Welcome again. US president Joe Biden, talking in Warsaw on the eve of the primary anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, stated that Vladimir Putin “may finish the warfare with a phrase”. However the Russian chief will take no such step, until he can declare victory on phrases completely unacceptable to Ukraine and its western supporters — that appears clear from Putin’s defiant public speeches in Moscow this week. So what’s going to occur subsequent? I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

Predictions in regards to the consequence of lengthy, apparently evenly fought wars are fraught with danger. Who in November 1917 foresaw that, 12 months later, France, the UK, the US and their allies would obtain a complete victory within the first world warfare over Germany and the opposite Central Powers?

Having spent this week sifting via an intensive vary of commentaries on the Ukraine warfare, I’ve the impression that the consensus prediction is that neither aspect is heading for a decisive victory, no peace settlement is remotely in sight and even a ceasefire — short-term or in any other case — is unlikely any time quickly.

A warfare of attrition

An excellent evaluation that units out this argument comes from Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow on the Council on International Relations and a former Moscow-based US diplomat. Writing for the Harvard Kennedy College’s Russia Issues web site, Graham explains that the home politics of Russia, Ukraine and the US all level to the continuation of “the warfare of attrition”.

Listed here are Graham’s ideas on Putin:

He has proven little interest in negotiating something aside from Ukraine’s capitulation . . . His hyperbolic rhetoric, likening the battle to the nice patriotic wars of survival in opposition to Hitler and Napoleon, limits his room for manoeuvre.

On Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “[He] has dedicated himself to complete victory . . . [He] can not commerce land for peace and hope to outlive politically.”

On Biden, the warfare and the 2024 US presidential election: “Having framed it as a historic contest between democracy and autocracy . . . Biden can not afford to see Ukraine defeated and hope to be re-elected.”

The US president himself put it this fashion in Warsaw:

President Putin selected this warfare. Day-after-day the warfare continues is his selection. He may finish the warfare with a phrase. It’s easy. If Russia stopped invading Ukraine, it will finish the warfare. If Ukraine stopped defending itself in opposition to Russia, it will be the top of Ukraine.

That final level is bolstered in an article by Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, for Challenge Syndicate showing within the Korea Occasions. What would have occurred, Bildt asks, if Russia had gained the warfare shortly a yr in the past?

[Zelenskyy] most certainly would have been murdered by Russian particular forces or incarcerated after a swift trial. At greatest, he can be main a authorities in exile from Warsaw or some other place . . . Ukraine as a political entity would have ceased to exist, returning to the standing that it held beneath the Russian imperialism of the Nineteenth century.

And so Ukraine fights on, regardless of excessive casualties, mass displacement of civilians and the warfare’s devastating affect on the financial system, as set out in this IMF report in December.

Western army and monetary assist retains Ukraine’s warfare effort going, although — as the FT stories — the finance ministry in Kyiv seems to have obtained, as much as December, solely €31bn of €64bn promised by western international locations because the invasion.

Because the Kiel Institute’s chart above reveals, the US offers the lion’s share of the west’s help, however for a way lengthy?

Felicia Schwartz, our Washington-based US international affairs and defence correspondent, writes that when rock-solid political and public assist for supplying Ukraine with weapons and cash is softening, and that it may come beneath nonetheless extra stress because the 2024 election approaches.

Battle goals

Any vital discount of US assist would absolutely shatter Ukraine’s hope of reaching all its warfare goals. These have hardened, because the battle has intensified, into the whole restoration of presidency management over each territory seized by Russia since 2014, together with Crimea and the south-eastern Donbas area.

Few western leaders dare to counsel in public that these warfare goals are too bold, however some assume so in non-public. Russia’s atrocities in occupied zones and its deportations of Ukrainian civilians, together with many hundreds of kids, make it particularly tough for western leaders to drift the concept of leaving such areas beneath Moscow’s management — whilst a part of a ceasefire, not to mention a long-term settlement.

Nevertheless, it’s no much less true that Putin has studiously prevented spelling out Russia’s warfare goals in exact element. Would he be happy with Crimea and 4 different areas of Ukraine which he declared in September to be annexed to Russia, although they aren’t beneath Moscow’s full army management?

Putin and Russia’s historic future

In my opinion, it will be unwise to imagine that. The destruction of the post-1991 impartial Ukrainian state, and the absorption of Ukrainian identification right into a Russian-led east Slav union, appear to me to be basic to Putin’s more and more mystical conception of Russia’s future.

Few have described Putin’s obsessions extra succinctly than the historian Thomas Otte, writing for the H-Diplo web site virtually a yr in the past:

Putin’s views . . . replicate his embrace of the essentially anti-western, anti-European idea of russky mir [the Russian world], a partly historic, partly ideological assemble that attracts on the concept of holy Rus’ of the tenth century — itself an “invention” of Nineteenth-century historians.

It encompasses late tsarist concepts of an ethnocultural pan-Slav bond between the japanese Slavs, and it’s fuelled by reminiscences of victory over fascism within the Nice Patriotic Battle.

Otte additionally underlines the significance for Putin of his grievance-filled competition that the west betrayed Russia after the chilly warfare by accepting the newly free, former communist international locations of central and japanese Europe into Nato. Mary Elise Sarotte, a number one authority on the diplomacy of that period, demolished this argument within the FT final weekend.

But, as Otte factors out, Putin’s allegations of western dangerous religion have was the Russian equal of post-1918 Germany’s rightwing nationalist “stab within the again” fable, in line with which Jews, socialists and different homegrown “traitors” precipitated the nation to lose the primary world warfare.

Briefly, Putin’s thirst for conquest, revenge and a revered place within the annals of Russian historical past stays unquenched. Former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev, who resigned final yr in protest on the assault on Ukraine, presents this perception into Putin and the officers who serve him:

He’ll all the time be a supply of warfare, of aggression, of destabilisation . . . This warfare is his private warfare as a result of no person round him wished this warfare. They usually don’t need it now. They only observe it as a result of it’s not their duty to assume and determine.

What do you assume? Will the combating in Ukraine cease by the top of this yr? Vote right here.

Extra on this matter

How Russia’s warfare shattered international vitality routes — an evaluation by Benjamin Storrow and Sara Schonhardt for E&E Information

Tony’s picks of the week

• Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has embraced a extra lively position in public life as he seeks to shore up the Iranian regime’s authority after essentially the most intense demonstrations because the Islamic revolution, the FT’s Najmeh Bozorgmehr stories from Tehran

• Poland’s ruling Legislation and Justice occasion has been on the again foot for a lot of the previous three and a half years, but it surely nonetheless has an opportunity of retaining energy after parliamentary elections set for later this yr, says Aleks Szczerbiak, politics professor on the UK’s College of Sussex