Ukraine has accustomed us to surprises. In 2022, when Russia simultaneously invaded nine of its regions, no one would have bet that it would survive: in our imagination, Russia was still the Soviet giant, that superpower participating in planetary partitions and battles for extraterrestrial space, while Ukraine was a poor country known at best for its carers and a couple of footballers.

The outcome of the first year of the war demolished both stereotypes.

Then, abetted by the duplicity of Joe Biden and European leaders, the conflict spiralled into three years of frightful attrition, in which Ukraine and Russia did all they could to bleed each other dry in the substantial immobility of the positions of the two armies.
1,300,000 dead and wounded for Russia, half a million for Ukraine, against territorial changes reduced to a handful of land as large as North Wales.

For three years, the Ukrainians clung to the hope that the Russian economy would collapse before their army did. The Russians, for their part, clung to the hope that American and European support would collapse before their economy did.
And here came the second surprise for those of us still living in twentieth-century imagery. Since February 2025, the new president of the United States has candidly espoused Russia’s line on how the war should end, subjected the Ukrainian government to months of pressure and blackmail, and yet still failed to achieve his goal.

In short, Moscow is failing to win a war against a medium-sized neighbouring country despite Washington’s diplomatic support: if my grandmother had been told this in the 1970s, she would not have believed it.

Evidently, the world is already much more ‘multipolar‘ than the prophets of so-called ‘geopolitics’ would have dreamed . Europe’s political support – whether by choice or necessity – weighs far more heavily than it would have half a century ago.

Now Volodymyr Zelensky is conducting yet another ‘negotiation’ with Donald Trump, out of which will come yet another plan for a mutilated though still independent Ukraine.
We do not know whether the Russians will accept this or whether they will insist – by choice or necessity – on a completely subjugated Ukraine.

We do know, however, that this exhausting pantomime has been going on for eleven months, and that in the meantime Kiev has continued to repel the invaders and defend its right to exist as a free and sovereign nation.

How did you manage this apparent miracle?

Steel and silicon

The first factor is Ukraine’s industrial complex .
In four years of high-intensity fighting, the aggrieved country has had to equip itself with a production base equal to its needs. While until 2023 it depended on Western support for vital supplies such as ammunition, missiles and artillery pieces, it now outstrips any NATO country in their production.

But the real revolution has been that of drones.
They are now the real killers in this conflict, responsible for more than 75% of the killings or serious injuries.
More than 500 companies are active throughout Ukraine, often founded as spontaneous groups of engineers and programmers, manufacturing them and developing new prototypes, with an impressive output : 2 million drones a year already manufactured, 4 million a year in potential capacity.

In addition to the classic ‘first-person view’ aerial drones , Ukraine has created sea drones which hunt Russian ships now as far as the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Ground drones evacuate wounded soldiers and detect mines underground.
A DevDroid robot has been defending a position against Russian assaults for a month and a half without human help.
Ukraine is also perhaps the only power in the world to have developed a multi-domain Unified Command and Control software, called Delta.
You read that right: it got there before the US. Not bad for the ‘country of carers’.

Since this is the leading sector of the contemporary military industry, European and US companies are rushing to form consortia with those in Kiev.
Sometimes they propose to outsource production to European soil, which is not yet attacked by the Russians (as the Danes have done, for example). In other cases, the opposite happens: the Western company develops new models by exploiting the large (and inexpensive) Ukrainian laboratory.

No more “frontline”

The Russians, of course, have also made dangerous advances in the drone war.
Fibre-optic drones, unscrupulously supplied by China, have made every Ukrainian move from the rear to the front line to bring in supplies a nightmare.
Ukrainian soldiers now take up collections to buy simple cars, because each vehicle they use (be it a tank, an armoured car or a Panda) often lasts for only one trip.

The very concept of the ‘front line’ has become inadequate to represent what is happening. On battlefields such as Pokrovsk, there is often a no-man’s-land of tens of kilometres between Russian and Ukrainian units, where small teams hunted by drones try to infiltrate and hide until they become large enough to storm a position.
The Russians are reduced to trying it on motorbikes, scooters or even horses. So, when you read in the newspaper that ‘the Russians are advancing’ and that a certain front ‘may collapse’, reserve the benefit of the doubt.

Instead, the civilians’ nightmare are the Shahed, two-metre-long explosive aircraft copied and perfected from an original Iranian model, which are launched against Ukrainian cities at a rate of over 4,500 per month.
By the year 2025, they have ‘learnt’ to fly at a higher altitude to gain more speed in the dive and even to ditch during the dive to avoid anti-aircraft fire.
The Ukrainian innovation ecosystem has obviously been active in producing increasingly sophisticated interceptor drones (such as those of Wild Hornets). But the interception rate continues to hover between 80% and 90%.

The swarms of drones, moreover, often only serve to saturate air defences before missile attacks: attacks against which interception rates do not exceed 60%.
Unfortunately, almost 4,000 more Ukrainian civilians were murdered in 2025 than in 2024.
Domestic methane deposits have been rendered unusable, so that Ukrainians have to import 19 times more gas from abroad to heat themselves than in 2024.

Even non-nuclear power plants have all been hit at least once, and today in many Ukrainian cities the sound of diesel generators has become the sound of life and hope.

“Two boxers in the twelfth round”

Such a picture looks bleak and rightly worrying in view of 2026. One must, however, consider that Russia is also very close to reaching the breaking point beyond which it can no longer finance its invasion. As Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov put it, ‘we are like two boxers who have reached the twelfth round’.

The fact is that, after at least three years of sanctions and total reconversion for the war effort, more and more sectors of the Russian economy are shifting from being in profit (and thus a reservoir of tax revenue for the Kremlin) to being in loss (and thus a drain on public spending to the Kremlin).

The most obvious one is industry, where Rosstat itself in November certified a genuine collapse in production compared to a year earlier: it applies to transport (engines -48%, clutches -37%, chassis -38%, tyres -29%, tractors -61%, trucks -43%, buses -28%, locomotives -24%, wagons -44%), to construction (lifts -37%, industrial pumps -38%, pipes -42%, boilers -29%, bulldozers -53%, cement -10%, bricks between -14% and -20% depending on the material), for the steel industry (-4.1%) and for the chemical industry (-1.7%). The figures include products destined for the military.

In general, orders for companies are the lowest since 1998 and one in three small or medium-sized enterprises is convinced that it will go bankrupt in the next six months.

Due to sanctions and Ukrainian drone attacks, the oil sector also became less and less profitable during 2025.
Rosneft, for example, had a net profit of 1.8 billion in the first quarter, 750 million in the second and 340 million in the third. In the fourth quarter it risks going straight into a loss, since Russian oil now sells at such a generous discount that it does not even repay its extraction and shipping cost ($35 per barrel against $46).
Natural gas and coal have already been off the market for over a year.

No longer able to rely on increased tax revenues, Putin has to go into debt. And a lot.
In 2025 he issued debt securities for the equivalent of EUR 84 billion, which were forcibly purchased by Russian banks (with money lent in turn by the Central Bank).
And if the central state has to get into debt, all the more so must the individual republics of the Russian Federation, which for the first time in 2025 reported a negative balance sheet: let us remember that up to now it was they who had been paying enlistment bonuses to soldiers.

In short, everything seems to converge towards a cessation of hostilities due to the exhaustion of the two combatants’ resources.
Too bloody a demographic and social cost for Ukraine, too heavy an economic and industrial cost for Russia.
Trump’s plan to close the issue with a ‘Russian half victory’ has more than a chance of coming to fruition.

Assuming, of course, that Putin’s power can survive a bare ‘half victory’.
If he cannot, let us prepare to see the boxers fight for many more rounds.