imagine that!
Don’t believe the conventional wisdom. Ukraine can still lose.
Defeat could take various forms. None of them are pretty.
July 4, 2025 at 1:17 p.m. EDTYesterday at 1:17 p.m. EDT
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Smoke rises after a Russian strike Friday on Kyiv. (Yehor Konovalov/AP)
PARIS — Soviet losses in World War II exceeded those of all other Allied forces combined and were roughly double those of Nazi Germany, whose capital, Berlin, ultimately fell to Red Army troops.
Keep that in mind when you hear that Moscow can’t possibly sustain the colossal military and economic costs it is suffering from the Ukrainian bloodbath Russian President Vladimir Putin initiated three years ago in pursuit of his neo-imperial fever dream. It can.
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Ukraine has proved its own ferocious resilience in the course of fighting a war of survival. But as the war grinds on into its 41st month, it’s worth questioning the conventional wisdom that neither side can win on the battlefield.
Which is to say, Ukraine can lose.
The chances of that outcome have risen considerably in recent days. Even as vicious Russian aerial assaults have crescendoed in the past month, sowing terror in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, the Trump administration has said it would withhold scarce Patriot air defense missiles and an array of other critical weapons already en route to Ukraine. The move, if prolonged, could turn the cracks in Ukrainian defenses into gashes, leaving Kyiv and other cities increasingly defenseless against Russian ballistic missiles.
A Ukrainian defeat could take various forms. It would not necessarily mean Ukraine’s forces would crumble along the 750-mile front line, resulting in a catastrophic loss of territory and subsequent carnage, as Russian troops swept through Ukrainian towns and villages. The lethality and density of Ukrainian drone defenses, increasingly supplemented by robots, along with Russian logistical limits, mean Moscow’s forces still struggle to make game-changing advances.
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But defeat might also mean that Kyiv is forced to sue for an unjust peace — one that subjugates it to Putin’s will — as it becomes increasingly unable to contain the damage of pulverizing Russian aerial bombardments. The scale of those attacks, involving hundreds of drones and dozens of cruise and ballistic missiles fired in concert to overwhelm Ukraine’s dwindling air defenses, was unimaginable a year ago. Today, it has become routine.
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Putin might have been deterred by now if he believed the United States possessed an iron will to continue or intensify the flow of arms to Ukraine indefinitely. But by suspending U.S. arms deliveries, President Donald Trump vindicates the dictator’s core belief that Moscow’s capacity for endurance will eventually wear down Kyiv and its Western allies.
Little surprise that when Trump telephoned Putin on Thursday, on the heels of news that the U.S. arms flow had been suspended, the Russian leader refused to discuss a ceasefire.
A Ukrainian defeat, whatever form it might take, might seem unimaginable, given the suffering Kyiv has already withstood without breaking — and given its ongoing ability to stun Moscow, as it did last month by attacking Russian bombers at airfields hundreds of miles behind the front lines.
But the unimaginable occurs regularly enough to serve as a reminder that the popular consensus is a poor metric by which to measure probability. Almost no one, including most experts, warned us to expect the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union’s collapse, the 9/11 attacks, the covid-19 pandemic, Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel or — until virtually the last minute — Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Conventional wisdom has also been of little value in forecasting the course of the war in Ukraine. On the upside, Ukrainian forces outperformed expectations by holding off Moscow’s all-out invasion in 2022, then rolled back some Russian advances later that year. But the following summer, Ukraine failed to deliver on sunny predictions that its heavily telegraphed counteroffensive could break Moscow’s lines.
To use a phrase often attributed to Joseph Stalin, quantity has a quality of its own. And Russia’s massive quantitative edge over Ukraine, not least a nearly 4-1 advantage in population, exerts a gravitational force that over time cannot but erode Kyiv’s reserves of resolve and courage.
Ukraine’s resolve has been bolstered by the tens of billions of dollars in U.S. and European military aid funneled to Ukrainian forces. The funding showed solidarity and helped the battered country contain the damage to vital infrastructure necessary for life to go on.
But it has been clear for at least a year that renewing Washington’s portion of that bargain would be a heavy lift in Congress, even had Democrats won the White House. Trump’s election meant it would be only a matter of time before the flow of many of Ukraine’s most critical weapons would slow or stop.
That halt came more abruptly than anyone in Kyiv expected. The blow to Ukrainian morale is undeniable. And now one has to wonder how many more such blows Ukraine — badly outmanned, struggling with personnel shortages and lacking Russia’s strategic depth — can withstand.