Can you remember how you felt when the last Winter Olympics opened? President Vladimir Putin certainly does, for February 4th 2022 saw him flying memorably to Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping, wishing China a successful Olympics and signing a joint statement pledging that Russia and China would work together to end Western leadership in world affairs.
Just 20 days later, shortly after the Olympics closing ceremony, Russia invaded Ukraine. Since then, an estimated 1.8 million people have been killed or wounded, roughly two-thirds of them Russian soldiers.
While watching the Milan-Cortina Olympics some people, most notably Donald Trump, may dream that the talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators that are under way in Abu Dhabi might soon bring a peace settlement. If so, they need to expect a rude awakening.
After four years of a costly, incompetent failure that has brought only minuscule amounts of extra territory Putin is not showing even the slightest interest in peace. The real question is whether the Ukraine war will still be going on when the next Winter Olympics is opened, in France in 2030.
Leon Trotsky famously wrote that “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” The essential task in Ukraine is to turn this Russian saying raound and force Putin to recognize that peace is interested in him and that it is in his and Russia’s interests to reciprocate.
Trump recognizes this but is such a weak figure when dealing with a fellow nuclear-armed great power, as opposed to his preferred opponents in Venezuela, Iran or Minneapolis, that his only plan so far has been to offer Putin, on a silver platter, a victory that Russia’s army has failed to achieve, and to allow him to pretend to agree to temporary ceasefires.
Trump is trying to persuade Ukraine to hand Russia large unconquered areas of its sovereign territory, a proposal that no country would find acceptable and which would lose Ukraine a strong line of defensive fortifications and leave its capital, Kyiv, more vulnerable to a future attack.
It is easy to see why, despite four years of military failure, Putin thinks it is worth fighting on. China continues to supply him with the technology and financing that his own economy cannot provide. His economy is weak, but the sale of oil and gas continues to be sufficient to pay for war production and military recruitment.
Meanwhile, the scandal of the late Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile and prostitution network continues to widen and to discredit the ruling elites of America, Britain and some others, and may be helping weaken Trump sufficiently to make the American president even more desperate to get credit for a peace deal in Ukraine.
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk has announced an investigation into whether the Epstein network may have been built in collaboration with the Russian intelligence services.
A few years ago, that would have seemed far-fetched, but now it seems highly plausible. Epstein traded in information and high-level access, along with sexual inducements for those he deemed susceptible, so the chances that he sold blackmail material to Russian spies must be taken seriously.
At home, Putin’s political position is strong, in the sense that any rivals have been imprisoned, killed or silenced and that he remains in control of all the major levers of power. It is weak, however, in the sense that the price of admitting the truth of Russia’s costly failure in Ukraine would likely be his own demise.
He fights on because although the military results are poor, he sees hope for his potential survival in the frailty of his western adversaries and his ability to manipulate Trump.
Putin’s big disadvantage is that. although Trump is manipulable, the Russian leader’s principal adversary in Ukraine continues to be strong. Four years of war have done what Ukrainian nationalists dreamed of for centuries, namely to forge a true national identity.
Having failed to win territory on the battlefield, Russia’s main military strategy is to kill and terrorize Ukrainian civilians, both directly with missiles and indirectly by turning off electricity and heating. Yet, even amid Ukraine’s coldest winter for many years, there is no sign that this is succeeding. Ukrainians, too, seem determined to fight on.
As they emerge from this brutal winter of Russian missile attacks and extreme cold, Ukrainians’ main need is for stronger defenses against those nightly attacks and more money to be able to expand their own production of missiles and drones. In the absence of a sufficient supply of long-range missiles from European partners or America, Ukraine has been developing and building its own.
Not surprisingly, European countries have become secretive about exactly what they have been supplying to Ukraine, but also Ukraine has become secretive about what it has been producing and how large its stockpiles have become. Let us hope that under the cover of winter, those stockpiles have grown large.
Unlike Putin, Ukraine’s President Volodymr Zelenskyy has no viable path to victory through support from the White House. His only option has been to buy time by participating in the Abu Dhabi talks and to avoid making an enemy of Trump.
But, depending on the quality of those home-made missiles and the volume of production, he does have a path to victory if he can show Putin and – more crucially – the Russian population that Ukraine can match Russia’s own tactics and even exceed them, by using its missiles and drones to destroy much more oil, refinery and electricity infrastructure in Russia in 2026 than in 2025, as well as, unfortunately, by attacking Russian cities themselves.
European countries and the EU institutions are already providing virtually all of Ukraine’s external military and financial support. The military support it now needs is principally in missile defence systems, to make the nightly Russian attacks less deadly and less devastating. It does, however, need more financial support to maintain its own weapons production and to finance the partner factories that it has established elsewhere, in countries such as Denmark.
There is no way of knowing how and when Putin and the Russian elites around him will become convinced that, although they are not interested in peace, peace really is the most interesting option for them. Falling oil and gas prices may make it harder for Russia to finance its own war production, unless a US war with Iran drives oil prices higher again.
Ultimately, however, the Russian calculation can and will change only if the cost of military failure really comes to be felt and noticed in Russian cities and Russian homes. Ukraine has a chance of achieving that. It needs help in doing so, and much sooner than the opening of the next Winter Olympics.
This is the original English version, first published by Bill Emmott’s Global View, of an article published in Italian by La Stampa. It is republished with permission.
