Four Years of War in Europe

Foreign Policy · Feb 20, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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If, at the outset in 2022, many saw Russia’s war against Ukraine as a regional conflict that might be contained, its nature as a global geopolitical turning point has become ever clearer. The invasion that Moscow launched four years ago next week has forced Europe to rearm and think about future wars on the continent. The Eurasian autocracies have aligned economically, technologically, and strategically in unprecedented ways—bringing Iranian weapons and North Korean soldiers deep into the European battlespace. The economics of energy are shifting as Europe cuts its links to Russia and the dangers of overreliance on a hostile power have become plain to see. Many of these developments have been turbocharged since the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump. His hostile stance toward Europe, abandonment of aid to Ukraine, and eagerness to strike a deal with Russia have put even more of an onus on Europe to secure stability on its borders and prepare for future conflict. As Washington refocuses on the Western Hemisphere, Europe is reaching out to new partners around the globe, accelerating the shift to a post-American world. To assess the state of the war, prospects for peace, and further geopolitical fallout, we asked eight of our best thinkers for their views. Read on for their responses, or click on an individual author and topic below.—Stefan Theil, deputy editor JUMP TO AUTHOR Christian Caryl on surprises Angela Stent on Trump Andriy Zagorodnyuk on peace Keir Giles on NATO’s frontier George Barros on Russia Carl Bildt on Europe C. Raja Mohan on Eurasia Agathe Demarais on economics Ukrainian soldiers test homemade drones—made of cheap electronics and 3D printed pieces—before sending them to the frontline as the Russia-Ukraine war continues in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, on Aug. 16, 2023. Ukrainian soldiers test homemade drones in Donetsk, Ukraine, on Aug. 16, 2023. Ignacio Marin/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images A Four-Year Failure of Imagination By Christian Caryl, a columnist at Foreign Policy Ukraine has no conventional navy, but it has sunk a large number of Russian warships and pushed most of what’s left of the Black Sea fleet far away from its home port in Crimea. Ukrainian drones have destroyed Russian strategic bombers nearly 3,000 miles from the battlefields of the Donbas. Kyiv has used 3D printing to make drone parts in decentralized facilities across the country—one factor that helped them to produce nearly 3 million drones last year. Russia’s use of fiber-optic guidance systems for its own drones has left landscapes around eastern Ukraine draped in filaments like the silk of a million spiders. This is a very short list of some of the astonishing developments since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine four years ago next week. The biggest surprise, of course, is the simple fact that the Ukrainians are holding and resisting—even though they remain significantly outnumbered and out-resourced by the Russians—after the most intense European combat since World War II. The war has now gone on longer than the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany, a particularly embarrassing comparison for Russian President Vladimir Putin, always so eager to place himself in the illustrious lineage of Russian military commanders. But Putin is not the only one guilty of epic miscalculation. This war has defied an uncountable number of forecasts. The initial consensus among Western military experts envisioned a quick Ukrainian defeat—and for good reason. Then as now, the numbers on paper all favored the Russians. The Ukrainians, after all, had failed to inflict serious damage on the Russian troops and their proxies who invaded Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. A few observers braved the consensus and foresaw that Kyiv would put up stiff resistance to a weaker-than-expected Russia, but it is hard to think of anyone who sketched out the wildly improbable particulars that followed. No one foretold the breakneck pace of battlefield innovation, the off-the-charts Russian casualty rate, or the many ways in which the conflict has transformed global politics. Given U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to power, some might have anticipated Washington’s new recalcitrance or the push for European rearmament. But who anticipated the startling news of North Korean soldiers dying to fight Russia’s war or Kyiv’s military intelligence helping to kill Russian mercenaries in Mali? One might argue that war, that most volatile of human activities, has always defied easy prediction. At the start of the Civil War, most well-informed Americans assumed that it would be over in a few months. In the summer of 1914, European leaders on all sides declared that the burgeoning conflict would be over by Christmas. In the 1960s, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson believed he could guide the Vietnam War to a successful conclusion with the help of management consultants and computer geeks. One of his successors, George W. Bush, was convinced that defeating Saddam Hussein’s regime would conclude the fighting in Iraq. In many other realms of everyday life, the consequences of myopia are limited. In war, they can be devastating beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Yet the gap between prediction and reality has been especially stark in the case of the Russia-Ukraine war. Perhaps this has to do with the insane pace of modern technological change, the speed of information sharing, or the specific power of Ukraine’s will to self-determination. Whatever the reason, we should take the record of our own shortsightedness in Ukraine as a salutary warning. The potential for fresh conflicts is growing around the world: in Iran, in South Asia, on the Korean Peninsula, and around Taiwan. Do we really understand all of the contingencies that each of these possible wars might unleash? To make this observation is not to counsel some particular reform of policy mechanisms, intelligence analysis, or military strategy. Wars will not stop, obviously, just because we cannot anticipate how they will unfurl. The planners will go on making plans, and the politicians will continue to work up policies even when they have little idea what such policies will entail. But surely it cannot hurt to acknowledge the limits of our foresight. Indeed, it is often precisely the developments we failed to anticipate that turn out to be the most significant. The U.S. government inquiry into the 9/11 terrorist attacks rightly chided decision-makers and security experts for their incapacity to think beyond precedent when it concluded that “[t]he most important failure was one of imagination.” Ukraine has taught the Russians a harsh lesson about such failures. As the United States prepares for the wars of the future, its planners would be well-advised to consider the dangers of arrogance. Return to Full List Russian President Vladimir Putin greets U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff prior to their talks in Moscow on Aug. 6, 2025. Russian President Vladimir Putin greets U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow on Aug. 6, 2025.Gavril Grigorov/AFP via Getty Images Performative Negotiations to Humor Trump By Angela Stent, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former U.S. national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia More than a year into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, the Russia-Ukraine war is no closer to a resolution than when he promised to end it within 24 hours of his inauguration. Russian President Vladimir Putin still believes that time is on his side and he can defeat Ukraine, making Russia’s participation in U.S.-led negotiations entirely performative. Putin understands that Trump’s foremost desire is to reset U.S.-Russian relations and negotiate rafts of profitable deals with Moscow—and that this will continue to drive Trump to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to make one-sided concessions. Performative negotiations are a way for Putin to humor Trump and prevent him from taking any more punitive actions against Russia. Trump admires Putin and likes the idea of making deals with him—but he is wary of Zelensky, whom he likely associates with his first impeachment in 2020. Whereas the Biden administration supported Ukraine after the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, the Trump administration’s stance has been neutral at best, with Trump often blaming Ukraine for allegedly starting the war. Financial and military assistance to Ukraine has virtually dried up, though intelligence support remains. U.S. efforts to end the war have developed on two tracks—a bilateral U.S.-Russia track aimed at improving relations and sealing business deals, as well as a trilateral U.S.-Russia-Ukraine track. Europe has largely been excluded from both, even though it now supplies most of the financial and military assistance, including purchasing U.S. weapons on Kyiv’s behalf. Instead of sending experienced U.S. diplomats who understand Russia and Putin into the negotiations, Trump has dispatched his personal friend and fellow real-estate billionaire Steve Witkoff. He has been to Russia six times in his special envoy role but has yet to visit Ukraine. As a former KGB case officer, Putin knows how to flatter and manipulate his U.S. interlocutors. He seems to have persuaded Witkoff of his own, unique view of the history of Ukraine. Witkoff also seems to believe that the core contention is over real estate—that all Ukraine has to do is to cede parts of the Donbas region that Russia has been trying to conquer since 2014. Putin, however, has made it altogether clear in his writings and speeches that his goal all along has been to subjugate Ukraine and install a Russia-aligned regime, because he does not believe that Ukraine has a right to exist as an independent country. To Putin, the Donbas territorial question is incidental to this but a good way to keep Trump and Witkoff busy. In November, a 28-point U.S.-Russian “peace plan” was leaked to Axios. It contained Russia’s maximum deman