There is a comforting fiction that animates almost every round of diplomacy over this war: the idea that peace is something one assembles at a table, by leaning on both sides until they meet somewhere in the middle. Pressure Kyiv to give a little, pressure Moscow to give a little, and the killing stops. It is a tidy theory. It is also, I am convinced, a delusion — one that has cost a great many lives and will cost more before it is finally abandoned. This war does not have a diplomatic solution that anyone in Kyiv could accept and survive. It has a military solution, and the sooner that truth is spoken plainly, the sooner the war can actually end — on the battlefield, in Ukraine’s favor.
I want to be careful here, because to say “there is no diplomatic path” sounds like a counsel of despair, and it is the opposite. The despair belongs to the negotiation-mania that has gripped Western capitals: the endless shuttling, the confidential documents, the leaked “far-reaching ideas” that ask Ukraine to recognize the seizure of Crimea and renounce its constitutional aspiration to join the Western alliance. Proposals like that are not steps toward peace. Either they are deliberately unacceptable, designed to provoke a refusal that can then be blamed on Ukraine, or they reveal a genuine failure to understand what this country is fighting for. Ukrainians are not dying for a better tariff schedule or a marginally larger slice of territory. They are dying for the right to be left alone — to live in their own country, with their own culture, and not as second-class subjects of a neighbor that denies they exist. You cannot split that difference at a conference table.
A dialogue conducted in war crimes
If you want to know what the Kremlin actually thinks of these negotiations, do not read its press statements. Watch what it does in the hours after each meeting. After one round of talks, ballistic missiles fell on the center of a regional city on a religious holiday — Iskanders, at least one of them packed with shrapnel, an indiscriminate weapon forbidden by international law from use where civilians gather; dozens dead, children among them. After another, a strike killed children in a second city. These are not coincidences of timing. They are replies. They are arguments. This is the language the Kremlin uses to answer everyone — Washington, Brussels, Berlin, and the people of Ukraine themselves.
And here we arrive at the deepest dishonesty of the “pressure both sides” framework: it treats the war as symmetrical, as if two equally culpable parties were trading blows that a referee could simply stop. The war is not symmetrical. One side consistently strikes legitimate military targets and the other consistently strikes civilians. When Ukraine reaches deep into Russian territory, it hits an oil depot that fuels the airfield from which heavy bombers take off to burn Ukrainian cities — and the night that depot burns, some Ukrainian families survive who would otherwise have died, because bombers without fuel cannot fly. It strikes the bridge to occupied Crimea, a structure used as a logistical artery to supply the occupying army, and therefore an unambiguously military object. It destroys strategic bombers on the ground. Russia answers these blows by killing civilians in their apartments. To call that an exchange between two warring parties, to be calmed by even-handed pressure, is to launder a war crime into a negotiating posture.
A “truce” built on this asymmetry would be a trap, and the practical questions alone should give pause to anyone who imagines it as a path to peace. The front runs for thousands of kilometers, much of it through inhabited villages split between the two armies. Who monitors a ceasefire on that scale, and with whom? What do hundreds of thousands of soldiers on each side do while they wait — sit in their trenches, or withdraw and leave the line open to a land grab? How do you guarantee that not one soldier among them, many of whom have buried their friends, fires a shot that the Kremlin can then frame as Ukrainian provocation? Violations on a vast scale are not a risk; they are a certainty, because that is how every prior ceasefire has gone. None of this means a genuine pause in the shelling would be worthless — every day without missiles falling on cities is lives saved, and I would welcome it. But a pause is not a settlement, and a settlement dictated by the side that negotiates in Iskanders is just a slower form of capitulation.
Only weapons stop a war like this
If diplomacy detached from reality cannot end it, what can? Here I want to dispose of two false hopes that recur constantly. The first is that sanctions will do the work — that economic pain will eventually force the Kremlin to stop. I have never believed the Russian economy is in tatters, and I have never claimed sanctions would end the war. They bite, the budget is tightening, oil sells below the price the budget assumed — but a tightening economy does not stop a dictator who has staked everything on this war.
The second false hope is darker and more revealing: the idea that mounting Russian casualties will produce a domestic reckoning, that enough dead soldiers will turn the population against the war. It will not. Consider what we already know. There are more than a hundred and ten thousand Russian dead recorded by name — and that is only the fraction that careful researchers have confirmed; the true figure is far higher. A hundred and ten thousand named corpses have produced no protest, no movement, no political consequence inside Russia. A society that absorbs that many of its own dead in silence is not going to be argued out of the war by adding to the pile. The grief is real, but it is privatized, swallowed, turned inward. It moves nothing.
What moves things is weapons in Ukrainian hands. This is the simple, unglamorous truth that the whole theater of negotiation has been constructed to avoid. The war ends through the exhaustion of Russia’s military potential — through the destruction of its war machine, plane by plane, depot by depot, bridge by bridge. Today one part of the aerospace forces is destroyed; tomorrow another; they do not recover. The movement runs in the right direction. And the means of that exhaustion are concrete and nameable: long-range missiles, combat aircraft, and air-defense systems. These are the “cards,” to borrow the gambler’s vocabulary so beloved of the dealmakers — except the cards that matter are not concessions traded in Paris hotels, they are the instruments that let Ukraine carry the war onto Russian soil and strike the things that make the war possible. Not to terrorize Russian civilians — to eliminate military capability. That distinction is everything, and I will come back to it.
Why technology, not brute force, is decisive
There is a reason I am not merely hoping for this outcome but expecting it, and it has to do with how modern war is actually fought. The old imagination of war — Stalin’s imagination, steel against steel, masses of tanks grinding forward, victory belonging to whoever can feed more bodies into the furnace — is obsolete. War today is a competition of technologies, and in that competition Ukraine holds genuine advantages. Naval and aerial drones are taking down aircraft and damaging targets that the brute-force calculus would have called untouchable. Ukraine leads in motivation, for the brutally simple reason that it has nowhere to retreat — a soldier defending his own home fights differently from one sent to occupy a stranger’s. And it leads in intelligence, in the capacity to find the target and reach it.
The most striking demonstration of this was an operation that struck strategic bombers deep inside Russia using drones — a feat of improvisation and reach that the Kremlin could not have imagined and barely acknowledged. Its material effect was real: a measurable bite out of Russia’s strategic aviation. But its deepest effect was psychological, and that is the part worth dwelling on. For years the West has operated under a paralyzing assumption — that Russia is an invincible force, that the red button is always one provocation away, that one must therefore negotiate because Russia simply cannot be beaten. Every successful strike dissolves a little of that fatalism. It turns out the aerospace forces can be destroyed, the bridge can be hit, the bombers can burn on their own tarmac. A Russia visibly losing pieces of its triad is a different Russia than the one that has to be perpetually appeased. The threat was never really a matter of how many warheads sit in silos; it was a matter of the state of mind in the Kremlin, and of the fear that state of mind induced abroad. Show that this enemy can be defeated, and you remove the entire foundation of the argument that one must capitulate to it.
The moral high ground is also the winning ground
There is a temptation, given all this, to conclude that Ukraine should answer symmetrically — that if the Kremlin kills civilians, Ukraine should kill civilians in return. I reject this completely, and not only on moral grounds, though the moral grounds are sufficient. I reject it because it would be a catastrophic military error. Ukraine’s single greatest asset in this war, beyond any weapons system, is that it is in the right and the Kremlin is not. The moment Ukraine deliberately targets Russian civilians, it forfeits that asset. It hands the Kremlin its own justification; it gives previously indifferent Russian soldiers a genuine reason to fight, where before they had none; and it bleeds away the Western support on which the supply of weapons depends. The same logic rules out the cynical provocations and staged outrages that some propose as shortcuts. Such things always come to light, and when they do, the side that is right becomes the side that is wrong — in the only court that ultimately matters here, the court of public opinion. Killing an armed invader on your soil is not a crime; it is the legitimate defense of a nation. Slaughtering the enemy’s civilians is. The line is not a sentimental nicety. It is the strategic boundary that keeps Ukraine winning.
Integration, not charity
Finally, a word about what the end of negotiation-mania makes room for, because abandoning the fantasy of a dictated peace is not the end of a policy but the beginning of a better one. The discrete arms package — a tranche of missiles here, a delivery of aircraft there — is necessary, but it is finite and fragile, hostage to the next election and the next change of mood in a capital that may decide Ukraine is no longer its concern. Something more durable is emerging alongside it, and it is, to my mind, the most genuinely hopeful development of all: the integration of Ukraine into European security through joint production. Agreements to manufacture long-range missiles together; a major European automaker preparing to build drones in or near Ukraine, with the output serving both Ukrainian defense and the European army. This is a profound shift in Ukraine’s position — from a petitioner forever asking and a consumer forever receiving, to an organic, indispensable part of the continent’s defense. Shared factories, shared technology, shared experience. That is worth more than any one-off delivery, because it cannot be revoked by a single signature, and because it is, in the end, the only real guarantee of Ukraine’s security.
So let the table be cleared of its illusions. Peace will not be handed down from a summit by men congratulating each other on a great day for Russia and Ukraine while the missiles are already in the air. It will be won where it has always had to be won — on the battlefield, by a nation that fights better, with better technology and unbreakable cause, supplied to the fullest by partners who have finally understood that arming the victim is not an escalation but the shortest road to the end of the killing. The dictator’s luck has held a long time. But luck is not a strategy, and it runs out. Weapons, motivation, and the refusal to be talked into surrender — those do not run out. That is how this ends.