A War at Crossroads: The Russia–Ukraine Conflict

Written by Elisa Garbil – 04.08.2025

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Diplomacy Without Traction

As the Russia–Ukraine war enters its fourth summer, the balance between diplomacy and devastation has become increasingly precarious. While representatives from both sides have returned to negotiation tables in Istanbul and Doha, the intensifying violence across Ukrainian cities and the internal strains within Ukraine’s own institutions suggest that peace remains elusive. This moment, defined by simultaneous overtures toward settlement and brutal continuation of warfare, carries layered strategic, operational, political, and geopolitical risks. Far from a clear path to resolution, the current landscape resembles a widening fracture. One in which competing pressures deepen, not relieve, the conflict.

At the strategic level, the recent rounds of peace talks reveal more about the limits of diplomacy than its promise. Ostensibly aimed at negotiating a settlement, the discussions have been characterised by predetermined outcomes and entrenched positions. Russia’s list of demands (territorial concessions, demilitarisation of Ukraine’s armed forces, exclusion of foreign troops, and immediate elections) offers no realistic space for Ukrainian sovereignty or compromise. The talks serve more as a public theater for international optics than as a functional negotiation space. They lack the fundamental conditions that make diplomacy viable: mutual recognition of legitimate stakes, incentive-aligned compromises, and enforcement mechanisms. Without these, such talks risk reinforcing stalemate rather than resolving it.

Firepower Over Dialogue

Compounding the failure of diplomacy is the operational reality on the ground, where Russia has launched one of the most intense aerial campaigns of the war. Drone swarms and missile barrages, numbering in the hundreds on a nightly basis, have struck both strategic infrastructure and civilian neighbourhoods. The scope of the bombardment, measured not just in tonnage but in the specific targeting of power grids, shelters, fuel stations, and residential zones, has pushed Ukraine’s air defense systems to the limit. While many attacks are intercepted, the sheer volume ensures that some reach their targets, resulting in casualties that include children, elderly civilians, and emergency responders.

The continuation of these attacks during the very period of negotiations indicates that they are not tactical manoeuvres meant to create leverage at the table, but rather part of a strategic framework aimed at exhaustion. Attrition, not agreement, appears to be the guiding logic. Russia’s military doctrine, always rooted in endurance and scale, now seems invested in grinding down Ukrainian morale and infrastructure to force capitulation not by consent but by collapse.

Erosion From Within

Yet Ukraine’s vulnerabilities extend beyond the battlefield. Internally, a different kind of crisis is unfolding: one that threatens the country’s political cohesion and its standing among Western allies. The recent approval of legislation weakening Ukraine’s leading anticorruption agencies has triggered waves of protest in Kyiv and other cities. For a nation fighting a war largely under the banner of democratic and transparent governance, this legislative shift represents a stark contradiction. It has opened fissures in public trust, especially among the younger urban populations who were once the strongest backers of institutional reform and European integration.

This erosion of domestic consensus is particularly dangerous in wartime. Public faith in government is a critical component of resilience, especially when the material conditions of everyday life are shaped by curfews, displacement, and economic hardship. If that trust erodes, so too does the civic solidarity that allows a country to endure prolonged conflict. What emerges is not only political risk, but operational fragility. Soldiers fight for a cause, and if that cause becomes muddied by perceptions of internal corruption or elite impunity, morale falters. The effects are indirect but potent.

The Fragile Terms of International Backing

Moreover, this internal political tension intersects with another vital domain of risk: the conditional nature of international support. Ukraine’s war effort has been sustained not only by domestic mobilisation but by an extraordinary influx of military, financial, and diplomatic aid from the United States, the European Union, and NATO allies. That support, however, is not automatic. It is premised on an understanding, explicit in treaties and implicit in political alignment, that Ukraine is moving toward the rule of law, market reforms, and democratic norms.

The weakening of anticorruption bodies jeopardises that understanding. European institutions have already signaled concern, and further divergence could trigger a recalibration of aid or delay integration talks. In Washington, meanwhile, political currents are shifting. While arms deliveries have resumed and U.S. envoys have re-entered the diplomatic theater, the tone is evolving. The willingness to back Ukraine unconditionally is being replaced by calls for “strategic prudence”. Some factions within the U.S. political system now argue that Ukraine must demonstrate not only battlefield effectiveness but governance discipline if it wants continued investment.

Thus, Ukraine faces a dual pressure: (1) external expectations of reform and (2) internal demands for security; without the luxury of choosing between them. The risk lies not in either vector alone, but in their convergence. Should international support waver at the same time that domestic legitimacy deteriorates, Ukraine would find itself vulnerable not just militarily, but existentially.

Endurance as Strategy

Russia, for its part, is operating from a long-term perspective. The war is not simply about territory but about worldview. In the Kremlin’s logic, Ukraine represents the geopolitical pivot around which Russian identity, influence, and power orbit. Even if battlefield lines remain fluid, Moscow’s strategic patience appears intact. It calculates that over time, Western unity will erode, Ukraine’s economy will falter, and its leadership will fragment under the strain of prolonged warfare. That wager explains the sustained offensives during negotiations and the insistence on maximalist terms in diplomacy. Concession is not in the script; coercion is.

Yet this too is a risk. Prolonged conflict imposes costs on Russia as well, economically, militarily, and diplomatically. The current phase of the war, fought amid international sanctions, a bruised ruble, and growing Chinese ambivalence, cannot be sustained indefinitely without consequences. But Russia’s ability to absorb pain, reinforced by authoritarian control and state propaganda, makes the war’s end less likely to come from domestic revolt or elite negotiation than from international pressure and battlefield attrition.

The Risk Web Tightens

This interplay of risks, such as strategic stagnation, operational escalation, political fragility, and geopolitical uncertainty, creates a volatile equilibrium. It is one that resists resolution and punishes hesitation. Without dramatic shifts in one or more domains, perhaps a battlefield breakthrough, a credible ceasefire, or a decisive political change? The conflict is likely to persist in its current destructive rhythm.

The most immediate imperative is to prevent further compounding of risks. That means safeguarding civilian life through upgraded air defences, restoring public trust via transparent governance reforms, and realigning diplomatic strategies toward achievable interim goals rather than abstract ideals. It also requires the international community to move beyond rhetorical support, ensuring that aid is timely, targeted, and tethered to conditions that protect both Ukraine’s sovereignty and its democratic trajectory.

A Dangerous Threshold

There is no easy off-ramp from this war. But there are thresholds that, once crossed, make recovery exponentially more difficult. In a landscape where each failure of diplomacy is met with a barrage of missiles and every protest in Kyiv risks becoming a symbol of deeper disillusionment, the stakes are not just territorial. They are systemic. And the longer the war drags on without structural solutions, the more likely it is that the very foundations of post-war peace, credibility, legitimacy, and reconstruction, will be eroded before the first peace accord is ever signed.