#WTH Some Ukraine optimism

Russia is nowhere near "victory"

Today, as we enter the fifth year of Russia’s war on Ukraine, I share a quick update to my post yesterday. Two important things to add. The first is our podcast with our colleague Fred Kagan, who just returned from his sixth trip to Ukraine. You can read the full transcript below, or…

Importantly, the Critical Threats/Institute for Study of War Russia team has an update that I think everyone who cares about the facts of the war will want to read. Here’s the teaser…

The fifth year of Russia’s invasion is not beginning well for Moscow. Recent Ukrainian successes on the battlefield disprove Russian claims that things can only get worse for Ukraine the longer Kyiv delays surrendering to Russian demands. Battlefield realities as of late February 2026 show that continued significant Russian battlefield gains, let alone total victory, are not inevitable. Ukrainian forces have recently made the most significant gains on the battlefield since Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Oblast in August 2024 and liberated the most territory in Ukraine itself since the 2023 counteroffensive. Ukrainian forces began a series of counterattacks in the area of Kupyansk in mid-December 2025 that stabilized Ukrainian control over the town of Kupyansk and retook at least 183 square kilometers between December 11 and 25, pushing Russian forces out of several settlements near the town. Ukraine has held its gains in Kupyansk since mid-December despite Russian efforts to reverse them, and current battlefield dynamics do not suggest that Russia will quickly regain land in the area. Ukrainian forces also began limited counterattacks in early February 2026 that liberated multiple settlements in the Oleksandrivka and Hulyaipole directions in Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia oblasts. ISW has observed evidence to assess that Ukrainian forces have liberated roughly 200 square kilometers in some areas of the Novopavlivka, Oleksandrivka, and Hulyaipole directions, losing 35 square kilometers in other areas of those three directions during the same time frame for a net gain of 165 square kilometers in February.[iv] Ukrainian forces continue limited counterattacks in these areas.

Events on the battlefield refute Moscow’s claims that a Russian battlefield victory is inevitable and that Ukraine should surrender to Russia’s demands before its position deteriorates further. Localized Ukrainian counterattacks are unlikely to grow into a large-scale counteroffensive in these areas, and Russian forces will very likely stabilize their positions and even begin advancing again as preparations for Russia’s Spring-Summer 2026 offensive approach completion. But Ukrainian counterattacks have reportedly disrupted Russian efforts to set conditions for that Spring-Summer 2026 offensive and will force the Russians first to fight to establish stable defensive positions before starting the fight to regain lost ground. Only then will they be able to move into their planned offensive operations with troops already attrited and worn down rather than fresh. Ukrainian forces have not liberated operationally significant areas, apart from Kupyansk, but the multiple localized Ukrainian counterattacks will likely have lasting effects on the ability of Russian forces to make significant advances in key sectors of the line this spring.

Read the entire report here.

TRANSCRIPT

Q: Walk us through the failure of Vladimir Putin to seize Ukraine.

FK: Yeah, look, so four years ago today, Putin was going to conquer Ukraine in three days, and initially he started off controlling about 7% of Ukraine from 2014, what he’d seized in 2014, at the height of the Russian invasion in 2022, he got up to about 26% of Ukraine. Then the Ukrainians conducted the counteroffensives in the fall, and the Russians knocked back down to about 18% of Ukraine. They’re currently at about just under 20% of Ukraine that they control.

So forgive the percentages, but what does it mean? It means that in four years of war, the Russians have occupied about one and a half percent of Ukraine’s territory, and over the last year, they’ve occupied about 0.8% of Ukraine’s territory at the loss of about half a million casualties. So the Ukrainians are holding, the Ukrainians have held them off, they have held them off for four years. They are holding and they will continue to hold as long as they receive the assistance from the West that they need. There are the good things going on that I want to talk about, but that’s the bottom line.

Q: Talk about the Russian conduct of the war, first, and tell us how it’s going.

FK: Well, it’s not going great for Vlad. He certainly did not mean to get mired in this Russian quagmire, and he obviously has no answer. The Russians continue to try different ways of restoring maneuver, of making gains, of making things work out, and every time the Russians come up with something, the Ukrainians come up with a countermeasure. And I’ll hold this for a bit and just at the moment, actually, the Ukrainians are the ones who come up with some ways to move forward, and that’s been interesting and important to see. But things are not going well for Vlad at all.

First of all, he has been trying very hard not to admit to Russians that Russia’s at war, he still won’t call it war, this is the special military operation, and he’s been trying very hard to shelter his people from the effects of this war, but he is no longer able to do so. The Russian economy is suffering from multiple drivers of structural inflation, including a labor shortage that is only mitigated because the Chinese are providing enormous quantities of material support to the Russians and North Koreans secondarily, but the Russians actually have a manpower problem. Everyone talks about the Ukrainian manpower problem, the Russians have a major manpower problem, and the ISW team is forecasting that in fact, Putin is probably going to go to another involuntary reserve mobilization soon because he’s really, it seems like coming to the limit of, first of all, how many Russians are willing just to sign up for money in order to die quickly. And second of all, how much money he can actually spend.

He started to spend down the Russian Gold Reserve, and that’s because he largely exhausted his ability to spend the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund, which was vast when the war began. And if you want a single indicator that he is has very serious economic pressures, when you’ve got to start spending down your gold reserve in order to keep current accounts, you have a big problem. And that’s one problem that he has. I could go into more detail on a lot of this stuff, but the Russians have a lot of problems. And you’re right, we focus on Ukraine’s problems all the time, and the Russian narrative is that everything’s great and they can keep doing this forever, and that is just not true.

Q: What is the negotiation strategy of Russia?

FK: The Russian game here is to try to win at the negotiating table what they cannot take on the battlefield, and furthermore that they need to win at the negotiating table soonish because things are not going well for them. So they are working very hard to, through Witkoff and Kushner to communicate a couple of things. One is they’re working very hard to communicate that they are winning and stomping on the Ukrainians and the Ukrainian lines are about to collapse any minute and so Zelenskyy is an idiot for not just surrendering stuff that he’s going to lose in a few months anyway. And this has been a huge Russian line, and this particularly relates of course to Donetsk.

There’s no assessment that says that that’s true, and we’ll come back to the trip. But I just want to tell you, in the engagements that we had with Ukrainian military officials on this trip, we’ve never found them more confident and more optimistic about their ability to hold the Russians off since the 2023 counter offensive, and all the data shows that they’re right. So the Russians are absolutely bluffing, and they have created this alternate reality in which they’re about to win in order to get Witkoff to persuade Trump, to force Ukraine to surrender, when in fact it’s the Russians who have the problems and the Russians who need to surrender.

Q: Walk us through your visit.

FK: We met with the senior commanders who were responsible for some of the sectors, and we met with some other folks who are involved with the various Ukrainian drone strikes and the drone campaign. And look, what we heard was confidence, and we haven’t heard that for a long time.

Q: How many times have you been to Ukraine?

FK: This was our sixth, I think.

And the last time we were there was in September, and people were very nervous. People were kind of down, and we talked to a lot of the same people. The mood was not good. This time, it was a completely different story. Everyone was confident. Everyone said, “We can hold.” And I’ll tell you, Dany and Marc, one of the things that became clear to me is ... I got an insight about Donetsk and the Fortress Belt that the Russians say they’re about to take in a few months, our calculations say if all the Russian gains that they make over the next two years happened in Donetsk, they would probably take it in about two years. That’s the current ISW assessment. But when we came back from this trip, I realized it’s not clear that they’ll ever take it.

And we were in some senses doing Ukraine into service by making these forecasts of how long it would take because it’s not at all clear the Russians are going to be able to take large cities, these are cities that are larger than any that they’ve taken since the start of the war and they’ve shown no ability to do that rapidly. They haven’t even approached to the outskirts of the two most important cities in the Fortress Belt, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. It took them over six months to take the town of Pokrovsk, once they entered the city limits, took them two years from when they started trying to take it, but once they entered the city limits, it took them six full months to take that town, which is less than half the size of both of the large cities in the Fortress Belt, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, both of which are heavily fortified. It is not at all clear that the Russians even have the capacity to do this at this point. And that was one of the things that we took away from this trip.

Q: So where does the confidence come from?

FK: The Ukrainian military is maturing. It is getting better. They are improving their wall of drones, the frontline drone system that they’re using to kill Russians before the Russians are able to advance very far. They are improving their long-range strike, which they’ve used to inflict huge damage on the Russian economy, which is one of the things that’s been driving up prices in Russia and inflicting pain on the Russians in various different ways. And they’ve also started to focus on what they call mid-range strike, which is hitting targets in the Russian rear to disrupt the Russians ability actually to do the offensive operations at all, even before they get to the frontline, which can reduce the pressure on the Ukrainian frontline and reduce Ukrainian casualties. So we’ve seen improvements in all of those areas. We’ve seen improvements in the quality of Ukrainian commanders and staffs, and the way that they’re functioning and the way that they’re planning and thinking. It really was very, very surprising to us because we didn’t come in expecting to see that, but that was what we got from everyone we talked to.

Q: Let’s talk about how the United States is supporting Ukraine, what is it that we are continuing to do for the Ukrainians?

FK: So the Trump administration is still supporting Ukraine in a number of critical ways without which we would be in a very different situation. First and foremost, the administration is continuing to provide Ukraine with intelligence, and that is in two forms. One is a warning of impending Russian attacks, and that warning intelligence is saving Ukrainian lives every night by letting Ukrainians know when missiles are on the way and letting people go to the shelters. And it’s really hard to overestimate how important that intelligence sharing is. And it’s also been reported that the US is supporting Ukrainian targeting, and that’s also very important. We have capabilities to help with that, that the Ukrainians don’t have access to, inside Russia too. And that’s also been very essential to what the Ukrainians are doing. So the intelligence sharing is very, very important, and it’s something that people don’t talk about very much, it doesn’t really cost the US anything, or certainly not very much, but it’s really, really valuable and it’s something that the Europeans would be very hard put to replace.

Q: What are the Europeans doing for the Ukrainians?

FK: The Europeans are stepping up. But before we come to that, look, the US is still letting the Europeans buy American equipment for Ukraine. And this has been one of the things that of course Trump has done is he’s pressured the Europeans into stepping up and taking financial responsibility for this war, even as we continue to facilitate the provision of important weapons systems to Ukraine. And we have some challenges here. There are challenges with the US defense industrial pace, and what I find inexplicable delays in going to the fastest possible production of Patriot interceptors that we can, I don’t understand how we can be this far into the war and still be producing as few interceptors a year as we actually do. And that is an issue for Ukraine. It’s an issue for Israel, it’s an issue for the United States. It’s going to be an issue for Taiwan and Japan. And this is a problem, because there just aren’t enough Patriot interceptors in the world and Ukraine needs them. So that’s a challenge.

But there are lots of other things that the Europeans are purchasing from us to provide to Ukraine, and that’s very, very important, including by the way, there are F-16s that are operating in Ukraine, and those play a very important, in defending Ukraine against Russian aerial attacks. The Ukrainians use those to shoot down drones and cruise missiles.

So there’s a lot of US material that’s going that’s really important. The Europeans are stepping up here. They’re hindered a little bit by some of the vicissitudes of European politics in various different states.

Change in leadership in Czechia was unfortunate from the standpoint of support for the Czech Artillery initiative, although I think that they’re getting that under control. But the bottom line is that we’re seeing something in, with the European relationship with Ukraine that I think is very positive, which is not only are the Europeans giving the Ukrainians money and weapons and buying American weapons for them, but they’re beginning to invest in Ukrainian defense industry and set up co-production agreements with Ukraine, that will ultimately turn Ukraine into what it should be after it gets to an acceptable resolution of this unjust illegal invasion that Russians initiated, which is the arsenal for NATO. That’s Ukraine’s actual future.

Q: What do the Ukrainians need to force Russia to reconsider its position?

I was having a conversation with somebody else the other day, and they were talking about what the Ukrainian economy was going to look like after the war and things. I said, “You don’t understand, we’re going to have a completely different Ukraine when this war is over. Ukraine is not going to be known as the breadbasket of the world anymore. Ukraine is going to be known as the arsenal of NATO, because that is what Ukraine has now built, is an incredible defense industry of its own that is more innovative, that is more effective, that is much more cost-efficient than anything you will find elsewhere in NATO states.”

And if we have any brains at all, we will work hard to make sure that there is a strong Ukraine that is deeply integrated with NATO, whether it’s a member or state or not, with bilateral security agreements that are binding that allow Ukraine to serve the function not only as the eastern bulwark of the alliance, but also as the arsenal of the independence of Europe, resisting Russia.

Q: One of the areas where Ukraine’s innovation has been incredible has been in sea drones. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

FK: Yeah, I mean, this has been an incredible story and I’m glad that you’re focusing on it. So there has been an offense-defense, measure-countermeasure race in the maritime drones. And there is one artifact that we need to just note here, which is the Russian Black Sea fleet was the weakest of the Russian fleets to begin with, and because of a nineteenth-century treaty, the Turks are required not to allow the Russians to reinforce their ships in the Black Sea from other fleets. So the Ukrainians have had the opportunity to fight only the stuff that was there to begin with, and the Russians haven’t been able to reinforce it with, possibly better ships from other parts of the Russian Navy.

So we just need to put it in context. That having been said, this is the only war that I can think of where a state with no Navy has defeated a significant fleet, and chased it all the way to the far side of the Black Sea. Because that’s where the Russians are now hanging out, all the way on the eastern side of the Black Sea, trying to stay away from Ukrainian attacks. Ukrainians are still hitting them, and they’re hitting the shadow tankers. So it’s been a combination of maritime and aerial drones.

Q: How successful has Russia been in countering the sea drones, compared to the air drones?

FK: So what happened is the Ukrainians first developed the maritime drones that they were operating against Russian ships with great effectiveness. Then the Russians realized that if they flew helicopters around their ships, they had a better chance of seeing those drones and destroying them before they got there. So the Ukrainians started mounting anti-aircraft systems on their unmanned systems; on the sea drones, would have any aircraft systems that could shoot the helicopters down.

This is a whole other interesting dynamic that we’re now seeing, that both sides are now mounting anti-aircraft missiles and things on drones. The Russians are mounting them on aerial drones. The Ukrainians are mounting them on maritime drones. This is an interesting dynamic that we’re seeing playing out here.

But the bottom line is that the Ukrainians have continued to find ways to take advantage of the fact that they can afford to lose lots of maritime drones to Russian countermeasures, because every Russian ship they sink, every Russian Kilo submarine, they damage, is worth more than the cost of all of the drones that they’ve expended on this. And that cost dynamic is very important, and it’s something that we really we need to stay focused on, because there are Russian aspects to this also when we talk about the Shaheds and so forth.

But when you can field high quality intelligence systems that have considerable capability at low cost, that... Stalin said, “Quantity has a quality all its own.” The ability to field quantities of those and continue to keep shooting at a limited number of high value enemy targets gives you a huge advantage. And that’s the dynamic that we’ve been seeing in the Black Sea.

Q: The Ukrainians have given everything; the Russians have given nothing. What is required to change the Russians’ calculus, and how do we do that?

FK: Okay. It’s long been our assessment that the only way that we’re going to change Putin’s calculus is if we help Ukraine stop the Russian advances completely and begin to inflict significant battlefield setbacks on the Russians and start liberating territory, and demonstrate that they will be able to continue to roll the Russians back.

Putin’s theory of victory rests on the supposition that the Russians will continue to grind forward at whatever cost indefinitely, and that forward grinding, he will be able to turn into an effort to persuade us and the Europeans to abandon Ukraine and force Ukraine to capitulate. That’s Putin’s theory of victory right now.

We have to help Ukraine demonstrably invalidate that theory, and make it clear to Putin, no, if you keep fighting, you’re going to lose what you have. That is the way that Putin’s calculus is going to be changed.

Q: How do we get there?

FK: There are a number of things that we can do to help the Ukrainians in this regard. One is that, I’m sorry, I’ve got to come back to Tomahawks. President Trump was talking about giving Ukraine tomahawks around November 1st, and then we didn’t. I can get account for you of how many Shaheds have been fired since then, but it’s many thousands.

And we need to understand, and many thousands of Shaheds have been fired, which is what has made this winter in Ukraine a nightmare. We were there, minus 20 degrees centigrade, talking to people who are living in 20 story apartments with no electricity, no heat, no hot water.

Q: What has been the net effect of this strategic bombing campaign on Ukrainian morale?

FK: As far as we can tell, it has been about the same as most strategic bombing campaigns, which it’s pissed Ukrainians off, and it’s just hardened their hatred of Russians. And it is not breaking their will, but it is absolutely making life miserable.

We were also on a train from Dnipro to Kiev when the Ukrainian power grid collapsed, and Kim and I were confident we were going to be sleeping on that train maybe for a few days. Now, the reason that didn’t become a front-page story, by the way, was because the Ukrainians got that grid up in a couple of hours, and that train was 40 minutes late. If only Amtrak could do that.

But the grid collapsed because of the damage the Russians were able to do because they’re able to produce thousands and thousands and thousands of Shaheds. And this should worry us for a whole lot of reasons. Destroying the facility that produces those Shaheds would set the Russians back considerably. It would also save Ukrainian lives.

Q: How would US action against Russian weapons capabilities be categorized?

FK: It’s presented as an escalation step. It’s a defensive step because the target that the Ukrainians would be going after would be the targets that are producing the Shaheds and secondarily Russian missiles. Look, people need to watch the video of the Oreshnik strikes because the video of the Oreshnik strikes guys, that’s what nuclear attack looks like, because that is a missile that is designed to deliver nuclear warheads.

That is the purpose of the Oreshnik. The Oreshnik was not built to deliver conventional warheads, and you can see the multiple reentry vehicles striking multiple targets. Those are designed to be nuclear warheads. That was an escalatory step, and it was meant to be.

So absolutely, this is not escalatory, but furthermore, it is defensive, because the point is to attack what the factories, the Russians are using to produce hundreds of thousands of these things. By the way, the Russian target, we hear, is to be able to produce 1000 Shaheds per day. That’s the Russian production target for this year. That would be 365,000 per year. This is something that we should be concerned about, and it’s something the US could do something about.

Q: Let’s say one were to convince President Trump to allow the Ukrainians to use ballistic missiles to target just the Shahed factory. How many Tomahawks would it take to just eliminate that target, and would that tilt the war in a significant way?

FK: Look, it would certainly, yes, it would certainly disrupt the current Russian attacks on the energy grid for months, and it would give the Ukrainians a reprieve. That would be extremely important for a lot of things. So yes, actually it would really be an asymmetric thing.

Look, I’m not a weaponeer, so I can’t give you a precise estimate, but I think somewhere in the range of 25 to 30 Tomahawks is what we’re talking about. I understand there’s a Tomahawk shortage. We’re going to need a lot of them. I am pretty sure that we can spare the number that would be needed to make a significant impact on this war. We’re not talking about hundreds of Tomahawks here, needed to do this.

Q: What else is required to change the Russians’ calculus? What about Iran and China.

FK: the Iranians are not doing that much for the Russians right now. Although if the Trump administration took down another Russian ally, it would be a major informational defeat for Putin, which Putin would register as a major defeat, and it would be more significant than the removal of Maduro. It would be a lot more significant than the removal of Maduro from that perspective, and of course from a lot of other perspectives. So there absolutely is a relationship there. The bigger thing that we need to focus on is that if the Chinese were not enabling or were not granting Putin access to the Chinese economy as a major offset for Russia’s manpower shortage, this war is probably over and it’s over on terms that are very positive for Ukraine. We really have to reckon with how deeply the Chinese are involved in supporting the Russian War effort, including sending fully assembled combat drones to Ukraine.

The Chinese are really right up at, and in many respects, just over the line in terms of sending lethal aid to the Russians. But I don’t have the economics to be able to figure out what the manpower offset is that the Chinese are doing for the Russians in terms of giving the Russians access to their economy and workforce but it’s enormous. And considering that there’s an actual labor shortage in Russia of about one and a half million, and that Putin has to decide, make choices about whether he’s going to send Russians to the front line or have them in his own factories, what the Chinese are doing for the Russians is almost existentially important for Putin and is essentially important for this war. If there were a way to bring increased pressure on China to cause the Chinese to ratchet back their support for Putin, and we’re not going to split China from Russia, that’s a fantasy.

I’m not suggesting that that’s a thing, but the Chinese have other interests and this is something that is really worth putting a lot of energy into because the Chinese are absolutely a major engine of this war, and they’re an engine of this war because they like what Putin is doing. They think that it’s good for them if Putin destroys NATO. They think it’s good for them for Russia to demonstrate that the US alliance system is ineffective. They think it’s good for them to demonstrate that the US is not going to respond decisively to attacks on partners. They think all of that sets them up to be able to operate against Taiwan and other US allies in the region. So that’s why they’re supporting this war. But they don’t want to pay too heavy a price for this, and I think we’ve not done remotely enough to impose cost on them for the support that they’re providing to Putin, and it would make a huge difference to Russia.

Q: Russia withdrew from Afghanistan after losing 17,000 troops or something to that effect, right? In Ukraine, Russia’s lost well over a million, right? Why does Putin not stop?

FK: So there’s one simple answer is he’s a victim of sunk cost fallacy. He has already invested so much in this that he’s got to get a return on the investment that’s worth it, and he’s not satisfied with the return that he’s got. So he’s got to lean into this more. I could give you a whole historical analogy to this. This is kind of what happened in Germany in 1918 where you can get into kind of a death spiral where in order to keep the war going, you have to make more demands of your population. In order to get your population to be okay with the demands, you need to promise them more. And so even as you can accomplish less and less on the battlefield, you promise more and more to your own people in order to keep the sacrifices going, in order to keep the war going. And I see elements of that dynamic here. So he’s trapped himself a little bit in this.

He’s caused Russians to lose a million people and he’s devastated the Russian economy. He needs to show more for that, he thinks, than what he’s got, but he believes that he can outweigh us. This is the fundamental problem here, is that he thinks he’s winning on the scoreboard that matters, and the scoreboard that matters for Putin is our will. He thinks that he is defeating our will, and he thinks that if he keeps pushing long enough, we will break and then Ukraine will be doomed.

Now, I personally think and hope that he’s wrong about that, but it’s the perception that we might just in fact compel the Ukrainians to surrender. That is one of the things that is encouraging Putin to keep going more than anything else because if he could find a way to get us to flip on Ukraine and get us actually to work to crush Zelenskyy into accepting a surrender that gives a lot more than Donetsk, because I’ll come back to this in a minute, but this was never about Donetsk and it isn’t about Donetsk, but if Putin could get us to do that, he could snatch a huge victory from the jaws of defeat.

Q: How can the US counteract Putin’s perception that Ukraine may be compelled to surrender?

FK: The prospect of that is one of the things that’s keeping him going. So we need to understand that that’s a kind of driver of his continuation of this is his belief that with some justification, that it may be that he could actually get us to decide that we just need to cut Zelenskyy off and put a huge amount of pressure on Ukraine to surrender. And nothing better could happen for Putin than that, and he thinks that’s worth playing for. But look, we do need to recognize this was never about Donetsk. The initial Russian invasion was aimed at Kyiv, and the objective was the conquest of Ukraine because in 2021, Putin laid out the cause of the war and his objectives and he wrote an article or caused someone to write an article that he signed laying all of this out and the essence of that article is there is no such thing as Ukraine.

Ukraine is part of Russia according to Putin. He doesn’t recognize Ukraine as a people, as an ethnicity, and as an independent state. He’s not fighting for territory in Donetsk. And this is something, I’m sorry, that Steve Witkoff gets wrong all the time. Because this is what the Russians tell him, but it’s not true. The Russian objective is the political or military conquest of all of Ukraine. And if Putin gets less than that, he’s lost. That’s Putin’s perspective. So until we can demonstrate to him our will is not going to break, we are not going to compel Ukraine to surrender. We are going to continue to press for a peace that leaves a strong, independent, viable Ukraine that can resist future Russian aggression. Until we do that, Putin is going to be incentivized to continue pressing forward.

Q: Recent WTH guest Michael Tory’s asserted that Putin can’t let Ukraine prosper because the Russian people will look at that and say, “Same people, same land, similar language, same culture, and yet they’re prospering and we’re not.” What’s your perspective on this?

FK: I think that is one factor. I also think we need to acknowledge a reality that a lot of Russia experts have been reluctant to come to acknowledging, which is Putin has created a state ideology. Putin has recreated the Soviet Union minus communism, and he substituted a kind of Russian nationalism and expansive Russian nationalism. It’s almost Pan-Slavism. It’s almost like 19th century Pan-Slavism, but it’s this image of Russian nationalism that has become the state ideology of Russia, and he’s requiring everybody to mouth this ideology. And the ideology calls for what is basically, sorry, I’m a Russian historian, so the phrase comes to my lips, the reunification of the Russian lands.

This is what the Tsarists used to talk about, and it’s important to remember Putin meditates on Russian history. It’s kind of a weird, very ultra-nationalist, not entirely accurate Russian history, we know the books that he reads and stuff, but he meditates on this stuff. He has become an ideologue, and the ideology is an ideology of conquest of the Russias, of which Ukraine is the crown jewel, especially since he basically already has Belarus. He does already have Belarus. He’s already taken Belarus. So Ukraine is the key now for him. So it’s ideological. And also, exactly as Michael Tory says, you say, Marc, that he can’t afford to have a successful Ukraine on Russia’s borders and explain to his people why Russia’s a basket case.

Q: Let’s dive into the negotiations. What’s going on, are still discussions ongoing, and talk about the good faith of both sides as well.

FK: I do think President Trump is trying to achieve peace here. I think that he does want to stop the killing. He wants to stop this war and he wants to do it on acceptable terms, and he has consistently refused just to sell the Ukrainians out. He’s consistently refused just to compel them to surrender to the Russians. That’s extremely noteworthy. And after the 28 points that came out, and we and others all raised a ruckus about it, he had Steve Witkoff engaged in a negotiations process with the Ukrainians about what they need, which is very important. So I absolutely agree with where this is coming from.

I think the problem is... Look, it does seem to be the case that the president is very unwilling to increase pressure on Putin, and I’m not going to speculate as to why that is, because I don’t fundamentally understand, and it’s not for me to understand, but it’s pretty obviously the case and the fact that President Trump is reluctant to increase pressure on Putin is actually making it harder for Witkoff and Kushner to get the kind of a deal that they actually are going to need here because it’s becoming apparent.

It has become apparent that the Russians think that they are winning on the negotiating table. They think that they have gotten the US over to their position more or less, and they just need to push a little bit more and they’ll get us to crush Ukraine into surrendering, and we need to break that dynamic somehow by demonstrating, no, actually, we’ve put a lot of pressure on Ukraine. President Trump has put a lot of pressure on Ukraine over this time, although he’s continued to support it. He’s not put enough pressure on Russia, although he has started by going after the shadow fleet vessels.

Q: How do you think the Trump administration should approach negotiations going forward?

FK: There’s a fundamental reality that we need to recognize here, and that I think is important for everyone who’s involved in negotiations, keep in mind. The US inherently has much more leverage over Ukraine than we have over Russia, right? So the natural thing to do is to lean on the people that we can lean on, and I wouldn’t do it that way, okay, but I understand that phenomenon. But we have reached the point, as you guys said, where the Ukrainians can’t give more than they’ve given. They have already given an enormous amount. Zelenskyy has said, if we stop the war on the current lines, he’ll accept that. That’s a huge concession. It’s a huge concession. So we need to ask ourselves a question. Why is the war continuing? Since the Ukrainians have agreed to accept the current lines, why is the war continuing? Because Putin is willing to kill more Ukrainians and Russians in order to get more than he has. That’s the fundamental dynamic that’s going on right now, and that’s not the dynamic that I hear being presented by readouts of the negotiations or discussions of our policy.

This is the thing that we have to get in our minds. The problem is that Putin is dissatisfied with what he has and insists on getting more. That makes Putin the obstacle, not the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians are not insisting on getting more than they have. The Ukrainians are not insisting on liberating all of their territories anymore. I actually think if you just forgive the digression, look, I think there’s a bit of a hangover in our thinking from the old Biden policy because one of the many problems with Biden policy was whatever it takes, as long as it takes. And lots of people were saying, “Okay, but do we seriously think the Ukrainians are going to liberate all of their lands? Is that what we’re going for?” Whatever it takes, as long as it takes was not a good bumper sticker other than for encouraging Ukrainians, and it led to this conviction-

And it led to this conviction coming into the Trump administration, that the Ukrainians had unrealistic expectations. The Ukrainians were going to insist on liberating all of their lands, and we had to get the Ukrainians to be realistic. And there was some truth in that. But we’re there guys, Zelenskyy has accepted the reality that he’s not going to get it all back. It’s Putin who is insisting on continuing the war to get more. And we need to reorient our negotiating strategy and our pressure strategy around that fundamental reality, because that’s the only way that Witkoff is going to have the tools and the pressure balance and the resources that he needs to get the Russians to make the concessions that they have to make, in order to get the kind of deal that President Trump can sign and accept and be satisfied with.

Q: What would you say to people who say, “Putin has decided he can’t get this 20% sliver of Donetsk that he has not been able to advance into. He’s already got 80% of it. Why don’t you just give him that 20% and then the war is over?”

FK: Well, so there’s two things going on here. One is, it’s a lie. The Russians are lying. They’re very good at this. The war is not over. If the Ukrainians give him that remaining 20%, the Russians are... And by Russians, I mean the Russian foreign minister. I mean, Putin himself, I mean Russian actual Kremlin officials who are speaking for Putin, continue to make it clear that the Ukrainian surrender of the rest of Donetsk is the starting point for further negotiations. And they’ve also made it clear that those negotiations are not going to include things like meaningful security guarantees because they’ve already vetoed that, and they’ve said that repeatedly. So we actually have to get very clear about this. The Russians are trying to get us to compel the Ukrainians to surrender territory, not in exchange for a piece, but in exchange for some more negotiations in which the Russians are going to continue to play the old Soviet game of what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable. They want a concession so that they can then continue to make more demands, and that’s the Russian negotiating strategy right now.

The second thing is, ISW coined the expression to call this the fortress belt, is the part of Donetsk that the Russians are asking the Ukrainians to give over. This is a region of four largest towns, a couple of small cities and a couple of towns that have been heavily fortified. The Russians have been trying to take them since 2014. They didn’t start trying to take these in 2022. They started trying to take them in 2014. They failed. This fortress belt has been deemed fortified for 12 years, and the Russians have been unable to take it for 12 years, and they’ve been trying.

And they’ve been unable to take it because it’s really hard to take. This is defensible terrain. This also includes significant Ukrainian defense industry, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian people. So this is going to be a very hard nut for the Russians to crack, if they can crack it at all. It’s going to cost them a huge number of soldiers. It’s going to cost them a huge amount of resources, and it’s not clear that they can take it. So that’s why this terrain matters. But again, the terrain is only part of the picture for Putin.

Q: Are the people in Luhansk and Donetsk, the so-called Donbas, are they Russians? How did they vote when Ukrainian independence was up?

FK: Well, I’ll tell you how they voted when it mattered. When the Russian separatists backed by Russian military came in, they fought them. They fought them like hell. That’s the voting that matters most. That’s why the Russians were not able to take this part of Donetsk in the first place, was because the inhabitants who are supposedly Russians, fought off the Russians and fought off the separatists like hell, and fortified, and have held for 12 years. Look, we were in Kharkiv on this last trip. Kharkiv is one of the places that Putin has always trumpeted as, this is a Russian city. It’s a beautiful city despite what the Russians have done to it. It’s a remarkable city. And everywhere you go, you see advertisements for the Ukrainian defense unit that is defending it. Which is the unit that is one of the most successful in recruiting for the war effort. And it’s because it’s a very good unit. But this is in what is supposed to be a Russian city according to Putin.

And when the Russian forces came down the highways toward Kharkiv in 2022, the locals picked up AK-47s and started shooting at the tanks. All of these Russian speakers in Ukraine who were supposedly Russians and were going to welcome the Russian invasion, they are the ones who are on the front lines in the trenches in minus 20 degrees with no heat, fighting against the Russian invaders. This is the easiest of all bits of propaganda to disprove. It is just simply not true. Ukrainians identify themselves as Ukrainians. And the Russians have accelerated, by the way, the development of a sense of Ukrainian nationalism and of a distinct identity that is not Russian by everything that they have been doing since 2014. So in some sense, no one is more responsible for the emergence of a very strong and vibrant sense of independent Ukraine than Vladimir Putin. And that’s because when he presented Ukrainians with a choice between being part of an independent Ukraine and part of Russia, they said, “We would rather die than be part of Russia.”

Q: What kind of security guarantees are necessary to make this hypothetical peace hold?

FK: Look, we need to have very robust security guarantees that involve the forces on the ground of NATO member states. This doesn’t need to be and shouldn’t be under a NATO auspice. It should be under probably a series of bilateral mutual defense agreements, by the way. And I emphasize mutual defense agreements because Ukraine has a lot to bring to the table here to help deter future Russian attacks against NATO if these defense agreements are set up properly. Mutual defense agreements that need to involve, among other things, European nuclear states, because there needs to be a non-US nuclear deterrent involved in all of this stuff. So it’s going to be very important to have the Brits at least, and hopefully the French also signed up to meaningful bilateral security guarantees that are going to involve the deployment of their forces in Ukraine. There needs to be US commitment to involvement in this. The US absolutely has to assure Ukraine and its allies that it will allow them to use US command and control systems, intelligence systems and so forth.

But the best single deterrent that the US can provide is the United States Air Force and to make a commitment that if the Russians violate, if the Russians attack again, the United States will bring the full strength of its air power to bear, which can crush the Russian military. And if we do that in conjunction with a solid set of European ground forces, deployments with some American with command and control and other resources in place in Ukraine and nearby in neighboring states, and rock solid commitments, and a solid monitoring process that will let us come quickly to the conclusion that Russians have in fact violated when the Russians actually blame the Ukrainians, that is a robust security guarantee. Oh, and last thing. We need to be investing in Ukraine so that the Ukrainians have a strong enough military on its own to make the Russians think twice, and the security guarantees make the Russians just not think about it. That’s the way to make this work.

Full transcript here.

SHOWNOTES:

Fred Kagan on Ukraine’s Attack and the Future of War (School of War Podcast, June 5, 2025)

Ukraine Briefing (Spirit of America YouTube, Fred Kagan Interview, February 24, 2025)

Trump Must Forge a Ukraine Peace Deal on America’s Terms – Not Putin’s (New York Post, Fred Kagan January 19, 2025)

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 19, 2026 (CTP-ISW, February 19, 2026)

Russia’s FPV Drone Campaign in Ukraine Institutionalizes Intentional Civilian Harm as a Tool of War (CTP-ISW, February 10, 2026)

Talks Break in Geneva With No End to Russia’s War or Hard-Line Demands (The Washington Post, February 18, 2026)

Ukraine Detains Ex-Energy Minister as High-Level Corruption Case Widens (The Washington Post, February 17, 2026)

Munich Day 3: Zelenskyy Seeks Tomahawks, Patriots (Politico, February 15, 2026)

Ukraine Gets $35 Billion in Military Aid Pledges After Attacks (Bloomberg, February 12, 2026)

US Military Aid to Ukraine Dropped 99% in 2025, Report Finds (The Kyiv Independent, February 11, 2026)

Dynamics of Trust in President V. Zelenskyy, Perception of the Prospects of the Ukrainian Government and the State of Democracy: Results of a Survey Conducted on January 23-29, 2026 (Kyiv International Institute of Sociology)

US Only Has 25% of all Patriot Missile Interceptors Needed for Pentagon’s Military Plans (The Guardian, July 8, 2025)

How To Make Sure the Stalinist in the Kremlin Faces a Grim Future (The Washington Post, February 13, 2026)

Peace Through Profit: The Problem with Steve Witkoff’s Ukraine Strategy (The Free Press, December 3, 2025)

Why Putin Can’t Afford to Let Ukraine Prosper (Michael Tory, WSJ, September 20, 2025)

How Russia is Reshaping Command and Control for AI-Enabled Warfare (CSIS, February 10, 2026)

Seven Contemporary Insights on the State of the Ukraine War (CSIS, November 17, 2025)

Thresholds of Survival: The Resistance in Occupied Ukraine (CSIS, January 14, 2026)