Photo: JULIEN DE ROSA/AFP via Getty Images
Members of the U.S. government have recently made the point that three years into Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression, Ukraine has found itself in a helpless situation. U.S. President Donald Trump, for example, has insisted that he has “been watching [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] for years . . . negotiate with no cards. He has no cards, and you get sick of it.” By Trump’s logic, it follows that the only solution is to somehow try and reach a peace plan with Putin even at the expense of multiple concessions to the Kremlin. In an effort to achieve the rushed settlement, Trump’s team of negotiators may even allegedly revisit the so-called Istanbul agreements proposed by the Russians at the start of the war in 2022. The Russian proposals during the Istanbul talks were highly unfavorable to Ukraine, including demands that Kyiv unilaterally abandon its NATO aspirations and announce permanent neutrality, refuse foreign weapons and hosting foreign military personnel, and reduce the size of its military and arms stockpiles.
However, Ukraine’s position has not collapsed, nor is its situation as helpless as Trump makes it appear. Ukraine faced a full-scale invasion from the second largest army in the world and on paper is weaker than Russia in terms of population size, economic resources, and weapons stockpiles. Still, Ukraine in the last three years has been able to preserve its sovereignty and existence as an independent state, in addition to militarily exhausting and draining Russia, and trapping the Kremlin in a military quagmire. The Ukrainian army has even managed to achieve what was considered as utterly unthinkable a decade ago—it has occupied Russian territory and conducted successful intelligence operations inside Russia. Given these major achievements, accepting Russian conditions highly unfavorable to Ukraine is not justified by the current situation on the ground. Instead, sustained Western assistance to Ukraine has strong prospects of ensuring a stalemate able to both protect European security and enable Ukraine to realize its goal of a future inside the European Union.
Economically, the war has put a significant strain on Russia’s economy. While Russia has qualitatively altered its military potential (ramping up production and introducing new weapons), the adjustment is not sufficient to change the stalemate on the ground. Not even the assistance of Iran and North Korea has been able to radically alter the situation. While it is not at risk of immediate economic crisis, Russia has reached capacity and appears to have reached supply-side constraints that prevent it from significantly boosting its military and industrial base. As economist Alexandra Prokopenko pointed out in her December 2024 report: “The industry, including the military industry, has hit a ceiling in terms of both production capacity, which is 81 [percent] loaded, and labor resources: 73 [percent] of enterprises complain about a shortage of personnel, the economy is almost at full employment—unemployment is 2.3 [percent].” With the record low unemployment rate, labor shortages are particularly pronounced, limiting Russia’s ability to increase production. These shortages have contributed to accelerating inflation despite the Central Bank of Russia spiking its key rate at the unusually high 21 percent per annum. While state-investment driven growth reached 3.6 percent in 2023 and 3.8 percent in 2024, it is now expected to decelerate to around 1 percent in 2025 and 2026. The combination of accelerating inflation and slowing growth is threatening the Russian economy with real risks of stagflation. Along with other factors, such as depleting rainy funds, in the future these trends could combine to create a “perfect storm” in the Russian economy. This is one of the reasons behind Russia’s eagerness to get sanctions lifted after signing a temporary ceasefire deal.
Militarily, while having boosted industrial production and so far maintained the inflow of volunteer recruits (albeit at a constantly growing price tag), Russia is still struggling to operate in the current environment. By the end of 2024, half as many tanks were left at Russian storage bases as there were prior to its 2022 invasion of Ukraine (and most of those left are of inferior quality). If the war continues, by the end of 2025 Russia is likely to run out of stocked tanks suitable for restoration and repair, and its capacity to produce new tanks from scratch remains limited to several dozen per month. While being able to regenerate forces, the Russian military has suffered from heavy losses and limitations in combat capabilities, being unable to break through the front and turn this into a war of maneuver. Instead, it has been slowly grinding Ukraine down with constant assaults: taking several emptied Ukrainian villages at the sky-high cost of about 30,000–45,000 casualties per month. As military analyst Dara Massicot suggests, the current state of the Russian military in Ukraine is that “of a car that has blown its transmission. It cannot get into the higher gears, because of the damages and the casualties and the losses that it has sustained.” While a Russian breakthrough remains possible if Ukraine reaches the point of collapse, it for now remains unlikely.
Altogether, in view of the existing economic and military constraints, Russia’s ability to achieve its maximalist goals in Ukraine through military means alone remains a distant prospect, so long as Western aid to Ukraine continues and sanctions on Russia remain in place. Thus, instead of peace negotiations, both Ukraine and the West should now be focused on sustaining this stalemate.
Ukraine has so far been reluctant to shift to a defensive strategy and had not constructed the same level of fortifications that Russia did in the winter of 2022 and 2023 under the leadership of General Sergey Surovikin. This is in part because Ukraine remained determined to regain the offensive. As such, it prioritized generating new combat brigades, as opposed to filling gaps in the brigades holding its defensive line. Ukraine has recently shifted its approach to using new recruits to plug holes along the front, which is a welcome shift.
A key variable for Ukraine is the supply of Western aid. The lapse of U.S. assistance from October 2023 to April 2024 led to a withering of Ukraine’s combat capacity. This represents the main danger for Ukraine. While Europe has provided comparable military aid in total to the United States, the aid from the United States has had greater impact as it is more coordinated and has fewer disparate systems. Europe, however, has the means to fill a gap left by the United States. Should the United States end its military assistance, Europe ought to seek to procure items from the United States that it cannot immediately provide. For instance, European countries through a Foreign Military Sale could buy 155 millimeter ammunition from the U.S. Army, which has dramatically scaled up its production capacity. Additionally, Europeans could seek to procure more air interceptors and other vital munitions for Ukraine. There is discussion of the European Union borrowing up to hundreds of billions of euros for defense, and the European Union could use a portion of that, roughly $10–20 billion, to procure weapons from the United States. Buying what was formerly U.S. foreign assistance to Ukraine will be a tough pill politically for Europeans to swallow. Yet it is a necessary short-term step to ensure Ukraine maintains its robust combat capacity until European production ramps up. Europe therefore must also ramp up production to be able to support Ukraine for the long term and refill their own stockpiles. This means Europe has the capacity to backfill for U.S. security assistance to Kyiv, assuming the willingness of the United States to sell its weapons to Europeans that they can then transfer onwards to Ukraine.
Additionally, Russia’s frozen central bank assets are largely in Europe. The EU and European governments should take steps to unfreeze these assets and transfer them to Ukraine. This will then provide financial support for its economy and additional resources for its defense industrial sector or to make additional procurements. These steps by Europe will at the very least help freeze the conflict and prevent Ukraine from losing the war through Western negligence.
By cutting off Russia’s path to win the war on the battlefield by demonstrating a long-term commitment to Ukraine, Europe will then have created clear incentives for Russia to seek a negotiated settlement to the war, rather than continuing to slam its exhausted military against Ukrainian lines without the hope of a breakthrough. Ukraine will know it can hold its position and has the resources to maintain its defensive position. Furthermore, should Ukraine receive greater quantities of advanced European weaponry, such as long-range missiles and advanced fighter aircraft, it may be able to impose even greater costs on Russia. With Russia’s economy beginning to reach constraints, its military losses building, Russia over time may be forced to drastically climb down from its maximalist position in negotiations. A massive European effort that forecloses the prospects of Russian victory may also crater Russian morale on the front. Such swings can happen in war, particularly wars of attrition. Regardless, a major European effort to support Ukraine and further degrade the Russian military will also buy Europe time to rearm itself and engage in the potentially arduous task of replacing U.S. forces in Europe should there be significant drawdowns.
Should the United States stop aiding Ukraine and should Europe take these steps, it would also significantly reduce the relevance of the United States in the conflict. Ukraine and Europe would become the key actors that Russia would have to negotiate with. If, and it is a big if, Europe could act quickly, such as on agreeing to issue an EU defense bond or beginning to seize Russian assets, it would immediately make itself an actor too important for Moscow to ignore. While one should always doubt the ability of Europe to move quickly, the new election of German Chancellor Fredrich Merz and his comments about the need for strong European action may in fact enable rapid decision-making, and even force Putin to take Europe more seriously as a geopolitical actor.
Should that occur, it would be far better than the alternative—a rushed unfavorable peace settlement with Putin, which would allow the Kremlin an opportunity to rebuild its military-industrial complex and will increase the odds of Russia conducting a far more consequential attack on Ukraine (or even its European partners) in the not-so-distant future.
Maria Snegovaya is a senior fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Max Bergmann is director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program and Stuart Center in Euro-Atlantic and Northern European Studies at CSIS.
