Both countries still believe they can prevail, and that belief is more powerful than any evidence suggesting that neither side can truly win
Initiatives aimed at ending the war that Russia started by invading Ukraine have been underway for months. On 24 February – a year to the day Russia started its attack – China unveiled a proposal containing 12 principles. In June, a group of African leaders met separately with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian president Vladimir Putin to present a 10-point peace plan. Most recently, this month, Saudi Arabia convened more than 40 countries, including Ukraine but not Russia, to find a way forward.
With the war approaching the 18-month mark, efforts like these are understandable. Parts of Ukraine have become rubble. Reconstruction costs are estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars. Some 11 million Ukrainians are either refugees or “internally displaced people” – about a quarter of the country’s population. More than 26,000 civilians have been killed or injured – some estimates run much higher – and military casualties may be four times greater. Anyone who has visited wartime Ukraine will attest that the enormity of devastation verges on the incomprehensible.
Rajan Menon is the director of the grand strategy program at Defense Priorities, a professor emeritus at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York, and the co-author of Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order
