Two eye-opening pieces have made the rounds on Ukraine, which reveal the increasingly grim mood behind the scenes of establishment thinkers and shakers as to the current situation and Ukraine’s future prospects.
It should be noted that mainstream outlets are being increasingly blunt in their assessments, as seen in several recent pieces calling for “honesty” in the West’s dialogue over Ukraine’s true status.
The problem is, honesty must come from first principles: this means establishing the most basic, foundational, keystone facts of a given scenario. In Ukraine’s case, first principle assessment would need to derive from basic quantifiable war costs, most critically being that of casualties. If the West is unable to be honest in scrutinizing Ukraine’s true losses in the same way it does on a weekly basis for those of Russia, then it will never approach the truth of the situation. That is because virtually all of Ukraine’s current problems stem from its hemorrhaging casualty rate, and it’s the most essential elephant in the room the West continues to glaringly ignore.
Now onto the pieces.
The first from Spectator makes a bold statement:
The piece begins with three “depressing takeaways” on the heels of Kushner and Witkoff’s latest pointless diplomatic pingpong:
Vladimir Putin has not changed his war aims a jot since 2022 and remains determined on fighting on. Donald Trump has no new plan for peace other than bringing the Ukraine war to an end on Putin’s terms. And Kyiv is running out of money and men to defend itself, just as surely as it has already run out of Patriot interceptors to defend its skies against the Kremlin’s barrages.
Those are the three depressing takeaways from the latest round of shuttle diplomacy in Moscow and Kyiv by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff.
The author continues the dour tone of his assessment in describing Russia’s growing edge on the battlefield, which will play a key role in our exegesis later:
More importantly, as the Kremlin continues its ruthless campaign to render Ukraine’s cities unliveable, destroy the country’s economy and rob it of its future, Kyiv’s ability to defend itself is in serious doubt.
Part of Ukraine’s unfolding nightmare is tactical. Every one of Russia’s long-range attack systems has become more devastating. A new generation of jet-powered Geran attack drones, much faster and more accurate than their old Iranian Shahed models, are being deployed in mass. Russia is developing at least two new, low-cost cruise missile systems and stepping up production of air- and ground-launched ballistic missiles. “This is a war of cities and infrastructure. No one will win it,” Serhii Beskrestnov, Zelensky’s advisor on defense technologies and a leading figure in Kyiv’s defense establishment, told the Guardian this weekend. “Attack has become stronger than defense.” Beskrestnov predicts that Ukraine will not be able to obtain enough missiles to fully protect Ukraine’s cities from devastation this winter.
The piece is surprisingly insightful in its honest breakdown of the myriad ways in which Ukraine is losing the war:
But a larger part of Ukraine’s slowly unfolding defeat is strategic…
…the third and most serious failure is a refusal to countenance seriously engaging the Kremlin in peace talks, and a stubbornly fixed idea that encouraging Ukraine to fight and fight forever will somehow magically lead to victory.
Most critically, the author cites Ukraine’s coming budget disaster at a time when European appetites for more endless loans have dried up:
The crunch point – where those promises will finally crash hard into reality – will come soon in the form of an imminent fiscal crisis in Kyiv. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Serhii Koretsky recently announced that Kyiv has already spent most of its 2026 defense funds and faces a looming €26 billion ($30 billion) budget black hole – despite a recent €90 billion ($104 billion) loan from the EU. That loan, secured after months of Brussels horse-trading, represented the high-water mark of what the EU is realistically capable of raising. As Ukraine heads into the hardest and most punishing winter of the war, it is about to run out of not only Patriot missiles and men for the front lines, but money to fight on.
Case in point:
The author’s final flourish is his most honest and realistic—instead of surreptitiously calling for more weapons and endless escalation like most such pieces have done in their parting paragraphs, this author admits that talking to Russia diplomatically is the only thing left that can save Ukraine, accurately noting that every single peace offer has been progressively worse:
What can save Ukraine from political and military collapse? There are signs that Europe’s political taboo on taking to Putin is cracking. Alice Weidel of Germany’s AfD, newly victorious in elections in Saxony, has called for “an open channel to Russia in order to reach an understanding and achieve a peaceful solution.” According to Iuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s press secretary from 2019 to 2021, “new forces are rising, and they are getting stronger” which represent “our only chance for peaceful Europe… More weapons will not save us. They never have.”
To date, every successive peace offer has been worse for Kyiv than the last. It seems that Putin’s clear intention is to give Ukraine’s cities a brutal final kicking before finally settling the war on his own terms, perhaps next year. The Trump administration has long given up on the idea of backing a full Ukrainian victory, and it will be for historians to decide whether that decision to pull American aid and arms became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Europe, for its part, continues talking the talk. But it has no concrete plan to help, or save, Ukraine from the Kremlin’s fury – much less to crush the Russian economy or break Putin’s will.
This leads us to the next and most consequential piece, complete with two alternate headlines:
It is written for WaPo by ex-Google head Eric Schmidt, who has had a second resurgent career as an anti-Russian war-tech organizer and entrepreneur in one. In the wake of a recent trip to Kiev, Schmidt’s assessment is grimmer than ever:
