Russia’s War in Ukraine

Understanding the conflict four years on.

President Donald Trump faces plunging public approval at home and a messy war he initiated abroad. But he has an opportunity to change that narrative, not in the Middle East but more than a thousand miles away, in Europe, where a bloody war rages on between Russia and Ukraine. In recent months, the tide has turned in that conflict in ways that make peace finally possible.

Ukraine is now in the fifth year of a war against an adversary with roughly 12 times its economy and more than four times its population. Its mere survival has been one of the great military and national achievements of the modern era. But now, Kyiv is no longer simply surviving. It is changing the arithmetic of the war.

President Donald Trump faces plunging public approval at home and a messy war he initiated abroad. But he has an opportunity to change that narrative, not in the Middle East but more than a thousand miles away, in Europe, where a bloody war rages on between Russia and Ukraine. In recent months, the tide has turned in that conflict in ways that make peace finally possible.

Ukraine is now in the fifth year of a war against an adversary with roughly 12 times its economy and more than four times its population. Its mere survival has been one of the great military and national achievements of the modern era. But now, Kyiv is no longer simply surviving. It is changing the arithmetic of the war.

For years, Russia’s brutal advantage was not that it fought well. It was that it could fight badly and endure the cost. Its army used conscripts, convicts, ethnic minorities, poor men from remote regions, and anyone else the state could throw into the furnace. It lost staggering numbers of soldiers, but could recruit more than it lost, often bringing in more than 30,000 men every month.

That equation has begun to break. Russia........

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