Don’t expect the war in Ukraine to end anytime soon
Ian Proud was a member of His Britannic Majesty’s Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023. He served as the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to February 2019. He recently published his memoir, “A Misfit in Moscow: How British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019,” and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute.
Cross-posted from Ian’s Substack “The Peacemonger”
Photo: Wikipedia
I have said for a long time that the war in Ukraine will continue into 2027. Without a major rethink of policy on the European side, which currently appears extremely unlikely, or without a significant military escalation from the Russian side, which is possibly more likely, the war could in fact run on much longer than that.
I remain extremely pessimistic of there being any policy change on the European side under the current leadership of Von der Leyen with Merz in charge in Berlin, Macron in charge in Paris and Starmer in charge in London.
The main reason is that the European position towards the war has remained unchanged since its beginning. Arguably it has hardened with the plans to remilitarise Europe. The current posture rests on their being no negotiations and no concessions towards Russia, even in spite of US led efforts under Trump to broker peace, which the European side has sought to derail at every turn.
I call this approach ‘anti-diplomacy’ in which negotiations themselves are viewed as a prize and are withheld for fear of rewarding the adversary, in this case Russia.
As it relates to the Ukraine war there is an underlying and sometimes stated assumption here too, including in the mainstream media, that eventual war with Russia is inevitable, and that Ukraine is buying time for Europe to rearm.
At the frontline of Europe’s ‘anti-diplomacy’ is its arch ‘anti-diplomat’, Kaja Kallas, who appears to have no diplomatic skills, or at least not outside of the committee rooms of Brussels, where she appears remarkably effective in herding the cats.
Her most recent reassertion of ‘anti-diplomacy’ happened last week when she said that the EU shouldn’t “beg” to talk to the Russians.
“What we have seen so far is that Russia does not want to engage in any kind of dialogue,” Kallas said after a Nordic-Baltic ministerial meeting. “We should not humiliate ourselves by being the demanders — you know, we beg you to talk to us.” Instead, she said, the goal must be to push Russia “from pretending to negotiate to actually negotiate.”
This was the most bizarre statement for several reasons.
Firstly, Russia has shown itself willing to engage in dialogue. Immediately after the war started in March/April 2022 when a peace deal was almost reached in Istanbul, before it was scotched by Boris Johnson and Victoria Nuland. During talks in Istanbul in the summer of 2025 after Trump came to power. In Putin’s meeting with Trump in Alaska which led to some sort of understanding of what Russia’s demands were. In direct talks with between the Russian and Ukrainian side in late 2025 and early 2026.
Russia’s participation in negotiations was neither demanded nor begged for.
Objectively, European politicians, through ‘anti-diplomacy’, have been unwilling to enter into negotiations with Russia at any point since the war started. After the Alaska talks, Ursula von der Leyen said there was no intent in Moscow to engage in peace talks, even after Putin had held talks with Trump, which was bizarre but also familiar, given the frequency with which this line is trotted out in Brussels and elsewhere across Europe.
Ten months after the war started, Joe Biden said he would only talk to Putin if Russia showed real intent to end the war, in other words, the US would not enter into talks unless Russia agreed to every western demand without securing any concessions including on NATO membership.
In December, Macron said that Europe will need to engage with Putin though that offer went nowhere amid infighting in Brussels around who should be the European representative in Putative talks.
Keir Starmer has said several times that he has no plans to talk to Putin, indeed, the Uk said that it would not enter into talks with Russia even if Europe did.
So, this “anti-diplomacy”, pushed by Ukraine’s western sponsors in which not talking to Russia is the norm, is established and fairly set in stone. In fact, it was first initiated by the UK Foreign Office in the summer of 2014, after Philip Hammond became foreign secretary. Twelve years down the track, the Europeans have adopted this approach lock stock and smoking missile launcher, and now own it.
More recently, Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever has suggested talks with Russia and absolutely nothing has happened.
So, looking back at Kallas’ statement you can see how absurd it is.
Firstly, it is absurd in its suggestion that Europe might “beg” Russia for peace talks. Europe has done everything in it power to avoid talks. If von der Leyen, Merz, Macron, Starmer, or any combination suggested talks with Russia, I believe Putin would agree to that. All the evidence of the talks that have taken place so far, brokered by the US, suggest that is so.
Indeed, throughout the war, there have been ongoing Russia-Ukrainian talks about practical issues such as prisoner and body swaps, and also on the reunification of displaced children with their Ukrainian parents.
A key principle of talks is the need to discuss areas of disagreement and search for ways to find compromise that will be acceptable to both sides and which both sides can agree to. And when I say both sides, I mean just that, both the Russian side and the Ukrainian side. Any peace deal will have to leave both countries feeling safer than they did before the war, and confident that war won’t resume again.
A popular misinformation line in Europe’s “anti-diplomacy” has been that Ukraine must not be left out of talks. And yet, when has Ukraine ever been left out of talks since the war began?
The pathology of European diplomacy has descended into holding countless Summits and meetings about peace that Zelensky attends, but to which the other combatant in the conflict – Russia – is not included.
This summitry serves not to resolve differences between Russia and Ukraine and search for common ground, but rather to reinforce the Ukrainian position as the only right and just position that should not be resiled from.
These summits are intended to avoid any possibility of compromise on Ukraine’s side and to insist on total compromise from the Russian side. As I’ve said before, Zelensky’s permanent star billing at these events allows him to own the narrative that Russia isn’t interested in peace and that only by supporting Ukraine with more funding and weapons, can peace be achieved.
One meeting between Putin and Trump, however, provoked a cacophony about Zelensky being excluded, yet this, too, is nonsense, as Trump has met him on several occasions.
Diplomatic negotiations aren’t about friendship they are about dispute resolution. They are not about favouring one side over another side. A single meeting does not confer legitimacy. It just confirms that there are important things to be discussed.
Europe’s “anti-diplomacy” has created a vacuum which, until Trump came to power, US leaders and now, European and British leaders filled with money and weapons. They didn’t fill it, by the way, with troops, preferring to let Zelensky fight to the last Ukrainian, so the Poles, Germans, French, Italians and sparse ranks of Tommies could be spared.
This is what I have described many times as the neither war nor peace posture of the British and Europeans. They don’t want a direct war with Russia, neither do they want peace with Russia, and so proxy war has become the preferred policy fudge whatever the cost in Ukrainian lives and livelihoods, not to mention Ukraine’s catastrophic depopulation and demographic cliff edge.
What is absolutely clear, is that funding Ukraine and giving it more weapons isn’t intended at resolving Ukraine’s dispute with Russia.
Many will say, of course, that if we don’t give Ukraine weapons, then Russia will take over the whole country. But no evidence is ever provided that Russia’s goal in entering this was really to conquer the whole of Ukraine, rather than to prevent the possibility of Ukraine being used as another NATO client state on Russia’s border.
Right at the start of the war, the first round of peace talks in Istanbul seemed to reach a point where Russia and Ukraine could agree to the conditions for the war to be brought to a close. That included Ukrainian neutrality and non-membership of NATO and an acceptance that Ukraine could join the EU.
So, having captured much less land than Russia occupies today, the Russian side was willing to sue for peace and pull its troops back from the north of Kyiv as a confidence building measure.
Organisations such as the Institute for the Study of War in DC, run by Victoria Nuland, has since claimed that the agreement was a surrender of Ukrainian sovereignty.
Yet, I don’t believe the first Istanbul deal would have been a surrender of Ukrainian sovereignty, but rather a guarantee of its future neutrality a neutrality, by the way, which would have allowed for a slow – and let’s be honest it may take a generation if it ever happens – normalisation of relations with Russia.
We now know, of course, that Victoria Nuland encouraged Zelensky not to take the deal. But the point is that both the Ukrainian and Russian negotiation teams believed that it was a deal that both countries could live with in the interests of ending the war.
That is how diplomacy works. Two sides with vastly opposing positions undertake tough negotiations to hammer out a framework that both can live with recognising that, absent a decisive military victory by one side, some compromise will have to be made.
Here we bring in the second aspect of “anti-diplomat” Kallas’ statement.
The goal must be to push Russia “from pretending to negotiate to actually negotiate.”
If you consider this statement carefully, I don’t understand what is meant by “pretending” to negotiate. Russia has been negotiating and a whole host of prisoner swaps, body swaps and children reunifications have happened at different times.
It also raises the question, actually, to negotiate with whom? Because Russia has been negotiating with Ukraine in circumstances where European leaders refused to engage with Russia in negotiations. There has been no pretence on the European side, they have not wanted either to pretend to, or, actually to negotiate.
And it is clear from Kallas’s rhetoric that pushing Russia to actually negotiate means insisting that Russia simply accepts Europe’s demands for how peace should be restored to Ukraine, with no Russian conditions being met in any settlement.
This, again, is clearly absurd, because Russia occupies 20% of Ukraine’s land – whatever the rights and wrongs of that situation – and has the funds to sustain the war for the foreseeable future, a position that Europe does not occupy. If the intention is to pressure Russia to end the war then that itself implies a negotiation that has not been offered by Europe and does not appear to be wanted by Europe.
Because any negotiation will inevitably lead to some concessions being offered to Russia that will allow Putin to settle and be able to show to his people that the four years of devastation was worth it in some way.
Kaja Kallas on the other hand has over the past year made wild demands that peace in Ukraine will only be possible if Russia fully withdraws from Ukraine back to the 1991 borders, pays full war reparations for all the damage caused to Ukraine, while leaving the door open to Ukraine joining NATO.
It may seem obvious to point this out, but Russia will never agree to this. If Russia was losing badly, then the situation might be different. If Russia was losing badly, perhaps Europe might prefer to maintain the war to inflict a much talked about strategic defeat on Russia. But neither of these scenarios have ever appeared even remotely likely.
So, the cold reality boils down to Europe doing everything in their power to avoid the possibility of such diplomatic negotiations that might result in an agreement between Russia and Ukraine that was markedly weaker than the maximalist calls they have been making since the war began.
And, unfortunately, the longer the war continues, the more solidified this position is becoming in Brussels.
Why? Because a peace deal with Russia will amount to a PR disaster for Europe.
Why? Because since the start of the war, European leaders to a person have been saying that Ukraine will win, and that the situation isn’t as bad as portrayed.
That position is relentlessly reinforced by the western mainstream media who insist that Russia is collapsing and that, ultimately, Ukraine will prevail.
This has never looked remotely true to any independent observer who looks at evidence of economic collapse, troops losses and territorial gains. Yet it is an unshakeable narrative punctuated just occasionally, by the odd voice who raises a hand only to be slapped down immediately, like the Punch and Judy crocodile.
Ukraine not winning will make citizens across Europe ask why they were lied to for all this time.
Since the war has started, citizens have been sanctioned, and in some cases had their citizenship revoked, naysayers are summarily detained at British airports and interrogated if they disagree, elections are rigged in Central European nations, lawfare is used in France against the political party with the largest share of public support, all because they disagree with this narrative.
And you need to understand something here too.
When the anti-diplomat Kaja Kallas holds another presser in yet another expensive designer dress or coat, she isn’t doing so to impart truth, she is doing so to gain attention.
She is safe and democratically uncontested – or rather, undemocratically uncontested – in her job at least until 2029 so she can say what she wants with the mainstream media hanging on her every word and reporting it verbatim as if it is truth.
I don’t know how many politicians in the foreign policy space you’ve met, but I’ve met a lot and I can tell you one thing, they love to cut a dash on the world stage. Starmer is another terrible example but then, in fairness, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were dreadful examples too.
Being right is entirely incidental to being right in front of the camera particularly, in Boris’ case, if the reporter is a bit of a filly.
So, the point is, it is far harder to bullshit when it comes to domestic policy. If the NHS is crap, if rats are taking over Birmingham, if innocent kids are being killed with zombie knives in London because the police are too timid to stop and searching sketchy looking youngsters, if young girls are being gang raped, then these are political stories that a British politician can’t ignore.
When it comes to foreign policy, they have a greater free reign to say what they want because most citizens are first and foremost concerned with basic survival and raising their kids and couldn’t really care that much about the situation in Ukraine. Except when it hits their bank balances, in which case the mainstream media will tell them it is Putin’s fault and we have to defeat him and we will defeat him because Ukraine is winning.
What happens, though, when he isn’t defeated? Suddenly, Ukraine becomes like a giant rat clambering over an uncollected bin bag in Birmingham or a yobbo walking away from a crime scene with a parent in tears over their murdered schoolchild. People will ask, hold on a minute, you said this wasn’t going to happen and that you were going to sort things out. You lied to us.
So, “anti-diplomacy” is held aloft by those like Kallas who are trapped by a dread fear of being revealed as bare faced liars and narcissists who kept a war going because they wanted more time in front of the cameras to shake their booty on the world stage and show how tough they were.
Because, you see the problem isn’t just that Ukraine isn’t winning and isn’t going to win, the problem is that Europe’s leaders are now making increasingly poverty stricken European citizens pay for Ukraine not to win. All the while Zelensky’s corrupt cronies steal hundreds of millions of dollars in western aid provided, and while ever more brutal tactics are used to drag unwilling young Ukrainian men to the front line – almost never reported by the mainstream media.
While the situation gets ever more dire for Ukraine, European leaders still insist that Ukraine is winning and just a few more weapons and a few more tens of billions will do the trick. Except that it won’t. It will just make us poorer and less safe.
And when I say poorer, peace will be devastating politically to European leaders who have merrily watched their economies tip into deindustrialisation, even before Trump’s war against Iran started. The cost of supporting Ukraine may just as likely go up after the war ends. And the self-harming, de-industrialisation inducing sanctions against Russia will probably remain.
Why have European economies tipped into deindustrialisation? Because, and I have said more times than I care to remember, Europe has chosen as an article to policy to absorb high energy costs to cut off hundreds of billions of Euros which in the past would have been paid to Russia, as a major supplier of oil and gas.
Again, that gamble may have been worthwhile had it worked. Europe’s leaders haven’t explained the cause of their cost of living crises to their citizens as yet. But had Russia buckled economically, pulled out of Ukraine, paid full war reparations to Ukraine then Europe’s leaders would have been able to sell the line to their voters that this was a necessary pain to defeat Russia in Ukraine.
Except that manifestly hasn’t happened. Russia has earned more from oil and gas in the four years since war started than in the four years before war commenced. It has simply sold it to China and India instead.
Yes, economic growth slowed to 1% in 2025 in Russia as the Central Bank sought to bear down on high inflation. But at the same time, growth in Germany was 0.2%, in Italy, 0.5% and in France 0.8%. German debt 63.5% of GDP, France 115% of GDP and Italy 137% of GDP. Russian debt is less than 20% of GDP. Unemployment in Germany 6.3%, in France 7.9% and in Italy 5.5% compared to 2.2% in Russia.
Russia has had to spend more to fund the war in Ukraine, yet its fiscal deficit is still lower than Germany, France and Italy. Europe can only fund the war in Ukraine by borrowing money to lend it to Ukraine. Russia has vast and growing reserve funds from its yearly current account surpluses that it can largely fund the war with little recourse to borrowing.
Russia is the most sanctioned economy on the planet and yet no one seems able to ask why it appears to be performing better than all of Europe’s biggest economies on key economic variables. These are observable facts, taken from data provided by the governments of each country. And before you say it, Russia maintains as high quality statistical standards as Europe.
The point is that Europe’s self-inflicted economic plight has been justified on the basis that it is in the interests of weakening Russia and helping Ukraine to win.
Yet that hasn’t happened. Which raises the question, why not revisit foreign policy towards Russia? Which takes us back to the start of this discussion. Europe has absolutely no interest in a diplomatic settlement with Russia, despite the harm it causes to itself by the war’s continuance in Ukraine. Because Europe is locked in “anti-diplomacy”.
This is hairbrained and yet, as no one in Brussels has been elected to office and as they live off the power trip of being putatively in charge of Europe, it comes as no surprise. What comes as a greater surprise is that the Germans, the French, the Italians and also, of course, the Brits, continue along this fruitless avenue.
The obvious solution, especially since Trump launched his war against Iran, should be to import cheap Russian energy to boost Europe’s economies.
If the war against Iran ended, a more diversified European import mix that included Russian energy would undoubtedly drive down energy prices across Europe.
If the war against Iran continues, Europe’s economic woes will get much worse if they maintain the embargo against Russia, at a time when Russia will profit massively from hugely inflated global energy prices. Lifting the embargo on Russian energy would at least help to moderate the economic damage caused by Trump’s war. Yet that, predictably, seems unlikely.
In fact, I see zero chance of this change in policy position taking place. Anti-diplomats like Kallas are too invested in the status quo and their political futures depend on the war’s continuance, given the devastating impact on their reputations if it ends.
That means Ukraine has been given another 90 billion Euro loan, which the Eurocrats themselves had to borrow to give to them. If the war continues beyond 2027, then a further multibillion loan will follow.
But just imagine if, instead of putting those billions into war, European countries got behind peace in Ukraine and also offered billions to rebuild their country and their economy? How much better off would Ukraine be today if, since 2014, Europe had got behind the Minsk II agreement, told the USA and Victoria Nuland to go away, and settled on peaceable relations with Russia?
How much easier would it be for European citizens to thrive in their countries if their governments were spending money on public services and not war?
How many factories in Europe might survive closure if Europe started buying lower cost Russian energy again?
How many lives would be saved in Ukraine and in Russia if the war ended tomorrow?
How many cities would be able to start to rebuild if the missile and drones stopped flying?
You know the answers to these rhetorical questions, of course.
Yet the anti-diplomats in charge do not or, if they do, are too focussed on clinging on to power prestige and status to admit it.
Europe desperately needs diplomats and states people who put the needs of their citizens first. Right now, you will not find them in Brussels, London, Paris or Berlin. Anyone who votes for globalist liberals in elections coming up over the coming three years is voting for a war with Russia in the future. It’s time for everyone to vote these warmongers out of power at every opportunity and to protest where they can, and to join a growing community of peacemongers worldwide.
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