Welcome again. US president Joe Biden, talking in Warsaw on the eve of the primary anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, stated that Vladimir Putin “may finish the struggle with a phrase”. However the Russian chief will take no such step, until he can declare victory on phrases totally unacceptable to Ukraine and its western supporters — that appears clear from Putin’s defiant public speeches in Moscow this week. So what is going to occur subsequent? I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

Predictions concerning the consequence of lengthy, apparently evenly fought wars are fraught with danger. Who in November 1917 foresaw that, 12 months later, France, the UK, the US and their allies would obtain a complete victory within the first world struggle over Germany and the opposite Central Powers?

Having spent this week sifting by way of an in depth vary of commentaries on the Ukraine struggle, I’ve the impression that the consensus prediction is that neither facet is heading for a decisive victory, no peace settlement is remotely in sight and even a ceasefire — short-term or in any other case — is unlikely any time quickly.

A struggle of attrition

An excellent evaluation that units out this argument comes from Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow on the Council on Overseas Relations and a former Moscow-based US diplomat. Writing for the Harvard Kennedy Faculty’s Russia Issues web site, Graham explains that the home politics of Russia, Ukraine and the US all level to the continuation of “the struggle of attrition”.

Listed below are Graham’s ideas on Putin:

He has proven little interest in negotiating something aside from Ukraine’s capitulation . . . His hyperbolic rhetoric, likening the battle to the nice patriotic wars of survival towards Hitler and Napoleon, limits his room for manoeuvre.

On Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “[He] has dedicated himself to whole victory . . . [He] can’t commerce land for peace and hope to outlive politically.”

On Biden, the struggle and the 2024 US presidential election: “Having framed it as a historic contest between democracy and autocracy . . . Biden can’t afford to see Ukraine defeated and hope to be re-elected.”

The US president himself put it this manner in Warsaw:

President Putin selected this struggle. Each day the struggle continues is his alternative. He may finish the struggle with a phrase. It’s easy. If Russia stopped invading Ukraine, it could finish the struggle. If Ukraine stopped defending itself towards Russia, it could be the top of Ukraine.

That final level is strengthened in an article by Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, for Mission Syndicate showing within the Korea Instances. What would have occurred, Bildt asks, if Russia had gained the struggle shortly a yr in the past?

[Zelenskyy] probably would have been murdered by Russian particular forces or incarcerated after a swift trial. At greatest, he could be main a authorities in exile from Warsaw or someplace else . . . Ukraine as a political entity would have ceased to exist, returning to the standing that it held underneath the Russian imperialism of the Nineteenth century.

And so Ukraine fights on, regardless of excessive casualties, mass displacement of civilians and the struggle’s devastating influence on the financial system, as set out on this IMF report in December.

Western army and monetary assist retains Ukraine’s struggle effort going, despite the fact that — because the FT studies — the finance ministry in Kyiv seems to have obtained, as much as December, solely €31bn of €64bn promised by western international locations because the invasion.

Because the Kiel Institute’s chart above exhibits, the US supplies the lion’s share of the west’s help, however for the way lengthy?

Felicia Schwartz, our Washington-based US overseas affairs and defence correspondent, writes that after rock-solid political and public assist for supplying Ukraine with weapons and cash is softening, and that it may come underneath nonetheless extra stress because the 2024 election approaches.

Battle goals

Any important discount of US assist would certainly shatter Ukraine’s hope of attaining all its struggle goals. These have hardened, because the battle has intensified, into the entire restoration of presidency management over each territory seized by Russia since 2014, together with Crimea and the south-eastern Donbas area.

Few western leaders dare to counsel in public that these struggle goals are too formidable, however some assume so in personal. Russia’s atrocities in occupied zones and its deportations of Ukrainian civilians, together with many hundreds of youngsters, make it particularly tough for western leaders to drift the concept of leaving such areas underneath Moscow’s management — at the same time as a part of a ceasefire, not to mention a long-term settlement.

Nevertheless, it’s no much less true that Putin has studiously prevented spelling out Russia’s struggle goals in exact element. Would he be glad with Crimea and 4 different areas of Ukraine which he declared in September to be annexed to Russia, despite the fact that they aren’t underneath Moscow’s full army management?

Putin and Russia’s historic future

In my opinion, it could be unwise to imagine that. The destruction of the post-1991 unbiased Ukrainian state, and the absorption of Ukrainian id right into a Russian-led east Slav union, appear to me to be basic to Putin’s more and more mystical conception of Russia’s future.

Few have described Putin’s obsessions extra succinctly than the historian Thomas Otte, writing for the H-Diplo web site nearly a yr in the past:

Putin’s views . . . mirror his embrace of the essentially anti-western, anti-European idea of russky mir [the Russian world], a partly historic, partly ideological assemble that attracts on the concept of holy Rus’ of the tenth century — itself an “invention” of Nineteenth-century historians.

It encompasses late tsarist concepts of an ethnocultural pan-Slav bond between the japanese Slavs, and it’s fuelled by recollections of victory over fascism within the Nice Patriotic Battle.

Otte additionally underlines the significance for Putin of his grievance-filled rivalry that the west betrayed Russia after the chilly struggle by accepting the newly free, former communist international locations of central and japanese Europe into Nato. Mary Elise Sarotte, a number one authority on the diplomacy of that period, demolished this argument within the FT final weekend.

But, as Otte factors out, Putin’s allegations of western unhealthy religion have was the Russian equal of post-1918 Germany’s rightwing nationalist “stab within the again” fable, based on which Jews, socialists and different homegrown “traitors” induced the nation to lose the primary world struggle.

In brief, Putin’s thirst for conquest, revenge and a revered place within the annals of Russian historical past stays unquenched. Former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev, who resigned final yr in protest on the assault on Ukraine, gives this perception into Putin and the officers who serve him:

He’ll all the time be a supply of struggle, of aggression, of destabilisation . . . This struggle is his private struggle as a result of no person round him wished this struggle. And so they don’t need it now. They only comply with it as a result of it’s not their duty to assume and determine.

What do you assume? Will the preventing in Ukraine cease by the top of this yr? Vote right here.

Extra on this subject

How Russia’s struggle shattered world power routes — an evaluation by Benjamin Storrow and Sara Schonhardt for E&E Information

Tony’s picks of the week

• Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has embraced a extra energetic function in public life as he seeks to shore up the Iranian regime’s authority after essentially the most intense demonstrations because the Islamic revolution, the FT’s Najmeh Bozorgmehr studies from Tehran

• Poland’s ruling Regulation and Justice celebration has been on the again foot for a lot of the previous three and a half years, however it nonetheless has an opportunity of retaining energy after parliamentary elections set for later this yr, says Aleks Szczerbiak, politics professor on the UK’s College of Sussex