Putin will not win: My encounter with Europe’s new-found optimism

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In Kyiv on Friday, the annual Yalta European Strategy ( YES ) Conference convened deep beneath the embattled capital’s Intercontinental Hotel. Originally held at the storied Crimean city where, in 1945, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt redrew the map of postwar Europe, the conference was moved to Kyiv after the Russian invasion in 2014 – the name unchanged to preserve the historical resonances (and the acronym).

I was among about 300 people who crowded into a warren of reception rooms which doubles as the hotel’s air raid shelter. They included current and former prime ministers, defence and foreign ministers, policymakers, diplomats, academics, editors, foreign correspondents, commentators and several Ukrainian military leaders.

The big names included David Petraeus (the former US commander in Iraq), Boris Johnson, famous international relations scholars such as Niall Ferguson and Anne Applebaum, her husband, Radek Sikorski (Poland’s deputy PM), and the national security advisers of Britain, France, Germany and Italy. The American delegation included no fewer than three senators and five congressmen.

The biggest delegation was Britain’s – which is only fitting since, in the early days after Russia invaded in February 2022, Boris Johnson’s government led global opinion by its immediate, unswerving support for Ukraine while Joe Biden dithered. Johnson, deservedly, is hugely admired here; there will be statues of him in Kyiv long before there is ever one in London.

Volodymyr Zelensky is always the star turn at the conference, but this year he addresses it from Canada; he had travelled to North America in his unrelenting pursuit of more armaments – this time, counter-drone and missile interceptors.

There are no social events (thank goodness). The business continues uninterruptedly well into the night over two days. Apart from the Ukrainians, all participants had made our way by an arduous overnight train journey from the Polish border.

These are deeply serious people. So many conferences are full of posturing nobodies who act as if they have the weight of the world on their shoulders. These people actually do. They are deeply conscious that this war is probably the defining conflict of the 21st century – the test of whether the liberal democracies will prevail over the authoritarian states; whether international law will survive or the world will regress to Hobbesian darkness; whether – as several seasoned participants not given to politicians’ rhetoric simply said – good will triumph over evil.

The fact that, under the Trump administration, the United States has abandoned its historic role of global leadership, choosing instead a contemptible neutrality between the free world and the dictatorships, lent further gravity to the occasion.

However, Trump’s pusillanimity, combined with Putin’s ever-present threat to the nations lying on Russia’s borders, have infused Europe’s democracies with new-found solidarity – not just with Ukraine, but with one another. That solidarity has been enhanced by the recent fall of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, removing from the councils of Europe Putin’s last apologist.

The overall mood of the conference is one of cautious optimism – the sober optimism of experienced diplomats and strategists. Much of the discussion is about the circumstances in which the conflict will come to a negotiated end. Few any longer fear that Russia will ultimately prevail. Given the objective initially set by Putin for his “special military operation”, some argue that he has already been defeated strategically – there is no realistic scenario under which the Ukrainian state will ultimately fall to Russian power.

However, some, notably Johnson, warn of the risk that any negotiated settlement which disappoints Ukrainian expectations may enable Putin to salvage some advantage by fostering a counter-narrative of Western betrayal.

There are three main reasons for optimism. First, the attritional war in eastern Ukraine, concentrated in the Donbas region, has ground to a bloody stalemate. While neither side made any significant territorial gains during the summer fighting season now drawing to a close, Ukrainian forces suffered far fewer casualties. The estimate of Russian casualties since the war began is an astonishing 1.5 million. Ukrainian forces are now killing or disabling enemy soldiers faster than Russia can replace them. Russia is losing about 30,000 fighters every month for no territorial advantage.

Second, Ukraine has pursued an effective offensive strategy of penetrating deeply into Russian territory, destroying air bases, infrastructure and, critically, oil refineries. Russia’s capacity to wage war has been primarily financed by its vast exports of petrochemicals. Now, Ukraine’s methodical destruction of its oil infrastructure is impeding that capacity.

Third, while the ground war continues in the east, with shocking human sacrifice reminiscent of the Western front in World War I, the dynamic aspect of the conflict is drone warfare. In the 4½ years since the war began, Ukraine has developed one of the most technologically capable militaries in the world. This year, it will build 10 million drones. (America will produce just 500,000.) While some are the sophisticated weapons used for deep strikes into Russia, most are inexpensively produced devices for localised fighting.

The very nature of warfare has changed at breathtaking speed as this war has progressed. Ukraine now has the most advanced armed force in Europe . All assumptions about relative military strength upon which Putin initially relied have been falsified by technological change, giving Ukraine first-mover advantage as Russia struggles to catch up.

Ukraine still faces one major threat. In recent weeks, Russian attacks on Kyiv, using ballistic missiles and new subsonic jet-propelled drones, have escalated sharply. Ukraine urgently needs to secure the interception capability to thwart those attacks. Zelensky told the conference he hoped that gap could be filled by year’s end .

Overall, the strategic landscape has shifted decisively in Ukraine’s favour . The great unknown about the duration of this war is no longer a military question, but a psychological one: how long will it be before Putin accepts that Russia cannot win?

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.