As the members of the pro-Ukraine Coalition of the Willing gathered in Paris to finalise their joint position on security guarantees the West could provide to the embattled country, US Ambassador to Nato Matt Whitaker sounded exceedingly optimistic. “We could be on the cusp of a peace deal”, he told Fox and Friends on the eve of the meeting. He went on to brag about finalising the 20-point peace plan (20PPP) submitted to the Kremlin on Christmas Eve - a version of an agreement which Moscow clearly indicated it would reject.

Promising peace deals without consulting the adversary is a very innovative approach to ending wars, but it once again confirms that Western governments exist in a rather hermetic make-believe information bubble of their own creation when it comes to war in Ukraine.

Two declarations were eventually adopted in Paris and both leave many more questions than answers, despite Western leaders’ performative optimism. One, signed by both Europeans and Americans, envisages the creation of a European-led and US-supported multinational force to be deployed in Ukraine after peace is reached. Another, signed by France and Britain, commits troops from these two countries to this force.

Needless to say, Nato boots on the ground - no matter how small and militarily insignificant this force might be - is a clear non-starter in any talks with Russia because this is exactly what the Kremlin was trying to prevent when it launched an all-out aggression against Ukraine in February, 2022. Moscow repeatedly said that it is not going to agree to this condition.

Talking about it would of course make sense if Russia were losing on the battlefield and if Ukraine were able to sustain a devastating war for many more years. But both is not true. Russia is holding battlefield initiative and keeps punishing Ukraine for postponing the inevitable - a peace deal along the framework of the failed 2022 Istanbul peace deal - by gradually eating away more and more of its territory and destroying more and more of its crucial infrastructure.

The Russian strategy has been clear since the start of the war. It is the strategy of a protection racket gang, like those which ran the show in Putin’s native St Petersburg in the 1990s. Your payment is rising exponentially the longer you postpone it.

Ukraine lost 4,336 sq km of its territory in 2025, according to Deep State, a war mapping service linked to the Ukrainian defence ministry. That’s more than in the two previous years combined. It might be a small percentage of the overall Ukrainian territory (0.72% in 2025), but areas lost last year included a coking coal deposit on which the country’s crucial metallurgical industry was reliant as well one of its largest prospected lithium deposits.

UNDP put the direct damage inflicted on Ukraine’s infrastructure by the end of 2024 at $176bn and the cost of recovery at $524bn (a 8% increase from 2023). Figures for the last year are yet to be released, but it was clearly more devastating.

Even if the Russian assets frozen in the West are spent on Ukraine’s reconstruction in their entirety, as per the initial draft of Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine, it will be a far cry from the amount Ukraine actually needs.

More horrible though is the population loss - an estimated 11mn of Ukrainians currently live abroad, according to the ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets. That’s around a quarter of the prewar population. The longer the war goes, the less likely that any significant part of them returns.

All this warrants the question of why the Coalition of the willing is proposing a plan which it knows Russia will reject. The first and obvious answer is that it doesn’t want the war to end at the moment, hoping that continued pressure on Russia, some black swan event or divine intervention could help it to turn the tables on the battlefield in such a way that the Kremlin will accede to a compromise that will not look as complete capitulation for both Ukraine and the West.

But that means that the West’s collective political mind is still stuck in the mentality of 2021 when Ukraine and its Western allies tried to coerce Putin into agreeing to a “better Minsk” - a version of Minsk agreement more palatable to Ukraine - by crossing each of his multiple red lines. They engineered a clampdown on Putin’s Ukrainian ally Viktor Medvedchuk and his media empire, launched loud campaigns for Ukraine’s roadmap to Nato and to derail Nord Stream-2 project. British destroyer HMS Defender staged a demonstrative “freedom of navigation” exercise, entering what Russian had proclaimed its territorial waters off the Crimean coast.

All of this ended with in a massive escalation when Russia launched a war of aggression against Ukraine (which the Kremlin and much of Russian society see as a defensive war against the US-led West). Support for Putin remains at close to an all-time high amongst Russians.

With the public attention span in the TikTok epoch not exceeding that of a three-year-old, few remember the events of 2021 today, not to mention learned any lesson from them. On the contrary, there is an extremely reckless, unpredictable and ill-informed US administration which might be seen as appeasing Putin before making a move that could easily precipitate a second Cuban crisis - as it did when it seized an oil tanker under the Russian flag in the Atlantic Ocean on January 7.

In addition, a few European governments (especially British) find themselves too badly invested in a totally unrealistic outcome of Ukraine which amounts to Russia’s defeat. The game they are playing boils down to an attempt at undoing the rapprochement between Trump and Putin which made peace seem likely throughout 2025. The hope is that Trump’s recklessness may result in the US applying those kinds of military and economic pressure on Russia which Biden administration wisely tried to avoid for fear of global economic crisis and the WWIII. That explains British participation in the capture of the Russian tanker, the Marinera.

As ever, the policy hinges on the assumption that Putin will keep absorbing the blows forever without escalating. But we know from very recent history that there is always a point when the overall mass of insults, big and small, becomes critical. When that happens, the Russian ruler tends to shift into the mode of excessive and shocking escalation which completely changes the rules of the game and the world we live in. This happened in 2008 when Russia responded to Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili ill-thought expedition in South Ossetia. It happened after the collapse of de-escalation agreements at Kyiv’s Maidan in 2014 and it happened again in February 2022. The difference though is that the next escalation most likely means direct conflict between world’s two largest superpowers.

The flurry of activity within the framework of what Western, especially European and Ukrainian leaders, present as “peace process” is perplexing, given the shining absence of Russia in any of these discussions (unless some secret talks are taking place elsewhere, away from public eye). At the end of the day, Ukraine’s partners may come up with a semblance of joint negotiating position which Russia will simply reject and then we are back to square one.

Then the US and Europe will need to come up with new economic and military measures aimed at coercing Russia, but this policy didn’t work in the last four years while further pressure is leading us deeper in the mortal danger zone where we’ve already been for quite some time. It is only the collective irresponsibility and reality avoidance - characteristic of political establishments in democratic countries - which sustains this dangerous situation.

But Putin understands that in the dilemma between abandoning Ukraine and suffering significant direct costs, Western leaders will ultimately opt for the former. This is especially true about Trump who needs to deliver peace in time for midterm Congress elections (or face mockery about his failure) and understands that coercing Zelenskiy and Europeans is much easier and much more feasible than coercing Putin.

There is of course also the performative aspect in everything that’s happening, especially when it comes to the leaders of key European countries - the UK, France and Germany. All three are to a varying extent unpopular at home, so their foreign policy “toughness” is a last-ditch attempt to avoid going down in history as miserable failures. Damage control is also a major motivation factor for Zelenskiy who had to downgrade expectations from Russia’s military defeat to conditions that will be much more humiliating than those once envisaged in Minsk and Istanbul agreements. With a clear risk of being personally affected by the ongoing corruption investigation against his immediate entourage, he faces the prospect of becoming the top scapegoat for Ukraine’s looming defeat.

Damage control means leaders need time for their audiences to get accustomed to their position shifting further and further away from aggressive defiance towards what they used to dismiss as “capitulation”.

Whether it is the magical thinking based on the fairytalish narrative of Russia about to collapse (we heard it for quarter a century now while it was only getting stronger) or damage control, the ones who are paying for delays in peace settlement are Ukrainians who keep dying, as well as losing property and future as a nation. Tectonic shifts in Ukrainian public mood and social structure is something Western political establishments are least aware of, trusting the “heroic nation” mythology created by stratcom experts and media, but this is the biggest time bomb that’s ticking next to their porch. Bigger and much more real than Russia.