Beyond the deal: The achievable path to Ukrainian victory

Graphic by Gabor Ruszkai / Shutterstock

It is not necessary to repeat arguments why Russia failed in Ukraine, as one can find these in numerous analytical reports. Moscow has not been able to achieve any of its strategic goals in four years of full-scale war: it has not captured a single regional centre; has not ensured sustainable logistics for annexed Crimea; has not collapsed the Ukrainian economy (primarily due to strong European support); has actually lost dominance in the air or at sea as well as in cyberspace; and has not divided Ukrainian society and forced it to surrender. After two years of continuous mass assaults, Russia has seized less than 1.5 per cent of Ukrainian territory – despite the full mobilization of its resources. At the same time, Ukraine has effectively displaced the Russian fleet from the Black Sea and is inflicting deep strikes on Russian military infrastructure (especially air defence and strategic aviation), logistics, oil refineries, and military production. This has been done using recently designed weapons and perfectly planned clandestine operations. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have also reached a situation in which Russia cannot accumulate troops: the number of casualties of Russian soldiers per month has reached the monthly number of new Russian recruits.

Thus, Russia cannot win. But what are the other possible outcomes of the war?

Scenario analysis by the Kyiv Foresight Foundation offers six different scenarios for the war ending. These range from scenarios that are either too optimistic or too catastrophic to be realistic, to those assessed as most plausible. Among them, the most probable scenario is called the “Rotten Deal”, which describes the course of actions that implement numerous American peace initiatives shaped by European leaders. Yet a full year has passed and the Kremlin rejected every such proposal. One can be surprised as to why the Russian leadership refused to give their country at least a short respite. However, deeper analysis explains their reasons that are both subjective (why they do not want) and objective (why they cannot). Indeed, from Beijing’s perspective, continued Russian escalation without decisive victory only serves to exhaust Moscow while tightening China’s leverage over it.

So what?

If it looks like a Rotten Deal is not reachable because of Russian politics and a systemic blind spot in peace-making, and the world is sliding towards the rule of force (the bottom row of the scenario table detailed here) to an Unstable Equilibrium (too unstable), should we look for an achievable good and sustainable scenario in this bottom row?

Such a scenario does exist. It is called “Bees Defeat the Bear” and it rests on three key factors:

1. Ukrainian innovations and resilience
2. The Coalition of the Willing
3. Weaknesses of the Russian economy and political system
   

1. Ukrainian Innovations and Resilience

Ukraine’s advantage in this war is not numerical parity but deliberate asymmetry rooted in innovation. Over four years of full-scale invasion, Ukraine has built a horizontal, decentralized, and fast-learning model of warfare in which innovation is systemic. This model extends beyond world-leading military R&D (air and sea drones, maritime platforms, long-range strike capabilities, AI solutions), to encompass organizational redesign, intelligence-sharing architectures, and deep civil–military integration.

Crucially, Ukraine has solved a problem that many advanced militaries still struggle to address: radically shorter feedback loops between the battlefield and decision-making, production, and logistics. Tactical lessons learnt are incorporated within weeks, while successful solutions spread horizontally through networks before bureaucratic procurement systems can respond. Military effectiveness, therefore, accumulates rather than resets — it systemically compounds.

Yet, to win a full-scale war, innovation must be matched by scalability. As a relatively small economy, Ukraine historically lacked the capacity to industrialize innovation at the level such a war demands. Tens of thousands of business leaders, engineers, and IT specialists who joined the Armed Forces or shifted into military production demonstrate exceptional capabilities in innovation, craftsmanship, and rapid learning under pressure. What they lack is not ingenuity but experience in scaling solutions to industrial volumes.

Scalability, however, requires systemic investment, mature supply chains, and institutional experience in mass production, and this is precisely where Ukraine faces structural limits. Europe, by contrast, possesses both missing ingredients: capital and long-standing experience in scaling complex industrial systems. To combine Ukrainian speed, creativity, adaptability and battlefield-tested innovation with European investment and production capacity, Europe can elevate Ukraine’s fast but small-scale innovations into a world-leading European military force.

Another core concept is resilience, which should help unwrap this issue’s unhelpful heroic gloss. As Oleksandra Keudel and Oksana Huss argue, resilience is not endurance for its own sake but the outcome of crisis response through which a system preserves its core values or functional nucleus. Under this lens, resilience is neither heroic nor infinite; it is a costly, emergent property that depends on continuous innovation, institutional learning, and resource mobilisation, and it has limits.

This is precisely why Ukraine can win and why that victory will also belong to Europe.

Ukraine’s society has not merely absorbed shock after shock; it has repeatedly reconfigured itself to preserve democratic governance, social cohesion, and military functionality. Pressure has generated learning rather than collapse. Russia’s strategy depends on exhaustion without transformation, while Ukraine’s resilience is built on transformation to avoid exhaustion. This asymmetry increasingly favours Ukraine, but only if Europe matches Ukrainian adaptability with strategic resolve, coordinated investment, and timely policy action.

2. The Coalition of the Willing

Ukraine can win, and this victory will also be Europe’s victory. But it will not come from abstract unity, symbolic declarations, or yet another incapable memorandum. The second pillar of this scenario is not universal western unity but selectively determined support by a coalition of states that are determined to act in self-defence even in the absence of full consensus.

The year 2025 reflected an important shift: Ukraine’s survival depends on the capacity of the core group of European and transatlantic states to sustain military, financial and political alignment and backing over time and to resist Russian strategies of fatigue and fragmentation.

We see this coalition in action: the most strategically aware and materially invested members of the Coalition of the Willing, those for whom Ukraine’s outcome is a direct national security concern, lead in weapons procurement, intelligence sharing, training, sanctions enforcement, and increasingly in joint industrial projects. What Europe must now adjust is the logic of support itself: maturing from emergency aid to structural integration, from ad hoc packages to long-term financing, and from parallel defence efforts to aligned defence planning. Deep industrial and military cooperation are not optional add-ons – they are the infrastructure of endurance.

What matters most is not the scale of any single aid package, but continuity and systemic impact. Russia’s strategy assumes fatigue, electoral cycles, and fragmentation among allies and heavily finances special operations to divide this unity.

The Coalition of the Willing directly undermines this strategy as it signals and embodies that the support for Ukraine is not a temporary moral stance or charity, but a core security interest and means of self-preservation in which Kyiv’s military victory is central to the continent’s security.

To survive as it is, Europe should therefore adjust its policy tempo, decouple Ukraine support from short political cycles or specific EU-destabilizing Russia-financed politicians, and institutionalize commitment beyond individual governments. The Coalition of the Willing has not yet demonstrated its full potential but this is exactly what would help completely change today’s narrative. When Europe empowers the rear of this war with the same strategic clarity, Ukraine can focus on holding the frontlines and civilian infrastructures. In these circumstances, Ukrainian victory becomes not only a possibility but an aligned, systemic and cohesive outcome of the accumulated effort.

The first immediate step to bring the end of the war much closer is the radical shutdown of Russian oil exports through the Baltic Sea, where tankers in a state of emergency with fake registrations and fake insurance threaten the whole of Northern Europe.

3. Weaknesses of the Russian economy and political system

Ukraine’s path to victory runs through a simple but uncomfortable truth for some in Europe:  Russia is fighting a war that is structurally self-exhausting, and Moscow is already weaker than it tries to make out. Only cumulative pressure, not gracious patience or premature compromise, can turn its weaknesses into a decisive defeat.

The Kremlin can still mobilize resources but it does so by cannibalizing its own future and its own economic and political foundations. There are no more resources for manoeuvre: every decision to save the budget (through money issuance) destroys stability and accelerates inflation, and every step to save stability (via high discount rates, tax hikes, a reduction of social spending) destroys the real sector. The Russian federal budget deficit for January alone has reached almost half of the planned annual deficit. The state of oil and gas revenues is a critical pillar of fiscal stability, including the decline in oil production despite rising OPEC quotas. There are also issues such as rising inflation; the rapid growth of the share of non-performing loans that now exceed 11 per cent (a level that signals elevated systemic risk and the possibility of a banking crisis or depositor run); the crisis in the real estate market; and the massive decline in business activity in the real sector. It is worth noting the pace of company closures and the growth in the share of vacant space for rent regarding this final point. These issues all indicate a growing “snowball” if not an avalanche of systemic problems.

Russia’s war economy has become both the engine and the hostage of escalation: military spending crowds out civilian investment, labour shortages cripple entire sectors, and technological degradation deepens dependency, primarily on China. What looks like endless resources is in fact exhaustion disguised as momentum. The war continues not because Russia is winning, but because stopping the war would expose the scale of accumulated damage and loss.

Recently the Financial Times claimed Russia increasingly finances the war through internal extraction rather than external rents. A growing share of the federal budget is absorbed by military spending, forcing cuts to public services and household income.

Official claims of robust growth mask a harsher reality. Independent assessments cited by Harvard Professor Martin Sandbu, alongside alternative inflation metrics from the Stockholm School of Economics, suggest that Russia’s economy has contracted in real terms since the full-scale invasion. Research by Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Elina Ribakova, and Iikka Korhonen for the Peterson Institute for International Economics shows that current growth is driven by the forced mobilization of labour and capital, not productivity, and therefore cannot last.

Politically, the regime is even more constrained in a dangerous paradox. As my previous New Eastern Europe article “Kremlin’s Poker Face” explains, Moscow does not operate on rational cost–benefit calculations but on a mafia–KGB logic in which locking in gains is perceived as defeat. Ending the war without visible “trophies” would undermine Putin’s personal legitimacy of his 30-year-long reign, fracture oligarchical elites, and expose the Russian regime to internal threats from militarized veterans and war beneficiaries, whose status and income now totally depend on continued mobilization. This is why Russia rejects ceasefires, imitates negotiations, and then turns the tables upside-down, invents fake accusations, and escalates even when escalation worsens its position. De-escalation is existentially impossible for this dictatorial system.

Taken together, these arguments demonstrate that Russia is not pursuing victory in Ukraine in any conventional sense. There are no more options left – it is postponing its own systemic collapse by continuous war escalation and more summits and flashy international visits. Time plays against both Russia and Ukraine, but the difference is crucial. This creates a fundamental asymmetry: Ukraine has learnt to adapt, prioritize, and endure through continuous agility and transformation, while Russia must escalate, pressing its rigid system without transformation until its economic, social and political foundations collapse. Understanding this logic is crucial because it explains why pressure and not compromise determines outcomes, and why any policy that stabilizes Russia’s war economy or offers it economic respite directly prolongs the war rather than ending it.

Why Ukraine can win and Europe must unite and align

The central strategic conclusion is clear: Ukraine can win this war, not by mirroring Russia’s mass mobilization or by waiting for a winning peace deal that will not come, but by out-adapting, out-enduring, and structurally neutralizing an aggressor trapped in its own logic of escalation. Russia’s failure is not accidental, and Ukraine’s resilience is not heroic improvisation. It is the result of European partnership, systemic innovation, societal transformation, and learning under pressure. The “Bees Defeat the Bear” scenario is therefore not aspirational – it is the only achievable outcome in a world sliding away from rules and toward force.

However, this victory is not Ukraine’s alone; it is inseparable from Europe’s current and future security. Ukraine has demonstrated that resilience is possible even under existential threat—but it is limited and costly, and Ukraine has already paid more than any society should be asked to pay. The longer Russia’s defeat is delayed, the higher the likelihood that Europe will face an expanded, full-scale multi-domain conflict for which it is still insufficiently prepared. To some extent, this war has already begun. It is visible in sustained hybrid attacks against European states, including the suspected sabotage of military assets such as German warships, repeated cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and covert acts targeting critical infrastructure. Strategic assessments describe this as an escalating and deliberate Russian hybrid war against Europe, aimed at exhausting European societies below the threshold of declared war.

Analyses in New Eastern Europe document how this campaign has intensified across NATO’s Eastern Flank. The same pattern is evident in the Baltic Sea region, where undersea internet and energy cables were attacked as part of Russia’s hybrid strategy to disrupt European connectivity and security. Forward-looking assessments warn that these methods are likely to intensify rather than subside as Russia seeks to compensate for its strategic failures in Ukraine.

The more closely Europe and its allies unite and concentrate on Russia’s defeat, the lower the long-term price Europeans will ultimately pay, not only in money, but in lives and in the security of their cities and critical infrastructure. To avoid exponentially higher prices, European governments and civil society alike must fully assume their role not as a rear but as a strategic and united ally. While Ukraine alone is waging a kinetic war, Europe must fully engage across all other domains – economic, informational, diplomatic, and cognitive.

Yuliya Shtaltovna, PhD, is Professor of Intercultural and International Management at HS Fresenius, Germany and a Research Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics, Ukraine.  

Valerii Pekar is a chairman of the board of the Decolonization NGO, the author of four books, an adjunct professor at the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School and Business School of the Ukrainian Catholic University, and a former member of the National Reform Council.

resilience, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine at war, victory