Every war inevitably gets framed in terms of who won and who lost. The war currently underway in Ukraine is no exception. As it nears the end, all the actors involved are jockeying around as they try - at the very least - to avoid being scapegoated for failures and unfulfilled promises. First among them all is president Volodymyr Zelenskiy who is emerging from the conflict as the scapegoat-in-chief.

This factor largely explains the constantly postponed settlement even as the outcome of the conflict has been clear since the end of 2023. That’s when the failed Ukrainian counter-offensive demonstrated that despite the Ukrainian army essentially becoming a branch of the world’s mightiest military alliance, Nato, driving the Russians far beyond the current frontline was not a realistic task.

In this context, it is worth recalling the expectations and motivations which drove public opinion in the run-up to all-out war. Lobbyist groups strove to present Russia as an evil empire single-mindedly focused on conquering and not interested in any kind of negotiation. The idea was to frame armed conflict as unavoidable simply because Russia is inherently evil and incorrigible.

That time when the war almost ended

The reality was much more nuanced, however. The images of an apocalyptic future drawn at the time in order to mobilise large audiences against the perceived Russian threat look more like self-fulfilling prophecy than historic inevitability today.

Two opposing views on Ukraine’s future were competing in Ukraine’s presidential election held in April 2019. The incumbent, Petro Poroshenko, campaigned under nationalist slogans and promoted a combative approach in relations with Russia, which had seized Crimea and triggered a low-intensity armed conflict in the eastern region of Donbas five years prior. Poroshenko’s campaign motto Army-Language-Faith stood for strengthening Ukraine’s military muscle and squeezing out Russian language as well as the Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

His opponent, Zelenskiy, favoured peace and rapprochement with Russia. He also pledged to defend Russian-speakers in Ukraine.

As it became clear that he was losing in December 2018, Poroshenko sent three Ukrainian navy vessels in a freedom of navigation stunt in the Kerch strait near the Russian-occupied Crimea. The Russians, expectedly, attacked and seized the ships giving Poroshenko an excuse to call for martial law. But the Ukrainian parliament only agreed to introduce a heavily watered-down version of the measure and refused to cancel elections, as Poroshenko perhaps hoped. The Kremlin chose not to retaliate for the act, but watch the incumbent lose the electoral battle miserably.

Having won by a landslide, Zelenskiy embarked on building trust with Vladimir Putin, an effort that resulted in a meeting between the two in December that year. These and subsequent Russo-Ukrainian talks led to a near-full ceasefire - the number of casualties dropped to an absolute minimum throughout 2020. Ukraine and Russia were extremely close to drawing the conflict to end along the lines of Minsk agreements which would have left a smaller portion of Donbas under Ukraine’s sovereignty but de-facto Russian control.

But Zelenskiy remained under constant pressure from Poroshenko-aligned nationalist forces and securocratic lobbies, while far right paramilitary groups, like Azov movement, sabotaged the withdrawal of troops from the line of contact. As hostilities on the frontline essentially fizzled out in the summer of 2020, the Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) embarked on the high-risk operation Avenue which could have easily precipitated Russia’s full-out aggression had it been successful.

HUR operatives, posing as Russian recruiters, lured dozens of Russian mercenaries associated with Wagner Group to Belarus with the intent to put them on a Turkish Airways flight which would have been force-landed in Ukrainian airspace. Apart from putting innocent passengers in mortal danger inside a plane filled with Wagner desperados and destroying critically important relations with the neighbour Turkey, the plan could have easily triggered Russia’s all-out aggression right away. The operation was called off by Zelenskiy’s administration last-minute, when the mercenaries were already assembled in Belarus. But this decision allowed Poroshenko supporters to demand Zelenskiy’s impeachment.

Zelenskiy demonstratively smirking and making fun of Putin at a press conference in Paris was not particularly helpful either. Putin was clearly frustrated with Zelenskiy by the end of 2020 and was refusing to see him in person. A year later, speaking in a remarkably candid interview Zelenskiy’s former chief of staff Andriy Bohdan said that Putin was most respectful in his dialogue with Zelenskiy and tried to find a solution in earnest, but “we scammed him badly… we promised his something, but we did nothing all”.

The U-turn

In November 2020, Azerbaijan conducted a lighting operation against Armenian forces around Şuşa with Turkish Bayraktar drones playing a crucial role in defeating the Russian-armed Karabakh Armenian forces. This created an impression among pro-war militaristic circles in the West and Ukraine - openly expressed on platforms like the Atlantic Council - that Russia was a colossus with feet of clay and that it could be defeated militarily without sparking a nuclear conflict with the West. This event was further changing Ukrainian calculus.

Yet by the end of 2020, Putin had very few incentives to launch all-out aggression against Ukraine. In December that year, the party of his Ukrainian ally Victor Medvedchuk overcame Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People in the polls. Meanwhile, the Nord Stream 2 project was edging towards completion despite American opposition. It would have relieved Russia from its dependence on gas transit through Ukraine and thus remove the most fundamental economic reason for conflict with this country. The Western opponents of Nord Stream claimed the Kremlin would strangle Ukraine economically if the project succeeded. True or not, Putin absolutely didn’t need war to achieve his goals in Ukraine, as things stood at the time.

Things changed completely in January 2021 when Joe Biden took over the White House replacing Donald Trump whose relations with Zelenskiy were difficult to say the least. From the very first days of January, Zelenskiy made an abrupt U-turn on relations with Russian, turning from a dove to a radical hawk aligned with platforms like Atlantic Council, a Nato-linked think tank which helped promote Zelenskiy’s new confrontational image during these months. He clamped down on Medvedchuk and his influential TV channels, launched a loud campaign for Ukraine’s Nato membership and for the return of Crimea. Meanwhile, his Western allies waged an aggressive campaign to derail Nord Stream 2.

By the end of March 2021, Russia started deploying troops at the Ukrainian border, threatening a large-scale attack. A year of hair-raising brinkmanship followed. In this process, the endgame for Ukraine and its Western allies was to coerce Russia into altering Minsk agreements, which ended the first phase of the conflict in 2015, in a way that favours Kyiv. Looking back at these efforts today, the strategic miscalculation by Zelenskiy’s administration looks monumentally tragic - four years later after the start of the all-out war, Ukraine can’t hope for anything remotely proximate to the Minsk framework and that’s disregarding the country’s epic devastation and depopulation.

There is no excuse for Putin winking first in that game of brinkmanship and committing the crime of launching all-out aggression, but the tragic truth is that all-out war could be avoided at various points in time, starting from the 2020 ceasefire and almost all the way to the start of invasion on February 24, 2022.

Gains and losses

The Kremlin’s behaviour at the start of the aggression was informed by two factors. One was Putin’s Ukrainian allies, like Medvedchuk, convincing the Kremlin that much of Ukraine was ripe for a takeover, that Ukrainians would greet Russian troops with flowers and tears in their eyes. That couldn’t have been more wrong.

The other was Russia’s intervention in Georgia in August 2008, when following president Mikheil Saakashvili’s ill-thought charge on South Ossetia, Russian troops marched to the edge of Tbilisi forcing Georgia to accept a humiliating peace, negotiated with the help of major European leaders.

The “Kyiv in three days” meme is now a regular talking point of Western politicians, experts and journalists even though no one at the top of the Russian government has ever made such a prediction and Russia’s actions around Kyiv didn’t suggest anything within such a short timeframe. The source of this phrase is the chief American military commander at the time, Mark Milley, who was trying to warn about dire consequences Ukraine would face if invaded.

But it is fair to say that the Kremlin had the expectation of a Georgia-like outcome - perhaps not within days, given Ukraine’s size compared with Georgia, but definitely within weeks. This outcome seemed forthcoming as the Ukrainians and Russians began negotiating a fast exit from the conflict in Istanbul in March 2022.

The occupation of Kyiv was not a pre-condition for Putin’s strategic goal. Within the first months of the war, the Russians pushed into Ukrainian territory beyond their wildest dreams by setting up the essential land corridor to the Crimea. What the Kremlin was trying to avoid by moving on Kyiv in its shock and awe operation was a grinding war of attrition along the heavily fortified old frontline in Donbas it would have had to fight otherwise.

The expectations of fast victory were proved wrong by the resilience of the Ukrainian army and civilians as well as by the Anglo-American intervention in the Istanbul talks, now confirmed by a plethora of sources, including former top US diplomat Victoria Nuland.

The Russians were forced to regroup, abandoning the terrain where they could only avoid loose presence, and engage in a prolonged confrontation in Donbas which saw industrial cities turning into fortresses and subsequently getting levelled by Russian artillery and seized by infantry.

A key Ukrainian spokesman back at the time, Oleksiy Arestovych, set a clear criteria for what the Ukrainian leadership saw as the definition of victory at the start of war. Speaking in an interview in March 2022, he said that anything worse than Minsk would be seen as Ukraine’s defeat.

Today though, Minsk provisions, even in the most pro-Russian reading, look like a distant dream. None of the expectations Ukrainian and Western societies were being fed with for years are coming true.

Instead of restoring its sovereignty over occupied regions and pushing the Russians towards the 1991 borders, it lost and keeps losing additional territory.

There is no question of Nato membership while fast-track EU membership, favoured by the Trump administration, has been ruled out by key European actors, including German chancellor Friedrich Merz. The tragic truth is that once Ukraine is out of the war, there will be a firm consensus within the EU that membership is not going to happen within decades if it all, not least because of Ukraine’s powerful agricultural sector (an elephant in the room EU officials tend to ignore at the moment). Worse than that, the visa-free regime is likely to be lifted to prevent mass population flight after the border is open for draft-age men, especially if ceasefire looks tentative.

There will be no real security guarantees because Russia will not agree to Nato contingents on the ground, unless it involves a de-facto separation of Western Ukraine where they will be based - an eventuality the Kremlin would likely endorse. If the conflict resumes for whatever reason - Western powers will not provide any additional capabilities compared to the current ones, because they’ve already stretched their abilities to the edge of direct nuclear conflict with Russia, which they are naturally trying to avoid.

It is highly questionable whether Ukraine can expect substantial rebuilding packages from the West. The Trumpian perception that instead Ukraine owes Western powers for being propped up by them all those years - and tends to display ungratefulness - is likely going to dominate in the current climate.

At the moment, Ukraine has good chances of getting much of the Russian assets frozen in Western financial institutions - because the Kremlin clearly agrees to it - but this chance is gradually getting squandered as the Russian leadership begins to feel that it could dictate even more humiliating conditions of peace.

Meanwhile in Russia, the population has been largely shielded from the impact of war despite relatively heavy human losses, as per journalistic estimates, like the one by the BBC/Mediazona (169/219 thousand documented/estimated lethal casualties). The losses disproportionately affect a very specific strata - the most destitute people, including Russia’s vast prison population. The country’s dominant middle class remains largely unaffected. On the economic side, Russians were far worse off during the turmoil of the 1990s. The current situation is extremely far away from what they could possibly regard as the end of the world.

Importantly, Russians are not psychologically invested in any unrealistic outcomes like occupying the whole of Ukraine or installing a puppet regime. From the Russian perspective, it is very much Putin’s war and any outcome that fixes Russia’s gains in the last four years will be easily accepted.

However for Ukrainians, the question of what they have been suffering and dying for will loom ominously over the political agenda for decades to come. As Zelenskiy’s former chief of staff Bohdan prophesied back in 2021: “We will all hate Zelenskiy. Not because he has stolen something, but because he had a chance”.