here is a peculiar quality to strategic miscalculation when it wears the costume of catastrophe. For three years, Western commentators have diagnosed Russia's war in Ukraine as a failure—tactical, economic, moral. The initial invasion was botched; the retreat from Kyiv, humiliating; the sanctions, supposedly crippling; the body count, staggering. All true. And all, perhaps, beside the point.
In the grammar of great-power competition, campaigns are not scored on their opening moves but on their end states. Vladimir Putin almost certainly now believes that his "special military operation" has accomplished its most important goals—not the conquest of Ukraine, which remains contested, but the exposure of something more valuable: the fundamental brittleness of the Western alliance, and the conditions under which that alliance might shatter permanently.
To state the obvious: Donald Trump's second presidency has been immensely helpful to Putin's position. No byzantine kompromat theories are required. Trump admires Putin and craves his admiration in return, for reasons that are familiar and pathetic. But there is no evidence Putin views Trump as a trustworthy partner—only as a stooge he can easily manipulate. As for Trump's surrender-lite Ukraine "peace plan," which may have been drafted with Russian input, at least it brings the painful contradictions to the surface: there is no exit from the Ukraine quagmire that does not involve giving Putin most of what he wants.
What follows is an examination of those contradictions through five lenses—the strategic, the energetic, the technological, the diplomatic, and the Global South's quiet repositioning. The picture that emerges is not of Russian victory in any simple sense, but of American self-wounding so profound that the distinction may not matter.
I. The Strategic Miscalculation That Wasn't
There was, and remains, ample evidence for the Western narrative that Russia was losing. The February 2022 invasion was predicated on strategic delusions: that Ukraine was a wayward province of Mother Russia that would capitulate with minimal resistance; that Kyiv would fall in days; that Zelensky would flee. None of this occurred. Ukrainians, united behind their unlikely president, fought back with immense courage and resourcefulness—as well as countless billions in overt and clandestine Western assistance. Under the Biden administration, the conflict became an unconcealed proxy war between Russia and a seemingly unified West.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and various military leaders spoke confidently—usually off the record—about recapturing all Ukrainian territory lost since 2014, driving Putin into his corner, or bringing down his regime entirely. Pride goeth before the fall.
On the other side of the equation, Putin believed he understood his opponent's weakness. It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that his analysis was more accurate.
Russia's military and society have paid a terrible price—hundreds of thousands killed or wounded by conservative estimates, enormous hardware losses, damaged infrastructure. Western leaders assumed Putin's regime was too fragile to withstand that level of social and economic damage. This may have been a critical miscalculation. Russian leaders have a long history of treating their young men as expendable cannon fodder in defense of the motherland; those tales of mass sacrifice are encoded deep in national mythology.
As Foreign Policy's Michael Hirsh has documented, far more unanimity of opinion exists on the Russian side in support of the invasion than on the Western side against it. Scholar Maria Snegovaya argues that Western politicians and policymakers "are deceiving themselves" if they believe Russian public opinion has turned against Putin—even younger Russians "remain unusually united in blaming the West for provoking Putin into war."
The conflict looks entirely different from Moscow's vantage point than from Washington's or Brussels'. Both sides are entrenched in ideological narratives that illuminate some truths and obscure others. But one narrative—the Western one—presumed a solidarity that has since proven conditional, while the other presumed a fracturing that has since proven prescient.
II. The Energy Architecture: Europe's Forced Metamorphosis
Before February 2022, Germany received more than 55 percent of its natural gas from Russia. The dependency was not accidental; it was policy—Wandel durch Handel, change through trade, the bet that commercial entanglement would moderate Moscow. Nord Stream 2 lay ready for certification, a €10 billion monument to that bet.
The invasion ended the wager overnight. Germany, under enormous pressure, froze Nord Stream 2's certification. Then, in September 2022, sabotage—still officially unattributed but widely suspected to involve Ukrainian actors—destroyed both Nord Stream pipelines. Europe's physical connection to Russian gas was severed at the seabed.
What followed was the most dramatic energy transition in modern European history. Germany built LNG terminals in months rather than years, importing liquefied natural gas from the United States, Qatar, and elsewhere at roughly four times the price of piped Russian supply. European industry—especially energy-intensive sectors like chemicals, steel, and glass—faced existential cost pressures. Some factories relocated; some closed. The continent burned through strategic reserves and prayed for mild winters.
From Putin's perspective, this is not a defeat. Russian gas still flows—to China and India at discounted rates, through pipelines like Power of Siberia 2, via "dark fleet" tankers that evade Western monitoring. The customer base has shifted, not vanished. And Europe, in its haste to decouple, has become more dependent on American LNG and American foreign policy than at any point since the Marshall Plan.
The irony is layered. Europe's green transition has been accelerated by the crisis—renewable installations are up, the case for energy independence reinforced. But the transition is occurring under duress, at inflated cost, with political fragility attached. Far-right parties across the continent have weaponized energy prices against centrist governments. The German economy has stagnated. The coalition that imposed sanctions is weaker than it was before it imposed them.
III. Technology Sovereignty: The Chip Wars and Digital Dependencies
The Ukraine war accelerated a parallel conflict—the technology cold war between the United States and China. Washington, citing security concerns, tightened export controls on advanced semiconductors and the equipment to manufacture them. The Netherlands blocked ASML from shipping extreme ultraviolet lithography machines to China. Japan followed. The "chip alliance" was born, but it was born in fear.
This has reshaped global technology governance in ways that benefit no one cleanly. China has poured resources into domestic semiconductor capacity, aiming for self-sufficiency by the end of the decade. Whether that succeeds or not, the direction is clear: decoupling, redundancy, and the end of the integrated global supply chains that defined the post-Cold War era.
Meanwhile, Europe discovered its own dependencies. The continent that invented the microprocessor—in the 1970s, at Fairchild and Siemens—now manufactures less than 10 percent of global chips, and almost none at the advanced nodes. The EU's Chips Act pledged €43 billion to rebuild capacity, but fabs take years to construct, and the talent pipeline has atrophied.
Artificial intelligence compounds the stakes. The frontier models—GPT-4, Claude, Gemini—run on American and European cloud infrastructure, trained on hardware subject to American export controls. Russia has been largely cut off from this ecosystem; its own AI development proceeds on older, sanctioned components. But so has much of the Global South, which now recognizes its own digital dependency with fresh clarity.
Technology sovereignty, in other words, has become the new great-power competition. And the Ukraine war—by hardening the camps—has made that competition zero-sum in ways it did not have to be.
IV. The Global South Realignment: Non-Alignment Returns
In 1955, at Bandung, twenty-nine newly independent nations proclaimed a third way between the American and Soviet blocs. The Non-Aligned Movement that emerged from that conference was always more aspirational than operational. But aspirations have a way of returning when circumstances shift.
The Ukraine war has catalyzed that return. Observe the vote patterns at the United Nations: while General Assembly resolutions condemning Russia have passed, the abstention bloc—India, South Africa, Brazil, much of Southeast Asia and Africa—is substantial and persistent. These nations have declined to impose sanctions. Many have increased their trade with Moscow.
India, the world's most populous democracy, has become Russia's largest customer for seaborne crude oil, purchasing at discounts that offset some of the inflation imported from elsewhere. Prime Minister Modi visited Moscow in December, signed economic and military deals, and returned home without rebuke. The "strategic autonomy" that Delhi has long proclaimed is now visible as strategic flexibility: partner with Washington on the Quad, buy oil from Moscow, court Beijing on trade.
Brazil's Lula has called for negotiation rather than military resolution, declined to ship munitions to Ukraine, and positioned himself as a mediator—a role the Global South increasingly claims. South Africa hosted a BRICS summit that expanded the bloc to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Whatever BRICS is—and it is less than its proponents claim—it is a forum where Washington's voice is not controlling.
This is the dimension least visible from Western capitals. The war in Ukraine is, for the Global South, someone else's quarrel—a European conflict dressed in universalist rhetoric that the Global South finds unconvincing, given the West's own history of selective morality. When Western leaders invoke the "rules-based international order," developing nations remember Iraq, remember Libya, remember decades of IMF conditionalities and World Bank structural adjustments.
Russia has exploited this memory ruthlessly. So has China. The result is a fragmentation of the post-1991 consensus—not into a new bipolarity, but into a more complicated geometry where middle powers maximize optionality and great powers bid for influence with deals rather than diktats.
V. The Collision of Narratives
One of the most important aspects of the Ukraine conflict is also among the most difficult to grasp: it looks entirely different from the Russian perspective than from the Western one. Both sides are embedded in narratives that tell some parts of the story and ignore others.
For many Europeans and Americans, understanding this war as David versus Goliath—Ukraine as a lonely democracy fighting tyranny—carries powerful historical resonance, a reprise of 1940. But a different historic grievance drives the Russian narrative: the mythical connection between Russia and Ukraine, resistance to Western decadence (blamed, not entirely without reason, for the poverty of the post-Soviet years), and reversal of decades of national humiliation.
These narratives collide, and Ukrainians are trapped between them—almost as supporting characters in other people's fables. The West tells a story of freedom defended; Moscow tells a story of encirclement resisted; Kyiv tells a story of national survival that neither fully hears.
It is precisely this collision, and the extent to which the narratives talk past each other, that has led the world into an unresolvable crisis. This is not moral equivalence—grievance does not justify unprovoked invasion. But it is strategic recognition: Putin perceived the weakness of the Western narrative, its internal contradictions and limited staying power, and Western leaders failed to perceive the strength of his.
VI. What Victory Looks Like From Here
Trump has been helpful to Putin, as previously stated. But Putin's view of Western liberal democracy was the same with or without Trump: a paper tiger, a failed system, posturing and big words but no sustained action. He saw the United States as a declining superpower lacking political will and self-confidence for coherent strategic response. He saw Europe as a confederation of American client states, internally conflicted, plagued by mass immigration and economic stagnation, lacking unified foreign or military policy.
Both assessments look more accurate today than they did in February 2022.
Any resolution to the conflict now involves unpalatable options for divided Western allies. A unified military response to recapture all of Ukraine's lost territory—risking open war with Russia over a non-EU, non-NATO nation—is almost inconceivable, and is even more so today. The alternative, in all likelihood, is a more politely phrased version of the current Trump plan: Ukraine surrenders significant territory in exchange for "security guarantees" everyone knows are temporary, conditional, and not worth much.
Ukraine's people do not seem ready to surrender—not yet. Europe's embattled centrist leaders seem prepared to help them fight on, with or without American aid, in hopes of a military breakthrough, an internal Russian crisis, or simply a better deal. There is honor in courage and hope.
But we can see the recent past clearly enough. Too many of us who live thousands of miles away, untouched by this war, told ourselves a story about what it meant and how it would go. Like so many of the stories Americans tell about the world, it wasn't true.
VII. The Paradox Complete
The deepest irony is this: America may have "won" the war in the narrow sense that Russia has been weakened, its military degraded, its economy constrained. But the United States has won it at the cost of its own alliance system, its own narrative coherence, and its own credibility as a guarantor of anything.
NATO is larger on paper—Finland and Sweden have joined—but more fragile in practice. European defense spending has increased, but so has European resentment of American erraticism. The Global South has drawn conclusions about Western reliability that will persist long after the Ukraine conflict ends. And the domestic American coalition for internationalism, already fraying, may not survive a second Trump administration's active dismantling.
Putin did not win the war he expected. But he may have won the war he needed: not conquest of Ukraine, but confirmation of the West's disunity; not a swift victory, but a prolonged bleeding that exposed every fault line in the Atlantic system.
In that accounting, the question of who won becomes almost beside the point. What matters is who remains—and in what condition—when the firing stops.