Four Years On – Ten Lessons from Russia’s War in Ukraine

By early January 2026, Russia’s war in Ukraine will have gone on longer than the Soviets’ Great Patriotic War, waged from the onset of Operation Barbarossa on Sunday 22 June 1941 until the Nazi capitulation on Saturday 9 May 1945.

The comparison is not merely chronological; it is rather civilisational. The earlier war forged the Soviet myth of historical destiny through sacrifice, suffering and an almost theological narrative of redemption through endurance. The present war, by contrast, stretches into the future stripped of legitimacy and strategic coherence, prolonged not by necessity but by delusion, not by conviction but by the refusal of power to confront the catastrophic consequences of its own aggression. Empires, history reminds us, rarely collapse because they are defeated on the battlefield. They unravel when the stories that once sustained their authority finally dissolve under the weight of their own misjudgement.

The bleakness of the frontline today in Ukraine stands in stark difference with the cheer of Christmas elsewhere. The choices before Kyiv contrast with those before Western capitals about spending on social services. Russian strategy appears to have moved from achieving dramatic breakthroughs to the slow asphyxiation of the Ukrainian Defence Forces through attrition rather than manoeuvre. Unspectacular but effective, particularly if drones prevent any concentration of force. This is unimaginably tough for those involved, sparsely dotted along miles of frozen trenches. Field Marshal Slim spoke of the predominating factor in modern warfare being loneliness. How much more so today.

And the contrast with the concerns and language of politicians could not be starker. On 19 December, 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that Ukraine was ‘not our war.’ He added that Washington cannot ‘force’ a peace deal on Ukraine, though he indicated that America’s negotiators are still trying to figure out what Russia wants despite US intelligence agencies warning that ‘Putin has not abandoned his aims of capturing all of Ukraine and reclaiming parts of Europe that belonged to the former Soviet empire.’ For nearly eight decades, the central assumption of Western statecraft had been that European stability was indivisible from American security, that aggression left unanswered metastasises into systemic disorder and that the defence of free societies abroad was inseparable from the preservation of legitimacy at home. To speak otherwise is not realism; it is the abdication of a strategic inheritance patiently constructed after 1945. If this US administration and Russia under Vladimir Putin share one thing, it seems to be their willingness to tear Europe apart.

The echoes with the past are both striking and eery. ‘We have sustained a defeat without a war,’ said Winston Churchill in emphasising that the Munich process of 1938 had merely delayed the inevitable conflict with Hitler’s Germany, ‘the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road. This is only the beginning of the reckoning.’

The war in Ukraine has been a catastrophic failure for Putin in almost every measure, in spite of the lack of requited generosity by some (but not all) Western governments towards Ukraine. But the White House is offering him a way out. President Trump’s real-estate-deal-cum-peace-plan could reward his aggression in enabling him to snatch a victory for him against the run of play. In this convergence of convenience, both Putin and Trump reveal a shared indifference toward the rules-based international order, the former dismantling it deliberately through invasion, the latter abandoning it by neglect, having ceased even to pretend that its preservation remains a strategic obligation.

Ten lessons stand out from the conflict that started in February 2022:

• 1. War as a test of will. There is an ongoing failure to think about war as a long-term process shaped by the constraints, context and choices of politics and people. There is a tendency, exacerbated by the media age, to rather think about wars as short-run events, a trait founded in an ahistorical understanding of what war – rather than movies or battles – is about. Reality, as Ukraine has reminded the world with brutal consistency, obeys no such script. For instance, at the outset, the outcome of the conflict was seen by many, not least in Moscow and Western capitals, as a foregone conclusion, a capitulation not a contest, with a heavyweight the certain winner over the middleweight power. Instead. it has proven an epic if grim struggle. The belief at the outset that the Ukrainians would easily fold also reflects a lack of understanding about what constitutes fighting strength, including what the respective sides believed they were fighting for.

  Historically, the mobilisation of resources, technical ingenuity, political imagination and the creation of alliances have enjoyed a significant bearing on the outcome. Such features can be seen, for example, in the substitution of drones for relative deficiencies in manpower, airpower, artillery and armour, and their increasing integration, proliferation, sophistication and accuracy. ‘Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will,’ wrote Mahatma Gandhi. Wars are thus won by not the quantitative tally of resources or the order of battle at the beginning of war, but by the longer-term qualitative metrics of politics, organisational sophistication (that is, logistics) and the will, leadership and skills of people.

  From Rome’s legions broken in the Teutoburg Forest to France’s slow unravelling in Algeria, from Spain’s exhaustion in the Low Countries to America’s long descent into disillusion in Vietnam, history offers no shortage of empires that possessed overwhelming means yet lacked the moral geometry required to convert power into victory. What endures, instead, are communities that construct coherence under pressure and meaning under threat. Put simply, the Ukrainians also had a vote in the outcome, and still do.

• 2. Ukraine is not losing, and Russia is not winning. The war continues to go much better for Ukraine than the generally gloomy prognosis suggesting the imminence of Ukraine’s demise maintains. Much of this ‘imminent analysis’ rests on a lazy axiom of international commentary: that size determines destiny, and that large states do not lose wars against smaller ones. History, however, offers a colder education. In fact, as the historian Timothy Snyder reminds, they lose wars all the time: think America in Viet Nam or Afghanistan; or Russia in Crimea, the war with Japan, the First World War, Afghanistan, or the first war in Chechnya.

  Some argue that the Soviet Union would have risked losing the Second World War without considerable Western materiel assistance. This highlights how the notion, overall, of Russia as a great power is a misnomer, and grants it more status – and correspondingly, greater respect – than it deserves. The war has moreover hollowed out its economy which, like its war machine, is increasingly dependent on Chinese support. Great powers are not a function of nuclear weapons (although that can help, as below), or even of geography, but organisation and outlook.

• 3. Western politicians have so far been unable to reconcile the difficult choices necessary to ensure a Ukrainian victory. In King Lear, the aging monarch’s tragedy does not begin with cruelty or malice, but with a catastrophic political misjudgement, a failure to make the one decision that would preserve the realm. He divides what should have been held together, postpones what should have been settled and convinces himself that delay is prudence. By the time clarity arrives, the structure he governed has already begun to collapse. Western policy toward Ukraine has followed a disturbingly similar logic. This is because victory has for many politicians in the West not been the immediate aim, since they never thought that Russia could be defeated, or they did not want Russia to be defeated, because they feared the consequences of its collapse. Rather than focus on the one issue that the West can control – giving Ukraine the tools for victory – the focus has strikingly been on the aspect that the West cannot control: Vladimir Putin’s view of the world and his destiny.

  Surprising that the US and Europe have not seen it in their interests to have Ukraine win and remove Russia as a conventional military threat for a long time. It would not have required a massive amount of military effort from the West since Ukraine was willing to do the fighting. Victory – defined as the expulsion of Russia from Ukrainian soil – would have allowed Europe to settle its security dilemmas for a generation or more. But the West has lacked the imagination to think of a Russian defeat, and consequently the politics to carry this out. This has manifest into what the historian Phillips O’Brien describes as a ‘Goldilocks’ strategy’ – a middle option offering enough help to prevent Ukraine from losing, but not enough to enable it to win.

  Assistance for Ukraine by most (but not all) Western governments has been laughably small, by a measure of GDP or defence expenditure, by the scale of what was required, the speed of delivery, or the technology transferred and caveats imposed on its use. Instead, Kyiv has been given a lot of the stuff that Western donors did not want, and with caveats on its use out of fear of provoking Moscow. And yet, since the end of the Cold War, Western governments have consistently enjoyed minimal impact on shaping events in Russia, just as they seemingly have little influence on how Putin negotiates peace.

• 4. Russia continues to dominate the war of narratives. Factually, Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas and is hitting civilian targets across Ukraine. Yet somehow it has been able to promote and perpetuate a discourse of Ukraine as a ‘non-country’ run by Nazis waging a war caused by NATO expansionism and the subjugation of Russian minorities, and now that it will stop at the Donbas. At one level, this reflects the corrupting influence of campaigns facilitated by state control of its media, and the support of authoritarians elsewhere with similar freedoms.

  Contrastingly, the West has been unable to effectively convince even itself that the desire of countries to join NATO does not reflect the organisation’s expansionism but rather the latent enmities pervading in eastern and central Europe from decades of brutal Soviet imperialism, nor that stopping Russian expansionism in Ukraine involves a fraction of the cost of stopping Moscow in Europe. Eastern European countries have scant reason to trust Russia; while Russia may have concerns about NATO's expansion, others have equal concerns about its intentions. Ukraine has won overwhelming support in the General Assembly of the United Nations but performed relatively poorly in attracting support from Africa in spite of the common anti-colonial thread, in part because Russia is the inheritor mostly of Soviet-era goodwill and Kyiv has lacked diplomatic bandwidth to engage beyond Western allies.

• 5. The ties that bind the West are not as immutable as imagined. The longer the war has dragged on, the West appears an increasingly fragile, fragmented and distracted entity. At one level there are the spoilers and relative defence free-riders in Europe, hence the squabbling about defence commitments and the management of the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico. But this pales by comparison to the impact of the second Trump administration, which effectively has driven a large wedge between the US and Europe as portrayed in this 28-point peace plan, which remarkably posits NATO and the US as two distinct entities.

  Trump’s view that Ukraine should not have fought the war plays into to the overall Russian narrative as much it naively rewrites history. This view is confirmed by Trump’s National Security Strategy which does not describe Russia as an enemy or a threat, but instead describes the US goal as seeking strategic stability with Russia. The Strategy describes the European Union and other transnational bodies as undermining liberty, its minority government as being anti-democratic, and the threat of becoming ‘less European’ as a threat to US national security. Europe already knows that it needs to become more independent of the US, though this Strategy may signal that this is going to have to happen sooner rather than later. Washington, at least under Trump, is repositioning itself not as Europe’s partner against Russian aggression, but as a mediator acting in its narrow interest. Trump fundamentally disagrees with much of Europe, has become an unreliable ally and is firmly in the Putin camp.

  As the former UK Secretary for International Development Rory Stewart has put it, ‘The Europeans keep deluding themselves. They think America’s basically on Europe’s side against Russia, and that there is some small understanding, and that if they just get on a plane or rewrite a draft, Trump will suddenly see the truth, he will suddenly realise that actually Russia poses a threat to Europe, that Russia invaded Ukraine, that Ukraine should defend itself.’

  The post-1945 settlement rested on a simple yet fragile assumption: that the security of others could enlarge, rather than diminish, one’s own. When that assumption dissolves, alliances lose their metaphysical foundation before they lose their material coherence. History suggests that such moments are rarely dramatic at first. They arrive quietly, disguised as prudence, clothed in the language of restraint and defended as flexibility. Only later does the system discover that what it mistook for adaptation was in fact abdication.

• 6. Ukraine’s continued resistance is a boost for nuclear non-proliferation. But the reverse also holds true. If a conventionally armed country could defeat a nuclear-armed adversary on the battlefield without the threat of a nuclear war (as has happened to the US, for instance) then it would not be necessary to arm oneself with nuclear weapons. If Russia was to win, defined as keeping large swarths of Ukrainian territory, nuclear proliferation would have been given a huge boost: there are massive benefits already from nuclear weapons, not least that frees up countries to make choices about what and whom they support, as is evident by North Korea’s approach. The nuclear aspect also illustrates just how far off the mark the West is about nuclear war – in most scenario assumptions, where the war has progressed to would likely have ended in nuclear conflict, whether over Kursk, the destruction of Russia’s Black Sea or its shadow Mediterranean fleets, or missile and drone strikes deep in Russian territory. Nuclear deterrence has worked, but only to deter the West, not Russia.

• 7. Hubris remains a strategic weakness. By any measure the war has been a strategic catastrophe for Putin – until now. The Russian overestimated themselves as much as they underestimated the Ukrainians, blinded seemingly by the belief that the Ukrainians were Malorusy, or ‘little Russians’, a less capable people, a view founded in racism, chauvinism and imperialism. This view of a lesser opponent beset with corruption and inefficiencies reinforced a belief that a short, sharp encounter would be all that it would take, the ground being prepared by so-called ‘hybrid’ warfare undermining Ukraine through sabotage, espionage and a media war. Its initial failures both reflected and were founded in an initial shambles of military command, control and logistics.

• 8. The Ukrainian economy has also not collapsed, and neither has the Russian one (yet). Sanctions are not a silver bullet but have had an effect in taking the fight to the Russian heartland. Sanctions compound the costs of the war. This is not expressed, as much as can be discerned, in opposition domestically to Vladimir Putin, but grumbling at lower levels, for instances over prices. Every modern regime survives on a fragile alignment between short-term political legitimacy and long-term economic expectation. Sanctions fracture that alignment.

  With Russian casualties now over a million, it is increasingly hard for Moscow to dismiss the war as a ‘special military operation’, or even as a liberation of Russian minorities. The internet is also subjected to down times, supposedly as a means to protect key infrastructure from Ukrainian drones and missiles, which have ramped up against targets well inside Russian territory. This can only increase domestic frustrations, but probably not enough to suggest regime change – until it happens.

• 9. Diplomacy is war by other means. Putin’s stamina and the West’s comparatively flaky resolve and divisions could help to turn what has been so far a military failure – millions of troops and trillions of roubles for a few kilometres of advance – for the Russian leader into a strategic victory. Trump’s original 28-point plan expected Ukraine to hand over around a quarter of the Donbas which it still controls despite nearly four years of war and would give up on its ambition to join NATO, reflects Russia’s demands and its narratives. But then what? The only conceivable way this peace could stick and be a viable basis to rebuild Ukraine and reset European security, is for NATO troops to be stationed in those zones as a tripwire for further Russian aggression. Without that there is little inducement for Ukrainians to believe in their own country.

  So far Russia is predictably and inflexibly sticking to these demands whatever the changes and concessions on the Western or Ukrainian sides result from negotiations and pressure, suggesting that Putin does not want to give up on his dream of recreating imperial Russia, or that he cannot stop even if he desires to, given the investment of blood and treasure already made.

  Or perhaps he believes that, with Trump in the White House, he thinks he has the momentum behind him. This explains why Moscow makes out that its Europe that is trying to torpedo Trump’s peace plan, which plays well with this White House given his view of Europe as apart from US interests. Putin’s aim to force Ukraine back into Russian orbit will likely continue to through diplomatic and political influence, including through the Ukrainian and other European elections. Finally, Putin’s diplomatic posture toward Europe is not aimed at Europe alone. It is designed for Washington. By portraying Europe as the obstacle to peace, Moscow seeks to fracture Western coherence at its source and convert American mediation into American detachment. The end state is not Ukrainian neutrality but Western resignation: a geopolitical environment in which Russia’s re-entry into imperial influence appears not as an aberration, but as the new normal.

• 10. The rules of international order are being rewritten. China has been a net beneficiary, so far, of the war in Ukraine, selling dual-use goods to Russia and importing cheap energy, while inserting itself at the heart of European security. For this reason, Europeans, including NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte are utterly convinced that if China was to invade Taiwan, it would not be a ‘one-front’ war, but a co-ordinated attack involving a Russian invasion of a European ally. This is why it is necessary – contrary to Trump’s preference – to see the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific as one theatre.

  For this and other reasons this was never a conflict about Russia and Ukraine alone, but about the impact that Moscow’s action would have on the principles that have guided the international system including the sovereign norms that protected borders and the weak against the strong, on the one hand, and the movement as articulated by Trump towards a 21st century version of spheres of influence dominated by great powers on the other. Like the 19th century variety, however, this image is unlikely to promote stability given the hierarchy of states and priority of interests that invariably lead to friction and conflict. For these reasons, successful negotiations to end this (and any other war) will require elements of justice, fairness, international law and security guarantees and not just a focus on real estate.

It is clear what is required to end this war. Ukraine needs to be given the weapons to defend itself and in so doing to raise the costs for Putin so much so that he, or his successor, cannot go on. Anything else, notes the former US ambassador Dennis Jett, is just a strategy to appease a dictator.

We shall not forget that any peace that ignores justice, law and credible guarantees does not conclude the conflict; it transposes it into the next phase. Civilisations do not decay because they lose battles. They decay because they lose the conviction that certain outcomes must not be permitted, regardless of cost. When that conviction falters, order becomes a negotiation with entropy.

‘If, God forbid, Ukraine is forced to make this deal,’ says the former World Chess Champion and Russian opposition figure Garry Kasparov speaking to the West, ‘then it is very clear, Putin will realise his dream, and then guys, you are next’. The consequences of failing to arm Ukraine decisively or to favour Russia in peace negotiations may yet amount to the 21st century version of appeasement, with catastrophic outcomes elsewhere for global order as we once knew it.

The current leadership generation (and the one before) have been the beneficiaries of the rules-based order. But it has been allowed to wither, with minimal commitments to its maintenance. In that sense, Russia (and other autocracies) may well feel that the war in Ukraine has achieved rather more than they had hoped; without the US as guarantors of this order the world will likely return to a realist and less liberal view of international relations. Whither liberal democracies in this new world remains to be seen.

And yet, this reminds of the discipline of remaining unbending when circumstances appear no longer to be in one’s favour. It is clear today that the decisive traits of this world are neither brilliance nor advantage, but courage and resilience.

The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar exposes with clarity the real conditions of power: Authority, reputation and ambition exist on borrowed time. They collapse before flesh. Time is the only sovereign that never abdicates. Only what is built with discipline endures. This requires addressing the misallocation of resources and talent, the fragmentation of knowledge, the inefficiencies of capital and the institutional rigidities that prevent competence from compounding. Everywhere the same pattern asserted itself. The world does not lack intelligence. It lacks coherence. It does not lack ambition. It lacks architecture. Endurance is not a property of circumstance; it is a product of construction.

Ukraine’s current condition reminds, for all of the attempts to abdicate responsibility to others, history is not shaped by those who simply understand. It is shaped by those who decide.

© RUSI, 2026.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the authors', and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

For terms of use, see Website Terms and Conditions of Use.

Have an idea for a Commentary you'd like to write for us? Send a short pitch to commentaries@rusi.org and we'll get back to you if it fits into our research interests. View full guidelines for contributors.