The End Of Illusion

“You don’t have the cards,” Donald Trump told Volodymyr Zelenskiy during their Oval Office meeting in February - a remark that captured, in its cold bluntness, the growing recognition that Ukraine’s military fortunes have waned. As the two leaders prepared to meet again in Washington, that assessment appeared truer than ever.

Ukraine’s army is under severe strain. Russian forces, having recovered from their early disarray, now control much of the battlefield initiative. The war has become a slow-motion grind in which manpower and industrial capacity matter more than rhetoric or sanctions.

The battlefield equation is obvious to any realist. In 2024, after two years of reverses, Russia regained strategic momentum, capturing thousands of square kilometres in eastern Ukraine. The fighting is now concentrated in the Donetsk Oblast, particularly around Pokrovsk, where Moscow’s troops advance metre by metre against exhausted Ukrainian defenders. In February 2025, Russian forces launched a new offensive into Sumy, creating what they termed a “buffer zone” in response to Ukrainian incursions into Russia’s Kursk region.

Ukraine’s defenders continue to show extraordinary resilience. Their drone campaign deep inside Russia - targeting oil refineries and energy hubs somewhat inflicted a set-back on the Kremlin’s war economy and forced it to redeploy anti-air systems away from the front. Yet these technological innovations cannot compensate for depleting manpower and ammunition stocks. And they come in bits and pieces rather than in an incessant flow.

Repeated Russian missile barrages have struck power grids and cities, causing widespread blackouts in October 2025. Ukrainian forces, while inventive, remain critically under-resourced. With soldiers exhausted and supplies running low, Kyiv’s survival depends almost entirely on Western assistance.

After three and a half years of full-scale conflict, the contours of Russia’s political economy reveal the boundaries of what the Kremlin can achieve. To defeat Putin’s grand goals, the United States and European countries must get a better grasp on the specific long-term vulnerabilities of the Russian economy and start exploiting them now.

That dependency is now in question. Trump’s return to power has altered the mood in Washington. He has hinted that continued support for Kyiv must serve “American interests” and spoken of a “peace deal” that may involve territorial concessions. For Zelenskiy, such talk borders on betrayal; for Trump, it is pragmatism.

Across Europe, political fatigue is evident, and the alliance is strained. The war’s economic toll — inflation, energy disruption, and soaring defense costs — has eroded public support. Early this month, Ukraine submitted its largest-ever request to the European Union: a €128 billion ($138 billion) arms and industrial support package meant to secure its defense capacity over the next five years. EU leaders admit the scale of need but are deeply divided over how to fund it. For Kyiv, the stakes are existential. An under-resourced nation cannot withstand a prolonged confrontation with a nuclear-armed state six times its size.

But Ukraine’s predicament cannot be understood merely as a clash of armies. It is the consequence of a long history of Western overreach and strategic deceit. When the Soviet Union collapsed, American and European leaders assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Those assurances were soon abandoned and were reduced to a string of broken promises

Under Bill Clinton, NATO incorporated former Warsaw Pact states and deployed missile systems ever closer to Russian borders. Moscow’s protests were ignored. The 2014 Maidan uprising — hailed in Western capitals as a democratic revolution — was seen by Russia as an externally abetted coup aimed at wrenching Ukraine out of its orbit. The Minsk Accords, intended to guarantee neutrality and autonomy for Donbas, were never implemented. Western leaders later admitted that the agreements were largely a tactic to buy time for arming Ukraine.

These betrayals laid the foundation for Russia’s aggression in 2022. While invasion is indefensible, it was also tragically predictable — the result of a security architecture built on exclusion rather than inclusion. The West’s refusal to acknowledge Russia’s security concerns turned Ukraine into the fault line of a new Cold War.

The war has since exposed the hollowness of Western strategy. Sanctions have failed to cripple Russia, whose economy has adapted through parallel trade with Asia. NATO unity has weakened, and European dependence on U.S. leadership is deeper than ever. The idea that Ukraine could serve as the spearhead of a Western containment policy has collapsed under the weight of reality.

Instead of “isolating” Moscow, the West’s policies have driven Russia into a tighter embrace with China, Iran, and North Korea — forming what many analysts now call an anti-Western military-technological bloc. Europe, meanwhile, faces the double burden of economic slowdown and strategic uncertainty.

For Ukraine, the tragedy is compounded: a once-independent nation caught between Russia’s imperial nostalgia and the West’s geopolitical ambitions. It is less a victim of one aggressor than of two rival imperialisms playing out their old rivalry on Ukrainian soil.

Trump said this week that if the war is not “settled” soon, the United States might provide Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, weapons Kyiv has sought in order to strike deeper inside Russia. Moscow has warned against the provision, and Trump and Putin discussed the missiles during yesterday’s call, which came at Putin’s request. Trump called that conversation “very productive” but did not provide further details.

Zelenskyy’s White House visit comes as Washington has stepped up intelligence support for Ukraine after Putin rejected Trump’s call for direct talks with Zelenskyy. In addition to missiles, the leaders are also expected to discuss potential U.S. energy support for Ukraine after Russian attacks depleted the country’s gas supplies ahead of winter. Ukraine has responded by hitting Russian fuel targets, a strategy the U.S. ambassador to NATO suggested this week would intensify if Ukraine had Tomahawks.

Trump and Putin plan to meet in Budapest at a still-to-be-announced date, Trump wrote on social media yesterday. It would be their first in-person encounter since their August meeting in Alaska, which failed to yield a Putin-Zelenskyy meeting on ending the war. It would also be Putin’s first trip to a European capital in years; Hungary is currently withdrawing from the International Criminal Court, which has issued an arrest warrant for Putin. Trump said he would brief Zelenskyy today about his call with Putin.

Trump’s latest meeting with Zelenskiy will not determine the war’s outcome, but it may signal the end of illusion – the ‘reckoning’ to put it in one word. For years, Western leaders promised victory, imagining that sanctions, weapon deliveries, and moral outrage could substitute for political realism. They spoke of defending democracy but refused to negotiate peace when it was still possible.

The war now drags on with diminishing returns. Russia gains ground, Ukraine loses men, and Europe loses confidence. The moral clarity of 2022 has faded into fatigue and quiet regret.

The real reckoning is not for Kyiv or Moscow alone, but for Washington and Brussels. Having broken the promises made to Gorbachev, sabotaged the Minsk process, and armed Ukraine for a war it could never win, the West must now face its own failure.

Ukraine’s thrashing is not simply a result of Russian might. It is rooted in the arrogance of a system that mistook dominance for diplomacy — a system that tried to encircle rather than engage, to humiliate rather than reconcile.

The lesson, belated though it is, is clear: no stable peace in Europe can be built on the ruins of trust.

Ranjan Solomon is a political commentator and rights advocate who writes on democracy, justice, and decolonization. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.