoted trade relationships, and absorbed the pressure unevenly.

Europe, by contrast, discovered the cost of energy interdependence the hard way. Even institutions which strongly support sanctions policy now acknowledge the original predictions of rapid economic collapse were badly overstated.

Every Prediction, Wrong

To understand how badly the British political class misjudged this, you need to remember what they believed, or claimed to believe, at each stage.

1. February 2022: Ukraine Will Fall

Kyiv was expected to fall within 72 to 96 hours. This was not merely Russian propaganda; it was mainstream Western intelligence assessment. Zelensky would flee. The Ukrainian command structure would disintegrate. Ukraine would become an insurgency problem, not a conventional war.

Wrong.

2. Late 2022: Russia Will Fail

After the Kharkiv and Kherson counteroffensives, the pendulum swung violently. Putin was finished. The Russian army was incompetent. Sanctions were destroying the Russian economy. Russia was running out of missiles, tanks, ammunition, will.

Wrong.

3. 2023: Ukraine Will Win With NATO Help

The great counteroffensive. Leopard 2 tanks. Bradley fighting vehicles. Storm Shadow cruise missiles. NATO training. The expectation, discussed openly in serious publications, was a strategic breakthrough: the severing of the Crimea land bridge, the isolation of Russian forces, the decisive turning point. Instead: minefields, drones, artillery, entrenched defensive belts. The front barely moved.

Wrong again.

4. 2024–2026: This Isn't Ending

The language finally, grudgingly shifted. Endurance. Sustainability. Attrition. Frozen conflict. Negotiation frameworks. Security guarantees. Notice how different this vocabulary is from "Kyiv falls in 72 hours" or "Russia collapses under sanctions."

The war produced four distinct phases of overconfidence, each followed by a correction, each followed by fresh overconfidence. The rhetoric kept predicting decisive moments. The numbers kept describing attrition.

Britain Made Another Foolish Bet

Britain committed to Ukraine on a scale extraordinary by any peacetime measure. More than almost any other issue by proportion in recent memory. Our politicians jumped in with the fervour of a trans activist at a gender critical event's toilet facilities.

• Total pledged UK support since February 2022: approximately £21.8 billion.
• Military assistance: approximately £13 billion, including £10.8 billion in gifted military aid.
• An ongoing commitment of at least £3 billion annually until 2030–31, and "for as long as necessary."
• A 100-year partnership agreement.
• A ten-year security cooperation agreement signed in January 2024.
• Operation Interflex, training 58,000 Ukrainian personnel on British soil (notice the American "through" vocabulary here).
• Britain co-chairs the Ukraine Defence Contact Group alongside Germany.
• The UK and France lead the typically-bureaucratic Multinational Force Ukraine initiative, the so-called "coalition of the willing."

For context: the entire UK defence budget is approximately 2.3 per cent of GDP. The defence establishment was already considered underfunded before the invasion. The British Army had already shrunk to its smallest size since the Napoleonic Wars. Recruitment was in crisis. Procurement was dysfunctional.

And into this environment, Britain began giving away howitzers.

The National Audit Office investigation, published in September 2024, laid the situation bare. Equipment donated from UK stockpiles up to March 2024 had a depreciated value of £171.5 million, but the MoD estimated the cost of replacing it at £2.71 billion. Wider stockpile funding was increased by £2.51 billion. A £10 billion decade-long munitions production programme was initiated. By mid-2023, the MoD assessed continuing donations at the previous rate would impose "unacceptable risks" on UK military readiness, and donations from existing stocks were sharply reduced. Over a quarter of the Army's training estate was occupied by Operation Interflex, reducing availability for British troops.

The parliamentary Armed Forces Minister Luke Pollard admitted the obvious: "We have depleted our own stocks." National stockpiles were described publicly as "threadbare."

A country with a small army, limited artillery depth, limited manufacturing redundancy, and decades of procurement contraction gave away equipment it could not quickly replace to sustain a war it could not materially influence enough to end.

The Launderer We Got Into Bed With

The false equivalence objection writes itself: Russia invaded. Ukraine was invaded. One side started it. The other is defending itself. Morally, this is uncomplicated. Strategically, it is irrelevant.

Britain picked a side. When you pick a side, the character of your partner becomes your problem. And the character of the Ukrainian state was well documented long before the first tank crossed the border.

Ukraine, before the invasion, was routinely described by Western governments, development agencies, and transparency organisations as one of the most corrupt states in Europe. Oligarchic capture of politics. Judicial corruption. Procurement fraud. Media controlled by competing business empires. Transparency International rankings placing Ukraine consistently at the bottom of European tables. The EU, IMF, and United States all repeatedly conditioned assistance on governance reforms. None of this was obscure. It was mainstream consensus.

Then there is the man himself. Volodymyr Zelensky, elected in 2019 on pledges to fight corruption and reduce oligarchic influence, appeared in the 2021 Pandora Papers investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The leaked documents revealed Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, had established a network of offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and Belize, dating back to at least 2012. Two of the offshore entities belonging to his business partners were used to purchase three properties in central London. Zelensky transferred his stake in one of the key offshore companies to his chief aide, Serhiy Shefir, shortly before the 2019 election, but the documents suggest an arrangement existed for Zelensky's family to continue receiving money from the structure. The head of Ukraine's Security Service, Ivan Bakanov, was part of the same offshore network. The offshore web's origins overlapped with the period in which Kvartal 95 entered a production deal with a media group linked to the oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, whose bank, Privatbank, was subsequently alleged to have been looted.

So it is no surprise then, when we subsequently read:

• Ukraine's second most powerful man resigned after the state anti-corruption body raided his home
• 1,400 pages of leaked files reveal a group of Zelensky’s friends exerted influence over the country’s defense, banking, and other strategic sectors.
• It goes on and on and on and on.

These stories of ongoing corruption, in true Kafka fashion are "proof" Ukraine is becoming less corrupt.... because it's reporting it now.

This is the man British parliamentarians gave standing ovations. The man every broadsheet compared to Churchill. The man whose face adorned magazine covers and charity galas from Davos to Westminster.

Nobody needed to read the Pandora Papers to know Ukraine had governance problems. Everybody who mattered had read the reports. The decision to suppress, ignore, or simply forget this context was deliberate, because the moral story required a saint, and saints do not have offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands.

The Gas: A Masterclass in Strategic Imbecility

If the stockpile depletion was reckless, the energy exposure was something worse. It was a category error so fundamental it belongs in a textbook on how not to conduct statecraft.

Britain, and Europe more broadly, spent decades integrating its energy infrastructure with Russian supply. The implicit assumption was commercial: trade interdependence would moderate geopolitical friction. Russia needed Europe's money. Europe needed Russia's gas. The arrangement was mutually constraining, or so the theory went.

Then Britain helped lead the Western response to a Russian invasion, supported unprecedented sanctions, armed Russia's enemy, trained its soldiers, targeted its finances, and expressed outrage when Russia, the world's energy superpower, used energy as a weapon.

The principle violated here is not sophisticated. It is nursery-level strategy: do not start a fight with the people who heat your house.

Britain's direct imports of Russian gas accounted for roughly four to six per cent of supply. But Britain operates within a European gas market, and when Russia reduced pipeline flows to the continent, global prices exploded. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit estimated the gas price surge cost the UK an additional £50 to 60 billion, roughly £1,000 for every adult in the country. Wholesale gas prices reached record highs. The energy price cap rose 54 per cent in April 2022. Without government intervention through the Energy Price Guarantee, it would have risen 80 per cent. British households, already among the worst-hit in Western Europe according to the IMF, absorbed energy cost increases which fed directly into food prices, fertiliser costs, supply chains, and inflation. The knock-on effects, interest rate rises, mortgage pressure, cost-of-living crisis, are still being felt.

Britain used gas for 40 per cent of its electricity generation and 85 per cent of its home heating. Its housing stock was among the least energy-efficient in Europe. And it entered a proxy confrontation with the world's gas superpower without securing an alternative supply, without building sufficient domestic generation capacity, without insulating its homes, and without apparently considering the possibility the adversary might use the one strategic weapon it possessed.

The German case was worse in absolute terms: Berlin's dependency on Russian pipeline gas was vastly greater. But at least Germany had the excuse of genuine structural entrapment. Britain's exposure was more indirect but no less damaging, and Britain's rhetorical posture was more aggressive than Germany's. Britain wanted to lead the response. Britain wanted to be seen as the most forward-leaning ally. Britain wanted Churchillian billing. Britain got Churchillian billing and a cost-of-living crisis.

234,000 Refugees In A Country With No Houses

The Homes for Ukraine scheme was launched in March 2022 with admirable speed and genuine public goodwill. Over 100,000 people registered interest within the first day. The scheme was uncapped, no limit on numbers. Ukrainians received three-year visas, the right to work, access to benefits, and NHS entitlement.

Approximately 234,000 Ukrainians came to the UK under the Homes for Ukraine and Ukraine Family Scheme programmes, the majority arriving in 2022. The Migration Observatory at Oxford estimated around 217,000 Ukrainians were living in the UK as of mid-2024. A further permission extension scheme now offers an additional 18 months, with over 133,000 applications granted.

The scheme was humane. It was also, in practical terms, the absorption of a medium-sized town into a country experiencing a housing crisis of historic severity.

By January 2026, over 12,590 Ukrainian households had been processed as homeless in England alone, two-thirds because sponsorship arrangements broke down. These figures are likely underestimates. Local authority budgets strained. Housing stock did not materialise. The temporary became, as temporary measures reliably do, semi-permanent.

None of this discredits the individuals who came. A political class made an uncapped humanitarian commitment without assessing its domestic infrastructure capacity to sustain it, the same failure, in microcosm, it made with military stockpiles, energy supply, and strategic planning.

The Millenarian Urge Won't Go Away

Climate catastrophe by 2030. Russian tanks rolling through the Suwalki Gap into Berlin. A pandemic ending civilisation. AI annihilating humanity by Thursday.

Modern Western politics, and British politics especially, operates through a recurring pattern so reliable it could be set to a car alarm.

1. A genuine problem exists.
2. It becomes moralised.
3. It becomes existential.
4. Extraordinary policies become justified.
5. Dissent becomes suspect.
6. Predictions soften or quietly expire.
7. The institutional architecture remains.

The Russia–Ukraine war fits the template precisely. The threat was real: Russia did invade a sovereign European state. The threat was then inflated rhetorically until it became civilisational. Putin as Hitler, Zelensky as Churchill, Ukraine as the front line of democracy, appeasement as the only alternative to escalation, negotiation as Munich, scepticism as collaboration.

But the material evidence for the most extreme version of the threat, a Russian invasion of NATO, a Russian march across Europe, a direct military challenge to Britain, was always thin.

Russia struggled for four years to take incremental territory from a neighbouring state across a land border, with numerical superiority, escalation dominance, a larger economy, and partial mobilisation. The notion it would simultaneously project a major amphibious or land force against the combined military weight of NATO was not credible. NATO itself doubled its eastern flank battlegroups precisely because the threat was real within a specific zone, the Baltic states, Poland, the Black Sea littoral. It was never a realistic direct threat to the British Isles.

The genuine threats to Britain from Russia (cyber attacks, undersea infrastructure sabotage, intelligence operations, naval probing, nuclear coercion), required different capabilities than the ones Britain was depleting. They required cyber resilience, undersea surveillance, naval readiness, and domestic infrastructure hardening. Not howitzer donations.

Russian fighters still intercepted RAF aircraft dangerously, coming within six metres of a Rivet Joint over the Black Sea in April 2026. This week it jammed the GPS of an aircraft carrying the Defence Secretary. Russian intelligence vessels still transited UK waters. Russian submarines still probed. The "fight them over there so they don't bother us here" argument collapsed in practice. We were doing both, arming Ukraine and facing Russian harassment at home, while the forces responsible for home defence thinned out.

Political Vanity And Wilful Blindness

The question is not whether Britain's political class got it wrong. The question is whether there were basic indicators, visible at the time, suggesting they were pursuing a course their own state could not sustain.

The answer is unambiguously yes.

The stockpiles were known to be thin. The army was known to be small. The defence industrial base was known to be hollowed out. Energy dependency on a European gas market intertwined with Russian supply was known. Ukraine's governance problems were known. The history of prediction failure, from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to sanctions projections to counteroffensive expectations, was known. The absence of clearly defined strategic objectives, cost ceilings, replenishment timelines, or exit conditions was known.

What was chosen instead was emotion. Moral certainty substituted for strategic preparation. Churchill's language was borrowed without Churchill's prior insistence on industrial mobilisation. Photo opportunities with the man from the Pandora Papers replaced sober calculation of shell production rates, demographic constraints, and industrial endurance.

The initial emergency support in 2022, NLAWs, Javelins, intelligence, training, was defensible. Ukraine was under acute existential threat. British assistance, alongside American and European support, was probably decisive in preventing the fall of Kyiv. A good decision.

Everything which followed, the open-ended commitment, the naive "as long as it takes" rhetoric, the escalating pledges, the absurd 100-year partnership, the stockpile depletion, the refusal to define objectives, was not strategy. It was gesture. It was gesture performed at the expense of national readiness, domestic resilience, and fiscal discipline, by a political class more interested in the emotional gratification of wartime moral theatre than in the unglamorous business of ensuring Britain could actually sustain the posture it adopted.

A responsible alternative existed.

Emergency aid, yes, but from new production, not hollowed stockpiles. Explicit objectives: Ukrainian survival, no Russian advance beyond defined lines, negotiation leverage for a settlement. Hard burden-sharing inside NATO, instead of posturing as moral vanguard while others free-rode. Energy security as a precondition for confrontation, not an afterthought. Rearmament before escalation. A diplomatic off-ramp maintained throughout, not appeasement, but statecraft.

Instead, Westminster committed Britain psychologically to a war footing before committing materially to the prerequisites of a war footing. The political class rediscovered the language of Churchill while presiding over armed forces, industrial capacity, and infrastructure Churchill would not have recognised.

There was always enough money for flags, speeches, and standing ovations. Never enough for roads, reservoirs, energy security, or the ammunition to replace what was given away.

Trust Me Bro, Just Another Thirty Billion

Russia is not winning cleanly. Ukraine is not losing cleanly. The West is not managing a triumph. The actual numbers describe something colder: a grinding industrial war in which territory barely moves, casualties compound, budgets distort, and both sides consume men, money, shells, drones, and political patience at rates no serious British statesman should describe with Churchill cosplay.

Russia is failing expensively. Ukraine is surviving expensively. Europe is underwriting an open-ended war without admitting the strategic price. And Britain, having committed itself rhetorically, materially, and financially to the most ambitious foreign entanglement since Afghanistan, still cannot answer the question any competent strategist would have asked before the first shipment left Portsmouth:

What, precisely, is the objective? What does victory look like? And what happens if it never arrives?

The war was not a test of so-called "British values." It was a test of British state common sense. The numbers are now in. We failed it.